Modern Times and Man With a Movie Camera: Alternate Visions of the Machine-Human Relationship in the Age of Mechanized Industry

It is difficult to imagine how two films as fundamentally different as Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) and Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929) could warrant a comparison.  They are about as dissimilar as any pair of feature films can be, the former being a narrative comedy and the latter a non-linear reportorial documentary.  Produced only a few years apart, however, there are certain parallels to be found in the historical contexts of both films.  The most palpable common theme between the two is the relationship between technology and the human body and how this dynamic is played out in the industrial settings of Depression-era America and the nascent Soviet Union.  Chaplin and Vertov, each with their own agenda, arrive at opposite conclusions in their respective meditations on technology and its implications for human livelihood, and they will each utilize specific formal elements such as editing and mise-en-scène (where the starkest contrast between the sensibilities of the two filmmakers is to be found) to convey their ideas.  Grounding each in their respective contexts, an analysis will be drawn forth from a comparison of the factory episode from Modern Times, and numerous sequences (mainly in reels four through six) from Man With a Movie Camera, to distinguish two opposing visions of technology during the infancy of mechanized industry.     

Beneath the slapstick, Modern Times is a bitterly trenchant commentary on the perceived effects of industrial capitalism and the dehumanizing nature of mass production technology.  Chaplin echoes the sentiments of millions of Americans suffering through the economic perdition of the Great Depression with his charming story of a factory worker (whom he plays) and the plight he suffers.  On the other hand, with his symphonic documentary of urban life in three different Soviet cities, Vertov portrays industrialization as a positive force.  The message here is partly propagandistic, as praise for Stalin's ambitious Five-Year Plan to industrialize a still mainly feudal Russia which was implemented in 1928 and announced the year Vertov released his film.  As an expression of authentic socialist values, Vertov portrays the Soviet Union as a worker's paradise, while Modern Times, inscribed in the milieu of capitalism, depicts the worker as the downtrodden member of society.  The portrayal of technology as a recurrent motif in both films underscores each director's own ideological associations with it and highlights the striking contrasts between the social contexts of each film which would lead to different assumptions about its role in human enterprise.

1913.  October.  In an automobile factory in Highland Park, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit), Henry Ford unveiled his invention that would revolutionize the age of mass production: the assembly line.  It was 250 feet long, and designed so each worker could be assigned a task to perform over and over as machines carried production along through its various stages—what once took 14 man-hours to manufacture a car now required only three.  Finally there was a method of supply to meet the feverish demand for Model T's in the United States.  It meant greater quotas and profits, though some saw in this marriage of human and machine-driven labor a potentially dehumanizing effect.  As workers are expected only to perform menial synchronized tasks in a mindless pattern of repetition, they become like cogs themselves in a giant wheel of production as they assume the characteristics of mere machine parts.  The human element of manufacturing (which, ironically, originally meant to make by hand 1) is all but disappeared; non-essential. 

Chaplin uses slapstick to voice this concern by taking literally the idea of mechanizing human beings.  The film introduces Chaplin's suffering hero with a masterfully choreographed sequence in which his Tramp character is tightening the bolts of machine parts as they are shuffled along by a conveyor belt (recalling Ford's assembly line).  This constant repetition appears to take over his basic motor controls as when production halts for a break, he is unable to stop his jerky motions, which lead him to perform the same bolt-tightening move on a pair of buttons adorning a woman's bottom.  Before he can shake it off, he also manages to spill his coworker's soup.  Technology, through its mechanization of human activity, has essentially hijacked his neural functions, leaving him with a nervous tick.  Now compare this with one of Vertov's many images of machine and man wedded labor: a girl folding cigarette boxes one after the other around a cubic slab of wood.  His use of rapid cutting and quick projection speed portray the nature of her movements as increasingly mechanical.  This in turn is juxtaposed with a shot of a machine churning out the pre-folded boxes.  This sort of associational imagery conveys Vertov's intended symptomatic effect: that technology, rather than a force which exerts control over the human body, as Chaplin suggests, is a means to improve its practical (and even aesthetic) function.  This theme is the basic mantra of Vertov's approach to filmmaking.  Citing the first manifesto of Vertov and his ilk, the self-termed kinoks (cine-eyes), published in 1922, Yuri Tsivian (who provides audio annotation to Man With a Movie Camera on the DVD) quotes their declaration to "bring people into closer kinship with machines."  And unlike the dismay his endlessly repeated production task causes Chaplin's Tramp, eventually leading to a nervous breakdown, the girl folding cigarette boxes ad infinitum is laughing and smiling, obviously having a grand old time.

