“Modern Times is the film of the twentieth century, a creation encompassing happiness and nightmare, freedom and alienation, man’s condition and point of view on what was happening around him in the time he was living”, wrote Peter von Bagh. “It is masterfully minimalist, a film that opens new horizons, a leap into the unknown and cruelty”.
That cruelty was new and Kafkaesque. The adversary is not a bully or the local police, who in the end are still human, but something larger as Ejzenštein noted, “The big one beats the little one. He is beaten up. At first man by man. Then more man by society.” The perfect point of convergence between the character of the Tramp and collective history, Modern Times flawlessly combines Chaplin’s humanism with his previous film work. When asked about his new role as a political filmmaker, Chaplin answered, a few months before the movie’s release, “I do not intend to deal with any political or social issue with my film. My heroes are factory workers. My character is man. I never christened him; he does not have a name: he is man”.
According to the opening title, the film’s purpose is to tell a “story of industry, of individual enterprise – humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness”, and that purpose is crystallized in two symbolic images that, if put in a time capsule, could illustrate the twentieth century to those who were not born in it: the Tramp/factory worker stuck in the gears of the machine is – “ both a hand-painted landscape of the modern soul and a psychiatric close-up. A cubist tableau” – while the Tramp and the Gamin on the road – for von Bagh – is probably the most complete image of human happiness ever created on screen.

Cecilia Cenciarelli