Modern Times

Student´s Name: Camila Botero

Film Title: Modern Times

Director: Charles Chaplin

Country: USA

Year: 1936

Language: English

Synopsis: “The Tramp struggles to live in modern industrial society with the help of a young homeless woman” (IMDB)

Modern Times (1936) is a comedy film written, directed by and starring Charles Chaplin, in which his iconic and popular character Little Tramp makes his last appearance. Chaplin, considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema, makes in this opportunity a satirical portrait of the American society during the Great Depression of the 30ths, when mass unemployment coincided with the extensive progress of industrial automation. Frequently in his work, this icon of the silent film era tries to transform his anxieties and concerns about the social and economic problems of his age into comedy. In this case, he does it by following a factory worker employed on an assembly line that incidentally gests involved with labor and law struggles, falls in love with a gorgeous gamine and is mistaken for a communist.

Referenced in important films as Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, Bananas (1971) by Woody Allen, RoboCop (1990) by Irivin Kershner and Scarface (1984) by Brian De Palma, and considered as one of top 100 films in cinema history, Modern Times has become certainly one of Chaplin’s greatest achievements. Not only because he manages to treat issues such as poverty, unemployment, economic discrimination, strikes, political intolerance, tyranny of the machines and narcotics through “Little Tramp’s positive outlook on life in a world full of chaos” (Smith, s.f), but also because this film represents a turning point in his career. As from this moment, Chaplin’s characteristic humor and romanticism acquires a remarkable critical functionality to make splendid satires on the fascist totalitarianism, as he did in his masterpiece The Great Dictator (1940).

Conceptual Analysis of the film 

From the begging to the end, Modern Times is a film full of political and social critique that collects and personifies few of the most important concepts in Karl Marx’s Capital. As Miras (2013) stands, Marx’s work is not just an economic work, but it is a criticism of capitalist economic theory, that is to say, a criticism of the whole system of categories of bourgeois economy. And it is precisely a striking illustration of this theory, based on the importance of the capitalist’s control of the laborer’s time and the relation of the laborer to the machine, what Chaplin portrays in this film through the Tramp’s point of view.

The first Marxist concept that is evident in the film is the class struggle, which is shown by the capitalist’s control of the laborer’s time. As the theory stands, “the less the capitalist can pay the laborer, the longer he can force the laborer to work, the more efficiently he can make him work, and the degree to which he can maximize the amount time he works while in the factory, is advantages to the capitalist” (Conklin, 2014). In other words, the laborer, played by Chaplin, is under the control of the capitalist, whose amount of profit earned depends upon the amount of time he can force the laborer to work. A remarkable example of this situation is when the Tramp decides to take a short break after going crazy because of his monotonous and inhuman work on the conveyor belt. He marks a time card, lights a cigarette and sits on the sink, but suddenly his boss appears on a big screen yelling at him “Quitstalling! Get back to work!”. The laborer, who must work long and strong hours to produce enough money to buy the things he needs to live, not only does not get paid for his breaks, but he is also monitored for what he does with his free time. 

Definitely in this context of capitalist production, time becomes synonym with production and efficiency, making people live under the tyranny of mechanically measured time.  It is precisely through the Billows Feeding Machine that Chaplin links the concept of time and machines. That instrument was a “practical” device that automatically feeds the laborers while at work, so in that way they don’t need to stop for lunch. The capitalist is always asking for high speed so he decides to give the machine a try by using Chaplin as a guinea pig, without considering the consequences on the physical and mental health of his worker. At the end, the device got crazy and the Tramp proves that machines cannot always replace certain human tasks.

In that vein, the relation of the laborer to the machine is the second Marxian concept that Modern Times illustrates. Constantly the Tramp is struggling with a frightening machine, which dictates his furious pace and dehumanizes individuals. At one point the laborer is swallowed and found in the belly of the machine, which digests and disposes. Therefore, industrialization was giving to machines a super power, even stronger that human’s. As Marx believed “machines were the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialize labor”, meaning that technology devices were getting a very important role in economics, but also in the relation between individual, society, politics and the environment. Chaplin, in a comic and marvelous way, succeed in showing that men of his new age trace his movements on the working of the new machines and not the other.

Personal Analysis and Reflections 

For 1936, the film Modern Times was already a modern piece by itself in terms of technical cinematography aspects: use of lights, incorporation of the sound, editing effects, performances, desing settings, etc. Furthermore, this piece of art is visionary in social, political, economic and circumstantial aspects that would take place decades later. From my point of view, this film perfectly displays through a solid character in a natural context, how modernity was taking part of everyday life and how that situation started to set up the nuances of what later would be the pillars of global geopolitics.

The reality portrayed by Chaplin is not ultimately that different form that of many workers today in countries such as China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Colombia, etc., as described by Marx at the 18^th century. Was at that point of history when scale production generated the repetitive human office automation in factories in a context where what mattered was the results in terms of number of minutes, hours and days of work. Considering that the weak lose more and more strength in the system, modernity implicitly contains the attempt to annihilate the minimum space and time of human dignity. Meanwhile, the strong, those who own the capital, get every time more power by monitoring and controlling the weak. Situation currently accentuated by the fact that we have to live under constant surveillance.

From a broader look, those elements are the ones that generate the class struggle, the worker’s parties, the trade unions, the proletariat and the social conflicts. Whereas the bourgeois dominates and provides the system with all its industrial mechanism. Mechanism that works closely with the state power, supported by the police, which clearly reflects the biggest injustices in society. In addition, the time in which the story was told was obviosously a crisis moment that profoundly marked the future world economy: the Great Depression of the 30s. From then on, it begins to set o that later became the confrontation by the two economic and politica ssystems that govern the world after the World War until the end of the eighties.