The general theme in reel four of Man With a Movie Camera is a celebration of labor, which is portrayed as a happy and successful marriage between technology and the human body.  The common motif in this portion of the film is the visual association of hands with machine tools, which come together to create the perfect hand (as the scene of the cigarette-box girl amply demonstrates).  Vertov's fascination with technology is apparent all throughout his celluloid mosaic of urban life.  Sergei Eisenstein once jokingly referred to him as "a relic of the steel and wheel age" (Tsivian).  Understood within its historical context, this is partly to serve a propagandistic function.  At the precise time the film was produced Stalin's strategy to industrialize Russia, the Five-Year Plan, had been announced and implemented.  In short, notwithstanding the overwhelming human cost of collectivizing the agricultural produce of the rustic populace to subsidize urban factory workers, the policy was a success in bringing the Soviet Union somewhat up to par with the Western nations in terms of heavy industry, so that she was able to (barely) survive the war machine of Nazi Germany in the years to come.  More than the self-conscious attempt of a dutiful Soviet citizen to exalt Soviet policy, Vertov celebrates the nuptials of machine technology and human enterprise with a cinematic hymn of praise for the glory of Russia's future, the anticipation of which was provided by the promise of Stalin's plan for rapid industrialization.

The social context for Modern Times, on the other hand, inexorably leads Chaplin to associate different ideas with industrial technology.  Set amid the Great Depression and the fourth year of FDR's New Deal, the film echoes the political atmosphere of the time which beheld the unfettered development of private industry of the 1920's and prior as the cause of economic collapse.  Gone was Coolidge's motto for America: "the business of this country is business."  Roosevelt and his architects of the modern welfare state did not hesitate to repudiate the doctrine of laissez-faire which hitherto formed the basis of federal economic policy.  The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the first major bill of the New Deal, swept with ease through the First Session of an overwhelmingly liberal Democratic Congress newly elected in 1932.  With this bill, FDR's New Deal architects (the "Brains Trust") imitated Mussolini's industrial policy gaining worldwide attention at the time by setting up the National Recovery Administration (NRA) which collectivized individual industries into federally supervised trade associations called Code Authorities—it was called the "corporative system" in fascist Italy (Flynn 39).  Though the NRA was found to be in violation of anti-trust laws and declared unconstitutional in 1935 (a year before the release of Modern Times) the argument behind some sort of regulation of industry still resonates in the film.  Chaplin portrays industry as a technological monster run amok: the Big Brother-like factory boss relays the order "Section 5 - give ‘em the limit!" to speed up the conveyor belt with no thought to the dismay it causes the Tramp and his overwhelmed coworkers trying to keep up.  The massive machinery then swallows the Tramp as he gets caught on the belt and dragged into its underbelly of cogs and gears.  Not only are the workers portrayed as slaves to the machine, but they have literally become its food, the ultimate symbol of subordination (recalling key lines from Fritz Lang's Metropolis and the basic premise of The Matrix).  A subtly implied symptomatic meaning in this sequence suggests that maybe industry is better left out of control of the technocrats.

