Modern Times

Modern Times

As a musician and an artist I find Charles Chaplin creativity and ability to combine social struggles of his time and comedy very inspiring. Chaplin’s approach to “Modern Times” is timeless.  Even today, almost 100 years later, we can still relate to the characters of the story.  The story depicts the different levels of society and their reactions to human suffering. Chaplin manages to convey a political and social message through the positive tone of comedy.

I believe that Chaplin’s ability and willingness to convey very relevant issues to society are hard to match to any of the current productions in the United States.

Even though there are plenty of good artist willing to express the struggles of current society, the United States population has become dull. We are numb, and in the general sense fail to question or invest ourselves in looking at the issues in our communities as something worth of discussing through entertainment.

We look at the screen in search of turning off our brains and with the intention of desensitizing ourselves from the safety of our living rooms. Long gone are the times when artist like Chaplin were recognize for the courage to make us think through the universal language of comedy and art.

Modern Times is definitely slapstick and a movie that appears almost innocent in nature. Many scenes of the movie revolve around humor based on movement and physical activities that were highly incongruent and caused us to laugh. One of the best examples of this childish humor is the scene when Chaplin in eaten by the machine at the factory and starts sliding through the different gears as if being inside was not a problem at all.

The relationship between Chaplin and his female friend was very simple and innocent. They did not show any sex scenes or talked about anything that was related to sex. When Chaplin and his girlfriend where together, they always thought about simple things in life.  They just wanted to life in a comfortable house and have enough to eat.

Also, I found that Chaplin wanted to show how the type of lifestyle of his character could make anyone crazy. Chaplin became crazy after going through the gears of the machinery at his job and started creating all sorts of problems around the factory. After Chaplin goes crazy, he is sent to jail instead of being sent to a mental institution without giving him the opportunity to be healthy again. I think that this problem is still alive in America; it is not a surprise to see shootings by mentally ill people at least once a moth on TV.

I personally believe that the work of an artist is to inspire humanity to attain new levels of consciousness and understanding. As and artist we have the ability to bring people together to think, collaborate, and develop connections between the different aspects that we call human experience. Science, humor, language, music, culture, and feelings that relate to all of us are creatively expressed on the timeless film, “Modern Times.” 

Modern Times

I wasn’t looking forward to watching this movie, but I kind of liked it. This movie depicts the hard times people were going through at this time. Charlie Chaplin is struggling to find a job and goes back and forth between a job and going to jail. Meanwhile he is trying to provide for the beautiful girl that he meets. She is also in poverty and needs to steal, just to get food. The two of them together, have a support system to help each through these hard times. They both just want to get a house and enjoy their lives together. 

This movie provides a comic relief from times of high stress people were enduring at these times. It showed how terrible things could be, but also how things could get better. She finds a job as a dancer in a cafe, which she then gets him a job as well. When they think everything is going to be fine, the police come after her. In the end, they realize that they have each other and could get through it. 

Never Say Die

Modern Times, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin, is a movie of visual extremes. By creating extremes of behavior, many of the situations become absurdist and lead to humorous outcomes that are visually self-explanatory. The movie is also a deeper meditation on the nature of the social changes sweeping through American culture in the early part of the 20th century. It is the fluid and jovial reactions of Chaplin that turn the somewhat horrific vision of the modern world into a series of funny events.

In the first scenes, a comparison between sheep and workers streaming into a factory makes the film maker's view clear and sets the stage for the primary character, the factory worker, being herded through life. The factory itself is an unlikely clean place, with technologies that would not be out of place in a factory today. The President of the company is able to see everywhere in the factory with a hawk like gaze. He too is shown to be a regular human being, piecing together a puzzle in his office, as an individual pursuing his own form of happiness.

The factory worker, played by Chaplin,  is performing an inhuman task, over and over again, and it consumes him. When stopping work, he continues to jerk and twitch the same motions as when performing his job. While his motions are comical and exaggerated, they are also sinister when considering our current understanding of repetitive stress injuries.

Between shifts, he is locked into a mechanical feeding machine. While the machine fails and the President of the company dismisses the technicians who presented it to him, it is obvious that if the machine were "practical", he would have no problem using it on his employees to limit the amount of time they are not performing their jobs. It is Chaplin's responses to the machine that humanize it, taking it from the realm of a claustrophobic nightmare and turning it into an laugh out loud folly.

