Various interpretations

The film's preface says it's "A story of industry, of individual enterprise--humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness." What exactly does this mean? There are several versions of interpretations. The most acceptable interpretation recently, neutral of course, is that Chaplin hopes the film will remind his audience of their inherent humanity and the need to be treated as a human being and not as a machine or, as the opening of this film, as sheep. I got this message from most reviews of this film in the Internet. This interpretation also marched the original Chaplin's idea of making this film. Chapin has repeated himself more than one time that he was not interested in politics. I think this point of view is trying to dodge the controversial political issues raised from this film.

As Puccio said in his review, "He takes on the Depression, unemployment, riots, strikes, everything he can associate with the problems of the era. It's no wonder many of the democratic countries of Europe denounced it as Communist propaganda and that Communist Russia denounced it a capitalist propaganda."(2)

In another article, Simonian expressed his idea, "In fact, the public ridiculed and blamed Charles Chaplin for bringing matters to the surface that contained tension and fear. For example, Modern Times was successful because it allowed people to make light of the hardships felt during the Great Depression and of the industrial worker lifestyle." (3)

Therefore, we can see the film Modern Times was described has political meanings. In the capitalism countries, the film was given communist tone. All the scenes and story setting was considered to promote communist ideas and spreading fear. While in communist countries, the film was given a new meaning; it was the capitalist propaganda and showing the capitalistic way of life.

Last year in one of my course, this film was presented to the class to show the process of mass production. The main focus was the Fordism of modern age and its relationship to the consumer culture. The purpose of showing this film was simply to show the way of production of that era. Although this is a very old film, this was not the first time I've heard about it. My father once talked about this film with me. Decades ago, there were virtually no foreign films in China, especially American ones. Surprisingly, Modern Times was quite popular in China. Everyone of my father's generation have seen the film before. The purpose of that was to criticize the capitalism social system. The idea was industrialization as problems was not inherently bad. Instead, the ruthless capitalists were causing the social problems because they maximized personal profit by exploiting workers. Modern Time was a perfect example to demonstrate this point, especially the first factory scene. Even today, the clip of this film is still being showed in some high school politics lessons in China. However, when my generation watches this film today, we usually think it's just a classic comedy.

In response to the claim of this film had a political tone; Chaplin denied these allegations and indicated that he was simply an artist delivering comedy. Chaplin must have been frustrated because the meanings he attempted to portray became misunderstood. So many people have biased opinions of his Modern Times in a sense that they thought it was something else rather than a comedy.

In conclusion, while interpret a film it is important to remember that this information and meaning can organized or explained in different ways. Therefore, meanings and actions can mislead the viewer to understand an issue entirely differently than what the artist, in this case Charles Chaplin, originally intended.

 

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Siliang Xu yu274663@yorku.ca