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Modern Times (1936) signals a notable shiftin the career of Charlie Chaplin. To be sure, the film remains loyal to the practices of silent cinema on which he built his success, and it relies, albeit for the last time, on the popularity of Chaplin's screen persona, the "Tramp," a loveable outcast victimized by institutional authorities, his own frailties, and plain old dumb luck. But the backstory of Chaplin's career and of the production of this Depression-era film complicate its interpretation, as well as its meaning to American cinema in this crucial period of social and economic turmoil. Much of the difficulty surrounding Modern Times stems from the diverse conditions of Chaplin's life and their influence on his art. His Tramp persona, informed by his own impoverished upbringing, represented class disadvantage to elicit the sympathy of audiences. And yet sympathetic identification with the Tramp was possible only if audiences disregarded the fact that off-screen Chaplin was one of the wealthiest screen celebrities of his day.' Indeed, as a filmmaker Chaplin was the antithesis of the befuddled incompetent Tramp. By 1936 he was unique in his total control over his productions, as actor, screenwriter, director, producer, composer, and finally corporate entity. But with each passing year after the release of The Jazz Singer (1929), Chaplin was increasingly aware that the growing demand for talking pictures in the marketplace threatened to make a silent-film star like him obsolete.
In the midst of social upheaval and professional peril, Chaplin attempted in Modern Times to reassert his relevance by representing 'machine-age' culture as a profoundly destabilizing condition of contemporary society. His turn toward social critique coincides with the emerging maturity of film as an art form and the growing expectations that film could achieve much more than it had as a medium of light entertainment. No less a notable public intellectual than Lewis Mumford recognized the potential of film. For him, it was "a major art" of what he called "the neotechnic phase" of civilization, the next great development in the history of humankind (Mumford 1934, 343). He saw the technological evolution of society and the arrival of film as an optimal process of cultural convergence. Film has the power to advance the neotechnic phase, he reasoned, because it epitomizes...