#19 - MODERN TIMES (1936)
Directed by - Charles Chaplin (USA)
Chaplin is the ultimate working class hero in cinema. There is no question about it. In previous outings to Modern Times, such as The Immigrant, Easy Street and The Floorwalker, Chaplin had insinuated a more than noble desire to allow influences of genuine social realism within his slapstick comedy works. This is what essentially made them so genuine. Even at his silliest, within a few years from his directorial debut, Chaplin was still making statements that represented the working class, and embodied its everyday hardships much better than any other character at the time. In fact, his achievement has arguably never been replicated or paralleled, certainly not with as much cosistency.
In Modern Times, his final silent film, he basically talks of the exploitation of a factory worker. In one of the most famous sequences in the film, the worker, played by Chaplin, is literally ingested by a huge machinery. For another interesting, visionary theme is the impact of technological advancement, and its impending threat on the working class (and in turn humanity.) This was a genuine concern for Chaplin for a number of reasons. One was personal. Cinema was being marked by the advent of sound, an achievement that revolutionized the film industry as it had been known at the beginning of its popularization in the early part of the 20th century. Chaplin risked fading away, becoming extinct like an old dinosaur. At the same, time, many of the elements that come together in the construction of Modern Times, as well as the ideas that inspired them, would be echoed in the legendary final speech in his next movie The Great Dictator - a talkie!
The film's imaginative force lends itself to the slapstick of the film, in a way that even at a superficial level seems a wonderful work of surrealism, expressionism and even futurism. But Modern Times is far from being superficial.