The Modern Time and The Great Dictator

 Hello readers, I'm writing this blog as an assignment given by the Department of English, MKBU. Here, I'm trying to do frame  study of the films of Charlie Chaplin 'Modern Times' and 'The Great Dictator' with the context of the settings of the 20th century. 

'The Modern Times':

'Modern Times' signals a notable shift in the career of Charlie Chaplin. To be sure, the film remains loyal to the practices of silent cinema on which he built his success, and it relies, albeit for the last time, on the popularity of Chaplin's screen persona, the "Tramp," a loveable outcast victimized by institutional authorities, his own frailties, and plain old dumb luck. 

But the backstory of Chaplin's career and of the production of this Depression-era film complicate its interpretation, as well as its meaning to American cinema in this crucial period of social and economic turmoil. 

Much of the difficulty surrounding 'Modern Times' stems from the diverse conditions of Chaplin's life and their influence on his art. His Tramp persona, informed by his own impoverished upbringing, represented class disadvantage to elicit the sympathy of audiences. And yet sympathetic identification with the Tramp was possible only if audiences disregarded the fact that off screen Chaplin was one of the wealthiest screen celebrities of his day. 

In the midst of social upheaval and professional peril, Chaplin attempted in 'Modern Times' to reassert his relevance by representing 'machine-age' culture as a profoundly destabilizing condition of contemporary society. His turn toward social critique coincides with the emerging maturity of film as an art form and the growing expectations that film could achieve much more than it had as a medium of light entertainment. 

For him, it was "a major art" of what he called "the neotechnic phase" of civilization, the next great development in the history of humankind. He saw the technological evolution of society and the arrival of film as an optimal process of cultural convergence. Film has the power to advance the neotechnic phase, he reasoned, because it epitomizes the cultural role of the machine. For all its wonder, the power of the 'Machine Age' threatened to overwhelm society. 

Radical critics who inclined toward Marxism similarly stressed the social significance of film rather than its entertainment value, and two among them singled out Chaplin for criticism. This criticism goaded Chaplin into thinking about modern society and the opportunities for film to address issues of importance. politics and economics, burnished his standing not simply as a celebrity but as a man of consequence and bolstered his confidence in commenting upon serious matters. "You're not a comedian, you're an economist." With Gandhi, Chaplin disagreed about the negative influence of machine technology, defending it as a labor-saving advancement. His alternating sympathy for workers and his defense of technology in these high profile exchanges provide a glimpse into the ambiguity that infuses Modern Times. 

Chaplin also came into contact with popular audiences, and he readily associated the outpouring of public admiration from crowds of adoring fans with the suffering of the masses. 

Although he did not associate the misery he inferred from the crowds with industrial technology, an early experience working as a printer's devil helped to make the connection between technology and the plight of workers that becomes central to Modern Timer. He recalled being horrified by the enormous printing machine, instilling in him a kind of awe and fear of being devoured by it. This personal experience made an account of Ford's assembly line system, recollected in Chaplin's autobiography, all the more compelling to him. 

In his own words, it was "a harrowing story of big industry luring healthy young men off the farms who, after four or five years at the belt system, became nervous wrecks". In this recollection we can detect a direct influence on the Tramp's factory experience in Modern Times.

Still, despite this jaundiced view of technology, Chaplin's own success was achieved in an art form defined by technology. As he began work on Modern Timer, more inclined than ever before to charge his art with a social critique targeting the industrial ideology that informed twentieth-century life, the film's political thesis became somewhat tangled in ambiguity, equivocating between the terms of its own technological production and its production of a critique of technology. Noting Chaplin's ambivalence is, of course, not a new idea, but heretofore Chaplin's conflicted feelings have been attributed primarily to his struggle to combine entertainment and didacticism.