 After the effects of his repetitive work situation lead him to a nervous breakdown, rampaging through the factory fiddling with valves and levers in a comical way; the factory worker recovers in a mental hospital but is swept up by police just after release, mistakenly believing him to be the leader of a communist march. In jail, the worker finds peace and is comfortable. He is once again in a herd, and in many ways is even more controlled than he was as a factory worker.

During this period, the gamin or street urchin is introduced, a character played by Paulette Goddard. She is shown desperately surviving by stealing food for herself, her family and other poor children. She is presented in a romantic way, as a pirate, knife between teeth, easily confusing and getting away from a dock worker trying to stop her.

The good nature of the worker inadvertently gets him out of jail, after he foils a jail breakout. It is interesting to see drugs, nose-powder, depicted in a film that was released in 1936.  This was just 3 years after the introduction of the "code" in Hollywood movies in an effort to limit themes in movies that were acceptable to Roman Catholic mores. This drug helps put the worker into a position to block the jail break attempt.

After being rewarded with release form jail for his good deeds, the worker and the gamin meet, while he is now trying to be put back into jail, he helps her avoid being put into jail. It is through this and being on the run together that they start to form a bond that leads to love by the end of the movie.

They fantasize about having a life together in a nice house and this requires the factory worker to find a new job to pay for it. He does so, working for a department store as a night watchman. During the evening, he invites the gamin into the store to be comfortable, and then burglars appear in the store, accidentally forcing the worker to drink rum until he passes out.

Now he goes back to jail but is not satisfied to stay there. When he comes out, the gamin has found a dilapidated home.  One that is in no way modern and yet, the couple is happy.

The rest of the film covers essentially the same ground. Both the worker and the gamin are trying to work their way through the world, and are failing, not always through their own fault, but through forces that are out of their control; a large crowd in a dining hall blocking the factory worker's path. The gamin being swept up by police to be returned to an orphanage.

In the end, they seem destitute and alone on an empty road. However, the worker won't let that keep them down.

Modern Times... in... 1936

Modern Times

Charlie Chaplain’s Modern Times is one of those timeless films that will last forever. It's display of comedy kept me focused and laughing, a tactic used by Chaplin in almost every one of his films. Yet, Modern Times has so much more to offer. It portrays the story of a man who struggles to find a job during the worst recession in America's history, known now as the Great Depression. While the severity and seriousness of this topic is presented at the very beginning of the film, the viewer finds him/herself distracted from it, due to the constant comedic relief.

And that is, in my opinion, one of the sole purposes of the movie. Filmed and released during the time of the Great Depression, Chaplin really focused on taking the sadness and stress out of what was going on across the nation, and even across the world. As we discussed in class, the relief of stress is why we as humans enjoy comedy. There is a sense of irony, however. The film was probably not seen by very many, because a movie was most likely not something anyone had the money to spend on.

However, I believe that stress relief was not the only purpose of this movie. There are many blatant and discreet messages portrayed throughout the show. For example, Police brutality and corruption. We see this when Chaplin is arrested, and jailed, after the false accusations of him being a protest/strike leader, just because he was trying to return a lost flag. Without trial or investigation, he was immediately put into prison.

Another sort of, "hidden" argument in the film is the control that employers had over their employees at the time. We first see this when the salesman comes to try and sell his "feeding machine" to Chaplain’s boss. He claims that it is for the benefit of the worker, when in reality, it is to profit the boss. We can also pull from this a sense of dependency that the employer must have felt his workers had. He didn't think they could even feed themselves, let alone do their own work.

Overall, the film was a fantastic representation of the power of rhetorical humor. Even in a time of great strife and anguish, rhetorical humor can turn the situation upside down, and add a positive annotation, even though it doesn't technically make anything better.

Modern Times

Modern Times is an incredibly well done film.  Although it is silent, silly, and old fashioned, I believe that it might have a more meaningful and intricate plot than many modern films.  I laughed through the entire movie and first thought that it was just a light hearted and humorous movie to make its audience giggle.  However, upon further observation, I found that it contained many themes and messages that were directed toward its audience at the time.

It is obvious from the film, as well as the era it was made in, that Modern Times was made, in part, to lighten people's attitudes toward their troubles in the Great Depression.  The movie did this by giving them hope and something to identify with and to laugh at to ensure that their problems would soon fade away.  By laughing at their current situations, victims of the Great Depression released some tension from their lives and envisioned that there would come a day when they would look back and find humor in their tribulation.

