Charlie Chaplin
Tempi Moderni

There are various parameters for determining the value of a great film. An infinite number could be enumerated: from the story being told to the director’s technique, from the actors’ performances to the meaning we derive from it. All important aspects for analysis and evaluation, certainly, but none as much as defining the work’s relevance. A masterpiece is often such and will always be, when the author succeeds in focusing on the universal themes of humanity, love, power, and progress.
An immortal and timeless film is "Modern Times" by Charlie Chaplin. In 1936, the year the film was made, Chaplin was a forty-seven-year-old at the peak of fame, the ultimate star who had conquered the world with his films steeped in comedy and melancholy. And such was his reputation, that he could still afford to make silent films when sound had already become popular. Only he could continue to break box office records with a type of cinema that was objectively obsolete. Chaplin firmly believed in silent films: he was convinced that words annihilated the poetry that gestures magically generated. In fact, if we exclude the sequence in which the protagonist performs in a club, Modern Times is entirely silent.

Those were crucial years for the world: the years of great economic transformations, the assertion of capitalism, the years of man being imprisoned by a new system and being surpassed by the "machine" he himself created. And it is mainly around this theme that Modern Times revolves: it is the splendid testimony of a man who does not accept the direction the world has taken and rebels. Memorable are the sequences in which the protagonist derails an entire factory. What the audience sees is a dancing and "free" Chaplin contrasting with the rigidity of the gears and unsustainable work rhythms. But what is striking is the film’s frightening relevance: the protagonist is a precarious worker (how many of them are there today?) who, for one reason or another, does not find economic stability, changes many jobs, and the logical consequence is the rejection of the life he leads: he detests it so much that, aware of the world’s ugliness, he leaves prison reluctantly after a period of detention. In the famous final sequence, he will find himself walking down an avenue that no one knows where it leads, the future is more uncertain than ever; but his woman is there with him to share the journey.
With this film, Chaplin would be accused of being a communist and obviously would not be well-regarded by an increasingly industrialized and powerful America. We are left with one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of cinema.