In contrasting the social/political backdrops of both films, it is apparent why Vertov chooses to praise his present society, during which mass-production technology was a beacon of a prosperous future, and why Chaplin chooses to criticize his, during which industry (and through it technology) was perceived as the catalyst for the present economic woes.  Yet the contrast seems to reach deeper than that.  More than a mere propagandist on the Kremlin's payroll, Vertov expresses his infatuation with technology through his sensibilities as a filmmaker.  Man With a Movie Camera is a celebration of filmmaking, (itself a form of technology, and still on the cutting-edge in the 1920's).  His dazzling cinematographic special effects are the most recognizable motif in the film.  Not intended to be noticeable, as Bordwell and Thompson note, they instead "flaunt the fact that the camera can alter everyday reality" (443).  Just as the Chinese magician beguiles the young children, Vertov uses movie magic to charm his audience.  Editing is the essential formal element he uses to posit ideas about the relationship between technology the body.  In Modern Times, mise-en-scène is the critical element Chaplin utilizes to visually depict the machine-human dynamic.  The comically absurd design of the Bellows Feeding Machine, for example, is meant to make the notion of using technology to usurp the control of mundane human functions (such as eating) seem ridiculous.  The importance of costuming, also an aspect of mise-en-scène, is seen in the specific design of the secretary's skirt, decorated with two buttons resembling the nuts on the machine parts, providing Chaplin with a gag opportunity to twist them when she bends over as he cannot suppress his dual-wrench wielding twitch reflex.  It is precisely these theatrical elements (obligatory for fictional narrative filmmaking) that Vertov detested, part of the reason he regarded fiction films as bourgeois dream factories, capitalist opiates to keep the proletarian drugged and incognizant of their oppression.  In the epigram for his documentary, the only time text appears in the film, Vertov proclaims his experiment to create a "truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature."  Hence only the technological (not theatrical) elements of filmmaking--cinematography, optical effects, editing--are to be used in his celebration of technology and the manipulative power of cinema.  Thus does style reflect substance.       

Given the non-linear nature of Man With a Movie Camera, editing does not relate images temporally or spatially, but in association to one another.  The deliberate juxtaposition of images of technology and humans extols their kinship and suggests the perfecting of human functions through technology.  The functions of the movie camera, for example, are personified when a visual element of the lens bringing an image of blurred flowers into focus is rapidly intercut with a woman batting her eyelids, thus analogizing the artificial lens of the camera with the human eye (B&T 444).  This association is made again, much more literally, with the film's memorable final image of a human eye superimposed on the camera lens.  Depictions of technology also function as metaphors for human activity: the divorce scene is followed by a shot of two trams traveling in opposite directions (a simple visual conceit for the concept of divorce).  Use of the overlap-dissolve technique in the sixth reel, such as fusing the image of hands on a typewriter with the up-angle shot of the typist suggest a unity of worker and tool.  Tsivian (the DVD commentator) explains Vertov's overarching theme during a shot of female switchboard operators feverishly plugging cords into the wall to connect telephone calls:

The core concept of the kinoks' philosophy was that in the ideal future people would relegate their imperfect faculties like seeing or hearing to more perfect machines capable of comparing images and analyzing them.

Philosophically, this is precisely the polar opposite of what Chaplin is conveying in Modern Times with respect to the notion of mechanizing human faculties.

Working within the established tradition of narrative filmmaking, Charlie Chaplin uses slapstick comedy to satirically comment on perceived societal ills.  In Modern Times, he is criticizing the dehumanizing effects of technology in the milieu of industrial manufacturing.  As in all conventional fiction cinema, he relies on the theatrical elements of filmmaking to tell his story and also posit certain implicit arguments about reflections of the real world within his story.  Vertov, on the other hand, taking advantage of avant-garde developments in film art, divorces the language of film from its theatrical elements, isolating the purely cinematic features to create his own subjective version of reality, or kinopravda (film truth) as he called it.  It is also a celebration of the process of moviemaking itself, and of technology in general.  In addition to the divergent artistic sensibilities of two renowned directors, contrasts in the specific historical contexts of both films have shown to lead Chaplin and Vertov to arrive at alternate conclusions in their respective meditations on the relationship between technology and the human body.  While Chaplin puts a decidedly negative spin on this dynamic, Vertov openly embraces the union of human faculties and machine capabilities, as his famous declaration illustrates: "I am Kino-eye."

Works Cited

Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson.  Film Art: An Introduction. 7th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2004.

Flynn, John T.  The Roosevelt Myth. San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1948.

Modern Times.  Dir: Charlie Chaplin.  Charlie Chaplin Productions, United Artists (US).  1936.

Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man With a Movie Camera).  Dir: Dziga Vertov.  VUFKU (Russia).  1929.  Commentary by Yuri Tsivian, DVD edition, Kino Video. 

Footnotes

In Latin: manu ("by hand") + facere ("to make") [back to text]