Charlie Chaplain plays the main character in the film, a happy, kind, and clumsy gentleman.  The first scene in the movie is hilarious as the main character falls into misfortune because of a nervous breakdown after trying to tighten everyone’s screws.  His performance forces the audience to fall in love with this quirky and likable man.  Then Chaplain continues and shows the audience the character of the hero that he wants them to focus on and follow his example.  The main character constantly puts others before himself by taking the blame for a girl who stole bread, giving her a comfy bed to sleep in and a few hungry men food at a department store and in turn risking his job.  I believe Chaplain’s main message for his audience was that they should help each other in their time of great need so that they do not make things worse for others or for themselves.

Modern Times

          There are so many moments in this movie that are humorous as well as timeless.  There are a few that stood out to me more than others did.  The reason these examples made an impression on me were for various reasons. Those reasons were mainly as follows: they were funny, I remembered them from other comedic works, and or, they related to everyday life even to the day; which is impressive for a movie that was made in 1936.

          The movie starts out with an early scene that is very similar to one of the more memorable episodes in the TV show “I Love Lucy”.  A lot of people will remember Lucy shoving chocolates into her mouth because she could not package and wrap them quickly enough.  When watching this opening scene, one cannot help but be taken to this moment in “I Love Lucy” and think that that joke was taken from this movie.  This helps to prove the timelessness of the joke, and the genius of Chaplin’s comedic mind.  There are a lot of other jokes that are fairly common in comedies of the present.  It seems that Chaplin was able to capture what was known to be funny and translate it into film where it is still funny even to the day. 

          The “feeding machine” was an area of particular interest to me.  I found this interesting because it was of the idea of capitalism and the willingness to do anything to make more money and stay ahead of the competitors is still very much alive today and Chaplin seems to have captured this as early as 1936.  Chaplin was able to capture the essence of comedy in the human condition that is very much present in the world today.  Chaplin of course take it a step further by showing everything that could have possibly gone wrong with the machine.  His misery while being strapped into the machine is a hilarious portion of the movie, as we seem to enjoy other peoples’ misery and discomfort (along with slapstick comedy).

         Throughout this movie, Chaplin was able to find the humor in every day life.  This was especially apparent in the scene where Chaplin and the preacher’s wife are sitting together and their stomachs keep making the gurgling noise.  This is something that all people can relate to, everyone can point to a time where this (or something similar has happened to them.  It is the ability to relate to this situation that makes this kind of humor so appealing and humorous to people. 

           Things that were funny in 1936 are still funny today; comedy and humor appear to be timeless.  The human mind has changed very little when it comes to comedy.  We still like the same things, we still enjoy discomfort (so long as it is not our own), we still like things that we can relate to, and of course, we still love to laugh. Chaplin was able to capture just exactly what humor was in 1936 and it still holds true for what humor is today in 2013.

Modern Times

Modern Times was a very interesting movie, I always love to watch old film and this was no exception. This movie had many layers and things it addressed, and one thing I noticed right away was some of the serious situations that were presented, things like: death, overworked and mistreated workers, political and labor riots, murder, drug use, depression and harshness of the times and the frailty of life. The harshness of times and the frailty of life especially, were very apparent in this film. The other things in this list were subjects that I, until this point in time, had thought were things that were swept under the rug during this time period and not addressed, especially in film. This movie might have been made to lighten these situations, and as others have written, to show that there is still something to laugh about and a reason to continue on with life.

Through the lens it used, Modern Times portrayed the times and the themes of this time, very well. It took a lighthearted approach to show some of the harsh things people went through and saw every day. Through this lens of humor, this movie showed people what was going on, and gave a character that went through some of the same things they went through. Also, using this positive type of vehicle to showcase different situations, it did give hope, at least to me. Even though there probably wasnt much joy to be found in being out of work and resorting to extremes to make ends meet, there still could be a positive outcome, or at least something to smile about.

Another thing about this movie that caught my attention, were the cuts in the scenes, how they moved from one situation to the next, which might have just been a time constraint, but was something that resonated with me. What seemed at first to be somewhat jumpy came to be something that I viewed as part of the style and the pace of life. Things happen, and they happen hard and fast, as with most of the unfortunate events that happen in the film.