The film's dramatization of this tension shows how Chaplin's political critique of technology confronts his artistic investment in technology in ways that also affect the politics of f The ilm reception. The collision between Chaplin's evolving interest in social themes and his own exercise of power as the impresario of cinematic production produce a complexity and an unevenness that suggest both Chaplin's lack of control over the narrative's multiple meanings and his inability to fully comprehend them. Ironically, these cinematic difficulties mark the film as a gauge of its era. Chaplin's struggle with the film and the Tramp's continued failures within the narrative reflect the ways in which the intractability of the Great Depression perplexed the economists, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens who grappled with the vicissitudes of capitalism.

The film's reflexive allegories of production register both Chaplin's fascination with film technology and his antagonism toward institutional authorities typically identified with the control of technology. The film's reflexive allegories of consumption signal Chaplin's anxieties about his ability to continue to satisfy the demands of his audience, but they also tap into widespread anxiety about the collapse of industrial society and its inability to satisfy the needs of its consumers.

By acknowledging production and consumption as dynamic processes, the film's reciprocal reflexivity enriches its representation of class and technological anxiety, and thus reflects the conflicts of the culture. In other words, because the film's reflexivity operates in two directions, it comments on the dynamic social relationship between production and consumption of supply and demand that was central to both the experience of and the attempts to understand the Great Depression. Equally the film's social critique turns inward on itself as a Hollywood commercial film, Modern Times epitomizes the comple mentary relationship between production and consumption both as a critique of technological culture and a commodity produced by it. 

'The Great Dictator':

“Had I known the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made “The Great Dictator;” I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.” 

The Great Dictator is a tale of two worlds, the palace, where dictator Adenoid Hynkel rules, and the ghetto, where a Jewish barber struggles to make a living and survive.

The comedic device of the film is the resemblance between the Dictator and the Barber, who is later mistaken for the Dictator. The theme of the story, at its basic level, is the struggle between good and evil, reflected in the balance between the two worlds. The film begins with this title: 

“This is a story of a period between two World Wars an interim in which Insanity cut loose, Liberty took a nose dive, and Humanity was kicked around somewhat.” 

It is followed by a prologue, set in World War I, in which the Jewish Barber fights as a patriotic, although ineffective, Tomanian soldier. This sequence,reminiscent of Chaplin’s World War I comedy “Shoulder Arms”, contains elements of nightmarish violence as well as humor, a combination that occurs often in the film.

 The Barber must fire the enormous Big Bertha gun, is pursued by a defective gun shell, loses a hand grenade in his uniform, accidentally marches with the enemy, and later finds himself upside down in an airplane. The prologue reminds the audience of the malevolence of machines, the horror of war, and the senselessness of destruction. Within this framework, the stories of the Barber and Hynkel in their two moral universes, represented by the good “People of the Ghetto” and the evil “People of the Palace” are regularly intercut.

The film concludes with an epilogue set after the start of the war in Europe, soon to be called World War II. It shows the Barber, mistaken for Hynkel, forced to address a massed rally. The final speech, however, is not given by the Barber character but by Chaplin himself, who pleads for peace, tolerance, and understanding.

The greatest moment of Chaplin’s satire on Hitler and the rise of dictators is the scene in which Hynkel performs a dance with a globe of the world. This scene, which stands with the very best set pieces of Chaplin’s silent films, requires no words to convey its message.

 Hynkel performs a graceful, seductive ballet with a balloon globe, a wonderful symbol of his maniacal dream of possessing the world for his pleasure. Yet when he believes he has it within his grasp, the bubble literally bursts. This is Chaplin’s symbolic comment on the futility of the dictator’s as aspirations and reflects his optimistic belief that dictators will never succeed. Probably the most famous sequence of “The Great Dictator” is the five-minute speech that concludes the film. Here Chaplin drops his comic mask and speaks directly to the world, conveying his view that people must rise up against dictators and unite in peace. The most enduring aspects of the final speech are its aspirational quality and tone and its underlying faith in humanity. Chaplin sketches a hopeful future in broad strokes and leaves the implementation of his vision to others, despite the fact that the more unsavory aspects of human nature may prevent mankind ever reaching his promised utopia. The final speech of “The Great Dictator” remains relevant and valuable in the twenty-first century and likely will remain so as long as conflict corrupts human interaction and despots endure. With the exception of “Gone With the Wind”, no other film of the period was met with such anticipation as “The Great Dictator.” 

