Modern Times

Quite frankly it doesn’t get better than Charlie Chaplin.  His films entertain while being political and making us all examine the world around us.  His masterpiece Modern Times holds true to this:

I don’t have much patience with colleagues who dismiss Charlie Chaplin by saying that Buster Keaton was better (whatever that means). To the best of my knowledge, with the arguable exception of Dickens, no one else in the history of art has shown us in greater detail what it means to be poor, and certainly no one else in the history of movies has played to a more diverse audience or evolved more ambitiously from one feature to the next. The opening sequence in Chaplin’s second Depression masterpiece (1936), of the Tramp on the assembly line, is possibly his greatest slapstick encounter with the 20th century, and as Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have brilliantly observed, the famous shot of his being run through machinery equates him with a strip of film. Still, there’s more hope here than in Chaplin’s preceding City Lights, perhaps because this time the Tramp has Paulette Goddard, another plucky urchin, to keep him company. [Jonathan Rosenbaum]

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Modern Times dissects industrialization and the idea of modern society by placing Chaplin’s famous Tramp in the factory.  It is nothing short of amazing. As a filmmaker and a citizen I don’t know if there is someone more inspiring than Chaplin.

Watch this film to see how it pushed the envelope and then takepart with the AFL-CIO to make sure workers’ rights are honored.

Modern Times was not nominated for and did not win an Academy Award®