Modern Times definitely shows an artist from a dated period. Charlie is making movies for a talking generation with the heart of a filmmaker from the silent film generation. He is living in modern times and the film is about that gap that emerged in the 1930’s between cultures, between people of different modes of thought of how the world should work. The mainstream audience of the day seemed to reject all of the more humanizing bold attitudes that the people of the 20’s put out and built up in favor of comforts, modernity, and progress.
The storytelling here is very poignant. And on a visual level it astounds. The meaning behind the images is very clear especially to the audience too which is the silent nature of the film, one that needed to be more blunt and obvious in its message through visuals. Chaplin held off on using dialogue throughout this film for the purpose of trying to show the universal truths about humany nature, need for love and compassion over the complexity and noise of modern life and modern sounds. That being said, the lack of dialogue definitely takes away from the enjoyment of this film in this period. You can feel that it’s out of place and there’s almost a reassurance as a result of this film about the supremacy of talking pictures in this moment in history.
This film is very similar in nature to A Nous La Liberte, a film about people who haven't caught up with the times and are causing chaos and disorder in what should be a Henry Ford like assembly line factory eventually building up more and more to comedic effect. That being said this film is a masterpiece of using sound repetition to create comedy and satire about the mechanized and dehumanized nature of society today. Chaplin is trying to show how people are becoming robotic just like the machines they work with by slowly adapting their behavior to the same repetitive mechanized motions of the factory. He's very successful in showing how our social life, something that should be dictated by human emotion and interaction and empathy is beginning to become routine and process driven much like the machines of the modern times, even going as far as to say the machines are what's driving us to change our behavior as humans.
But I think that's the discrepancy that makes this movie feel a part of an older generation. The people of the 1930's want progress, they want machines, they want social change out of an "older, antiquated" way of communal life and into a streamlined, efficient modern life that promotes individual routine over social community interaction.
36 minutes into the movie you get the shock of his physical humor by seeing him knocking the boat into the water. That gag of him accidentally causing a massive ship to fall into the ocean and be destroyed summarizes all of Charlie's attempts in this film to reset the social order of humans by doing away with machines.
1:15 in. The stunt of him trying to eat food off a rotating tray is also a summary of Charlie. You build up expectation, come close to ending the joke and then go back into the gag again like a dance. That’s what’s unique about chaplin’s work versus keaton, the dance effect, keaton is more like a routine, Charlie engages with the changing world around him almost dancing with it.
At the end of the film though you feel reaffirmed as a human being in an increasingly technologically driven world. There's serious heart in this movie. It is a masterpiece of a film.