 “The Great Dictator” was hailed as a masterpiece, closing the Berlin Film Festival Only a few hundred yards from where Hitler committed suicide in his bunker.

Adolf Hitler was disturbed when he heard Chaplin was at work on “The Great Dictator,” and there is evidence that Hitler actually saw the film. According to an agent who fled Germany after working in the film division of the Nazi Ministry of Culture, Nazi authorities procured a print and Hitler screened the film one evening in solitude. The following evening he again watched the film all by himself. That is all the agent could tell Chaplin. In relaying the anecdote, Chaplin said, “I’d give anything to know what he thought of it.” Whatever Hitler thought of Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” the film survives as cinema’s supreme satire and one of Chaplin’s most important and enduring works. 

The final speech:

The final speech of Chaplin's The Great Dictator has aroused commentary since the film premiered on 15 October 1940. "The final speech demonstrates that it has even put Mr. Chaplin momentarily off balance." The speech is dreadful. It is a hoary collection of disorganized platitudes, belligerently delivered." Theodore Huff has written "The final long speech (six minutes) surprised and embarrassed some as out of place, tacked on rather than integral to the film. Other elements in the ending were thought to be propagandistic and banal." Writing in The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris said of the speech, "Even Chaplin's beloved Paulette Goddard is pressed into service as his emotional correlative for all humanity. Look up, Hannah, he cries hysterically at the end. The criticism focuses on the inappropriateness of this "personal statement-"Chaplin momentarily off balance," etc. if indeed it is personal.

The Great Dictator is ostensibly slapstick, a bitter anti-war anti-racist satire, and a no-holds-barred attack on fascism, and as great satirists have done in the past, Chaplin eventually turns his Satyr's mockery on his persona. Therefore, one should be careful not to attribute to the filmmaker the statements that the persona makes, since the persona may become the butt of the satire. The Dictator's Speech is properly the Barber's Speech. He invents it, gives it, he impersonates the Führer to save his butt, but, no doubt, the strain of his having to preserve his life by addressing a multitude of "Nazis" has taken its toll on his reason.

The hypothesis is that as the Little Jewish Barber progresses through his speech, he loses his reason and this is supported by the content analysis that follows.

The "Dictator's Speech" begins as an humanitarian appeal for peace, brotherhood, and rational progress, and finishes as a "crusading" appeal for peace through war. It is jingoistic schizophrenia, and it is this mystic-democratic mania to "fight" for "a kindlier world" that is mad nonsense. One fights to save his butt-Nazi, American, or Jew.In The Great Dictator, as in all art, the artist creates a persona, but he is not it. One is fiction, one is not-just as Chaplin drives his persona mad by forcing him to speak, or "dictate". Ultimately, by becoming a dictator"and there is not all that much difference between a man who wants to save the world and a man who wants to destroy it," says the Jewish Barber as Savior becomes the butt of the satire, for he becomes the Great Dictator by falling victim to his enemy's form."

Citation:

CORSARO, DOMENIC J. “Chaplin as Satyr: Mocking the Mystic Ebullience, or Life, Liberty and Prosperity in Three Chaplin Films (with An Afterword on the Final Speech from The Great Dictator).” Journal of the University Film Association, vol. 31, no. 1, 1979, pp. 33–46. JSTOR,http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687462. Accessed 10 Dec. 2022. 

HOWE, LAWRENCE. “CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION: REFLEXIVE AMBIGUITY IN ‘MODERN TIMES.’” College Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 45–65. JSTOR,http://www.jstor.org/stable/24543206. Accessed 9 Dec. 2022. 

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