THE MASTERPIECE

Modern Times

IT’S A BOLD move to name your film Modern Times. It’s like naming your film ‘The Future’: sooner or later, by definition, it will eventually become ‘The Past’.

And certainly to 21st-century eyes, there’s nothing obviously modern about Modern Times, a largely silent black-and-white slapstick film about the Great Depression.

In fact, it might have seemed a bit old-fashioned to the eyes who first watched it on release in 1936, too. The advent of recorded sound in movies had arrived a decade or so earlier with Al Jolson’s , and Hollywood’s abandonment of the silent status quo wasexplosion of colour just three years away. In 1936, black-and-white silent films would have been considered anachronistic, a thing of the past. No other major filmmaker was making silent films at the time. That title must have seemed almost ironic.