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December 16, 2003

Modern Times

Just saw Charlie Chaplin's 1936 "Modern Times" at the Film Forum, and it made me think I needed a new category of 'movie profiles'. I should watch 'Metropolis' and 'Blade Runner' and other movies that deal with society dealing with technology.
All I remembered of "Modern Times" was the scene where Chaplin gets stuck in the gears of the big machine - a pretty obvious metaphor - but most of the movie was a set of vignettes that could have been used in many of his other movies. His character, the little tramp, is always on the run from the law.

Some aspects of the movie were surprising though. There were more references to nipple-tweaking than I thought would have been allowed in 1936. Also, there was a scene where people's stomach's were gurgling in an embarrassing way. It was quite an achievement to express that in a movie that was clearly filmed silent, with all the sound added post-production. The dialog still relied on the interstitial cards like I would expect of a movie of that era.

It didn't deal much with technology, but "Modern Times" should still be on a list of movies to watch if you're interested in humanity's relationship to industrialization, mechanization, and the ideas of efficiency being embraced at the expense of humanity.
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Posted by mslaybau at December 16, 2003 12:55 PM

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