Charlie Chaplin
Tempi Moderni

Compiling, even in a serious (and obviously debatable) way, a list of the greatest films of all time, a game to which everyone has succumbed at some point, I realized that I had, almost unknowingly, placed three Chaplin films in the top ten positions ("The Gold Rush", "City Lights", "Modern Times", in precisely this order). I feel inclined to say, and rightly so. Chaplin was the greatest of all, perhaps only Welles came close, but greater than Kubrick, Hitchcock, Fellini, Kurosawa, anyone you like. But, damn, "Modern Times" is something that, after almost a century, hasn't aged a bit. Is that possible?

It was released in 1936, after four years of production. His previous film, "City Lights", came out in 1931. Sound has existed for eight years; the first film in this sense was "The Jazz Singer" from 1928, and everyone uses sound by now, except Chaplin, who detests it, struggles to understand it, and believes that words, in a film, are not that important. Only in 1940, twelve years later, with "The Great Dictator" will he seize the opportunity, perhaps talking too much. And "Modern Times" is a political film, there's no skirting around it, so much so that upon its release it did poorly, with the author accused of being a dangerous communist (imagine that!) and even the most insightful critics hurled deadly stones at him. It's worth recalling a few: Baldelli, one of the most well-known Italian critics of the time (it must be said we were in the middle of the fascist regime which, surprisingly, let the film be released in Italy), accused him of "forced nihilism", adding "Chaplin does not hate this or that Society, but Society"; Bazin, in France, wrote: "[...] Chaplin possesses no class consciousness, and if he sides with the proletariat, it is because he too is a victim of the society as it is, and of the police." A disaster.

"Modern Times", which has some small sound inserts, but Chaplin uses sound more as an extension of the gags (except for the famous "Titina") is divided into five mirror acts, all variations on a theme. In the first act, which begins with the famous montage of pigs entering a pen and workers crowding into a factory (an eloquent metaphor), it represents the impossibility of the everyman, the worker Chaplin, to adapt to the new reality, alienating and sci-fi, where one must screw as many bolts as possible and use a deadly robotic machine to eat and shorten break times, impossible to survive against Capital; in the second act, the most political, Chaplin finds himself having to deal with the workers' revolt, political awareness, and recognizing his own status as exploited, even though He, deep down, doesn't really understand it, even if, unwittingly, he finds himself in the midst of a workers' demonstration (and here appears a red flag, even though the film is shot in masterful B/W, that flag must be red):

"Charlot picks up the fallen flag and runs after the truck that lost it, waving it. [...] It is not the demonstration that organizes itself and gathers behind Charlot, it is Charlot who, unbeknownst to himself, finds himself at the head of a demonstration that was already underway" (Glauco Viazzi)

In the third part begins the desire, and possibility, of escaping from the bleakest worker routine, and here Chaplin meets Paulette Goddard, and the two flee to a cabin on a river; the fourth part is the comeback, but still in a work-related field, not yet sentimental, and here Chaplin finds work as a night watchman in a warehouse, a less alienating job, at least it seems so, until the arrival of thieves (here appears the famous skating scene, liberating and symbol of a past that one would like to forget, among the most poignant and fitting pieces in Chaplin's entire filmography); the fifth part is yet another chance to start over, here as a singing-waiter, but the troubles of the beloved put them on the run again, towards an ending that many have perhaps interpreted too politically (in a film, I repeat, that is such) and that is, the two walk away, in search of a better future, with a sun ahead of them that has been read as the proverbial Dawn of Tomorrow, and from here many, but not all, the communist connotations attributed to Chaplin.

It is one of the many Chaplin films where love helps the protagonist grow but never completely gets him out of trouble (see, in this sense, "The Circus" (1928) and "City Lights"), yet it is the first film where we can witness the end of Charlot as the little man with the cane, in trouble, alien to the happenings of the world and always ready to suffer them without understanding them. Chaplin here is a man of his times, a worker, an individual who knows and understands the reality of his era, even modified in appearance (away with the bushy hair replaced by a different parting) and he mutters a nonsensical song, giving the audience of the time the chance to hear his own voice, something never happened before, but even in this case it is a mockery:

"[...] He sings a song, but the words he pronounces are senseless: it is a mockery of the spoken word, which is an achievement of technological progress (the only words in the film are those pronounced by a machine). It is an implicit theoretical statement: Chaplin demonstrates that comedy (and therefore cinema, of which comedy is for him the specific linguistic form) lies primarily in the image. And it must also be noted how in his style the use of the camera and its movements has meanwhile refined" (Giorgio Cremonini)

One can delve even deeper, and Barthes, a French critic, does so, saying: "His anarchy, politically questionable, in art represents perhaps the most effective form of revolution." Aside from the politically questionable, which is a critical connotation of the times, it is also true that Chaplin here performs a conceptual revolution unthinkable at the time, with Europe caught between fascism and Nazism, the author highlights an unsustainable worker condition far removed from the apparent, and false, conception that authoritarian regimes narrated of the working class, seemingly close to it, but in reality, they were far removed from it. But the argument also applies to the democratic USA of the era, the Rooseveltian ones:

"[...] The portrait that Chaplin gives us of the proletariat in 1936 rejects the easy (and false, in the USA) illusion of class struggle. It is a proletarian who lacks the awareness of being a proletarian; bourgeois ideology has already invaded him, definitively" (Giorgio Cremonini)

Chaplin is certainly not a born optimist, and "Modern Times" demonstrates this fully, despite the hopeful ending (but it is perhaps a hope more pursued than idealized) but the technical inventions in this film are astounding: the filmic space is always narrow, almost to tell us that life is an eternal "prison" (in which our protagonist, in the film, ends up), but when madness explodes, when one can no longer contain oneself, wide fields dominate. And nothing, nothing, is truly hopeful, including the skating sequence with that undercurrent of unease and nightmare that will be even more explosive in the subsequent "The Great Dictator" in the wonderful, and famous, globe sequence.

A masterpiece that speaks to today's men as it did at the time of its release, but perhaps today with greater awareness, even if the defeatism of today's society is far worse, and it couldn't have been otherwise, than Chaplin's in 1936.