Being a comedy film, this movie obviously appealed to the viewer through emotion. Through camera work, imagery and the characters, this movie had many means to connect to its viewers. Using different angles of shots and how people were framed played a role, especially when showing the main female character. She seemed to always be in downward angled shots, which I perceived to be a means to show her as a potentially weak or troubled character, which was true to her being troubled. Charlie Chapman’s character, however, was mostly shot straight on or fully framed in the shot, probably because he was the main character, but also because he portrayed a different emotional disposition than the female lead.

Overall, Modern times was a very interesting movie and it addressed the issues of the world around it very well. The lighthearted nature of the film complimented the issues and made them more relate-able and approachable. Something that is hard to do, no matter the genre or style of movie. 

Depiction of a Hard Life Through Humor

The movie Modern Times was released in 1936 during the Great Depression in the United Sates. The film depicts the historical time by using humor. Many people during the Great Depression were out of work, lost their homes, and had no means of living. Unfortunately, poverty breeds crime. By not educating or proving work for the people, the government is resigning them to a life of crime and then punishes them for the crime they commit. The young woman in the film exemplifies this concept perfectly. She is not allowed to work and therefore has no money to purchase the basic necessities in life-food, shelter, and clothing. She has no way to live except by stealing and committing crimes. Charlie Chaplin's character suffers a similar fate. He gets laid off his job and sent to a mental hospital. After he is released, he happens to be in the wrong place and the wrong time and gets arrested. He is released, but cannot find a decent job. He and the young woman get together, but cannot afford a decent place to live in and have to steal to stay alive. When he finally finds a job at the factory, the workers go on strike and he is arrested again.

This movie depicts all of these tragedies by using Charlie Chaplin's physical humor and the slight impossibility of some events. Charlie Chaplin makes us all laugh because he uses his body, rather than his words, to create humor. Physical humor still exists today. Jim Carey is a modern actor that uses his face and body to make us laugh. Kramer from Seinfeld used physical humor as well. Every single time he walked in Jerry Seinfeld's door, everyone would laugh because he would spin around. Physical humor is universal because every person can understand it without needing to speak the same language.

Humor allows us to grasp what is given to us. We remember funny things more than we remember non humorous things. This movie wants us to experience the hardship of the times, but is using humor as the medium.

Modern Times

Modern Times brings many problems in our society to light. Chaplin addresses these problems through humor, which is probably one of the best ways to get audiences to listen. These problems are not only relevant in 1936 but in current times as well. The problems of unemployment, increasing efficiency, and governmental protests are still problems, not quite on the scale as they were in 1936.

Modern Times addresses this problem in two parts, when Chaplin becomes the night watchman of the department store and when he gets a job again at the factory. Chaplin only gets the job at the department store with the letter of recommendation from the sheriff.  As he is working he encounters intruders, these intruders don’t wish to steal anything besides food because they are hungry.  Now days there are similarities. Jobs are difficult to procure and to get one you must have an infallible resume and lots of recommendations.  Secondly when Chaplin gets a job at the factory again, the employees immediately go on strike, continuing their streak of unemployment. The same can be said, at times, currently. Workers in general are never content with their position, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But when there is a lack of job openings, one should be content with the fact that one actually has a job, promotion will come later.

Companies are still looking for ways to become more efficient, as was the factory in Modern Times. The lunch feeding machine puts this issue in to comical light, it also shows the difference between humans and machines. Humans can make mistakes but eventually learn and adapt, machines are programed and can make mistakes but have to be reprogrammed if such a thing happened. In the movie the Lunch machine was built and programmed to increase efficiency in the factory, but ultimately fails with hilarious results! Currently machines are replacing humans in assembly lines contributing to the problem stated in the previous paragraph, and are still making mistakes! One notable failure on the part of machine assembly lines was the Toyota breaking system problem in 2009-10. The machines in the Toyota assembly line were built to increase efficiency but ultimately failed just like the lunch feeding machine but with less hilarious results.

When people are unemployed, especially in current times, they begin to question the government. The same can be said in Modern Times. Chaplin is mistaken for a leader of a communist rally. The modern equivalent is the 99% movement in 2011-12. Both demonstrate the unemployed in masses and asking for employment equality. Another similarity can be drawn between the two. Neither worked. Obviously the US in not Communist nor has the 99% movement effected any change in employment.

Modern times is a hilarious comedy, it actually had me ROTF I was laughing so hard! But it is also addresses problems prevalent in 1936 as well as 2013. Unemployment, efficiency, and governmental protests are problems threatening the common man. Increasing efficiency in some cases leads to unemployment, which leads to protests and rallies against the government, which finally leads an unruly populace, not good at all for the government.