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Essay on Modern Times By Charles Chaplin
Charles Chaplin was the supreme cinematic mastermind of the 20th century. His luminosity was renowned and acknowledged for decades, but then America brutally bowed against him. How it grieved him that his adopted homeland, the country that had given him prominence, possessions and countless affluence, denounced him as a Communist and typically didn't permit him back into the country. He is the reigning king of silent comedy. His faultlessly supple gesturing, sense of timing and suggestive facial features have made him a milestone artist, a masterful film maker and one of the utmost talents to ever grace the silver screen.
Chaplin urged a new commencement, to steer clear of self-indulgence, to avoid machine minds and to clinch humankind. He esteemed and warned of the dangers of both control and mechanical automation now electronic or biological. His words and vision stretch far: his soldiers of light are needed now to fight spiritually the worship of materialism and consequential environmental spoil just as they were physically in 1940. (DOLAND, 2003)
Modern Times by Charles Chaplin is a tale of an industry of individual enterprise humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness, states the forward to the last great silent film. It opens with an overhead shot of a flock of sheep jostling in their sheep pen, and rushing all the way through a channel. Immediately, the sheep liquefy into a similar overhead shot of industrial workers pushing out of a subway station at rush hour on their way to work in a factory.
Modern Times is the classic battle of man and the toil and dehumanization of factory life. The final scene has the Tramp optimistically arm and arm with his love Paulette Goddard walking into the sunset, a fitting end to the grand era of the silent film. The movie is Chaplin's peerless take on the machine age; his ballet on the assembly....
