Новые времена Новые времена: Фильм Чарли Чаплина

1936 comedy film by Charles Chaplin

Modern Times is a 1936 American part talkie comedy film produced, written and directed by Charlie Chaplin. In Chaplin's last performance as the iconic Little Tramp, his character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film also stars Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford and Chester Conklin. Modern Times has won many awards and honors, and is widely considered one of the greatest films ever. It was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

The Tramp works on an assembly line, where he suffers greatly due to the stress and pace of the repetitive work. He eventually suffers a nervous breakdown and runs amok, getting stuck within a machine and throwing the factory into chaos; he is then sent to the hospital. Following his recovery, the now unemployed Tramp is mistakenly arrested in a Communist demonstration. In jail, he accidentally ingests smuggled cocaine, and in his subsequent delirium, he avoids being put back in his cell. When he returns, he stumbles upon a jailbreak and knocks the convicts unconscious for which he is hailed as a hero and given special treatment. When he is informed that he will soon be released due to his heroic actions, he argues unsuccessfully that he prefers life in jail. Upon release, he applies for a new job with a shipbuilder but leaves after causing an accident. Soon after, he runs into an orphaned girl, Ellen, who is fleeing the police after stealing a loaf of bread. Determined to go back to jail and to save her from arrest, the Tramp tells the police that he is the thief and asks to be arrested, but a witness reveals his deception and he is freed. He then eats an enormous amount of food at a cafeteria without paying to get arrested, and once again encounters Ellen in a paddy wagon after he is put in it. It soon crashes however, and she convinces him to escape with her. The Tramp then gets a job as a night watchman at a department store, and encounters three burglars led by "Big Bill," a fellow worker from the factory, who explains that they are hungry and desperate. After sharing drinks with them, he wakes up the next morning during opening hours and is arrested once again for failing to call the police on the burglars and for sleeping in the store's clothes on a desk, shocking a customer and the storekeeper. Days later, Ellen takes him to a run down shack to live in. The next morning, he reads about an old factory's re opening and lands a job as a mechanic's assistant. The other workers then suddenly decide to go on strike, and tell the Tramp to leave with them. Outside the factory, he accidentally launches a brick at a policeman and is arrested again. He is released two weeks later, and learns that Ellen is now a café dancer. She gets him a job as a singer and waiter, but he goes about his duties clumsily. During his floor show, he loses his cuffs, which bear the lyrics to his song, but he rescues the act by improvising the lyrics using gibberish and by pantomiming. When police arrive to arrest Ellen for her earlier escape, the two are forced to flee again, and Ellen despairs that their struggles are all pointless, but the Tramp reassures her. At a bright dawn, they walk down the road towards an uncertain but hopeful future.

During a European tour promoting City Lights, Chaplin got the inspiration for Modern Times from both the lamentable conditions of the continent through the Great Depression, along with a conversation with Mahatma Gandhi in which they discussed modern technology. Chaplin did not understand why Gandhi generally opposed it, though he granted that "machinery with only consideration of profit" had put people out of work and ruined lives. Chaplin began preparing the film in 1934 as his first "talkie", and went as far as writing a dialogue script and experimenting with some sound scenes. However, he soon abandoned these attempts and reverted to a silent format with synchronized sound effects and sparse dialogue. The dialogue experiments confirmed his long standing conviction that the universal appeal of his "Little Tramp" character would be lost if the character ever spoke on screen. Most of the film was shot at "silent speed", 18 frames per second, which when projected at "sound speed", 24 frames per second, made the slapstick action appear even more frenetic. The duration of filming was long for the time, beginning on October 11, 1934, and ending on August 30, 1935. Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance has noted: “Chaplin recognized that Modern Times was the valedictory for the Tramp and deliberately included many gags and sequences as a loving farewell to the character and an homage to the visual comedy tradition." This film also famously uses matte painting in the harrowing skating scene where Charlie skates blindfolded, not realizing he's constantly near the edge and very likely could fall down. The illusory drop has been matte painted, and Chaplin was never in actual danger while filming this scene in reality, he skated on a plain floor, with a ledge for him to discern when to stop. This can be observed in the fact that, at one moment, Chaplin's back wheel briefly disappeared behind the painting. This most likely escaped the eyes of Chaplin, which could be the reason he left it in. The reference to drugs seen in the prison sequence is somewhat daring for the time (since the production code, established in 1930, forbade the depiction of illegal drug use in films); Chaplin had made drug references before in one of his most famous short films, Easy Street, released in 1917.

According to the official documents, the music score was composed by Chaplin himself, and arranged with the assistance of Alfred Newman, who had collaborated with Chaplin on the music score of his previous film City Lights. Newman and Chaplin had a falling out near the end of the Modern Times soundtrack recording sessions, leading to Newman's angry departure. The romance theme was later given lyrics, and became the pop standard "Smile", first recorded by Nat King Cole. A cover of this song by Jimmy Durante was also used in the trailer for the 2019 film Joker, in which the lead character also watches scenes from a showing of Modern Times after sneaking into a movie theatre. Modern Times was the first film where Chaplin's voice is heard as he performs Léo Daniderff's comical song "Je cherche après Titine". Chaplin's version is also known as "The Nonsense Song", as his character sings it in gibberish. The lyrics are nonsensical but appear to contain words from French and Italian; the use of deliberately half intelligible wording for comic effect points the way towards Adenoid Hynkel's speeches in The Great Dictator. According to film composer David Raksin, Chaplin wrote the music as a young man wanting to make a name for himself. He would sit, often in the washroom, humming tunes and telling Raksin to "take this down". Raksin's job was to turn the humming into a score and create timings and synchronization that fit the situations. Chaplin was a violinist and had some musical knowledge, but he was not an orchestrator and was unfamiliar with synchronization. Along with Edward B. Powell, Raksin did receive screen credit for the music arrangements. Raksin later created scores for films including Laura and The Day After.

A digitally restored version of the film was released in 2003. The French company MK2 searched the world for good copies of the original footage, cut them together and processed each of the 126,000 frames, removing scratches and dust, and ensuring optimal image stability and balanced black and white tone levels. The restored version was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003. In 2013 Cineteca di Bologna and the Criterion Collection effected further digital improvements of the 2003 version, as noted in a preface ahead of the title.