silver nitrate notes

Chaplin's Modern Times and the Last Silent Film

8 sep 2010

Chaplin directed Modern Times (1936) nine years after The Jazz Singer had made sound mandatory, five years after he had refused sound for City Lights, and sold it to the public as his final bow to silent cinema. The film is not quite silent. It has synchronised music, some diegetic sound (machines, radios, a recorded voice through a vintage selector), and a famous sequence where Chaplin sings a nonsense song. But the Tramp does not speak. He would never speak in a Chaplin film again.

The cinematographer was Roland Totheroh (1890-1970) again, this time joined by Ira Morgan. The film was shot over fourteen months at Chaplin's own studio in Hollywood, on sets designed to be modular and rearrangeable. The opening factory sequence, which is what most people remember, uses a single industrial set with conveyor belts, presses, and machinery. Totheroh lights it in a flat, even fluorescent style that makes the machinery feel mass-produced and anonymous.

The feeding-machine sequence is the best-remembered set piece. The Tramp, a factory worker, is used to test a machine that will feed workers during their shifts. The machine malfunctions. Totheroh shoots the scene in a tight medium shot, with the camera locked down, so that the malfunction registers through Chaplin's face and body rather than through the camera's coverage. The mechanism of the machine is entirely visible. Every gag is a mechanical event. The audience laughs at the engineering before they laugh at the Tramp.

The politics of the film are not subtle. Chaplin had just returned from an international tour during which he had met Gandhi, visited factories in Berlin and Moscow, and read Marx. What he put on screen is a critique of industrial capitalism so plainly satirical that FBI surveillance files from 1936 recorded it as suspect material. The Tramp's capacity for suffering is what we watch for. His capacity for dignity is what the film is ultimately about.

Paulette Goddard, playing the Gamine, is twenty-six. She would be Chaplin's fourth wife within months of the film's release. Their partnership would produce The Great Dictator four years later. Modern Times is the last film in which the Tramp exists without speaking. After it, Chaplin moved on.

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sources
[1] Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. McGraw-Hill, 1985.
[2] Maland, Charles J. Chaplin and American Culture. Princeton UP, 1989.
[3] Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. Simon & Schuster, 1964.
[4] Vance, Jeffrey. Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema. Abrams, 2003.