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Modern Times. Directed by Charlie Chaplin. 1936. New York: Criterion Collection, 2010. DVD.
The film “Modern Times,” directed by Charlie Chaplin, is set in the mid nineteen thirties. This time frame places the characters in the middle of the Great Depression and the industrial revolution. The film depicts the lifestyle and quality of living for people in this era by showing a factory worker who cannot take the monotony of working on an assembly line. The film follows the factory worker through many of his adventures throughout the film. The film’s main stars are Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard.
The timing of this film was a significant factor in the story line. In the middle of the Great Depression unemployment and poverty were a major
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This film was written and produced in the middle of the Great Depression, and the depiction of the poverty and unemployment is very evident throughout the entire film.
From a scholarly point of view, the film accurately depicts the lifestyle of a factory worker in the timeframe. Workers would stand on an assembly line and repeat the same action day in and day out. The film also depicts the transition of the human dependency of machines very well. The workers would work at the pace of the machines. The film also had metaphors of humans being controlled by machines when the main actor was sucked into the pulley system of a machine. The film also has a scene where there is a machine that automatically feeds humans. Moving outside the factory, the film depicted the extremely poor living conditions of people during the Great Depression. Many people were living in dilapidated shacks. However, the film failed to depict the vastness of people living in these shacks, as it only shows the main character’s shack. Tying into living conditions, the film also shows many people were struggling to put food on the table. In many cases people were forced to steal food to survive. The film also very briefly depicted the public’s political insecurities when the main character is arrested for “participating” in a communist
Of Mice and Men takes place in the 1930's of America during the Great Depression. The American dream vanished, and the ideal land became the land of misfortune. The Great Depression was a massive global economic recession that led to numerous bank failures, high-unemployment, as well as dramatic drops in GDP, industrial production, stock market share prices and v...
the setting of the novel is in the 1930’s in the midst of the great depression where money and work was hard to come by. Most people turned to manual labor since is always needed somewhere, but it never payed well.
The context of the movie was one of the elements that influence its meaning. Modern Times was released on January 1st, 1936 when the United State was still deep in the Great Depression. Although the economy was recovering at that time, the unemployment rate of the previous year was 20.1 % (Steve Kangas). Across the ...
It did not matter if a laborer lost a finger, the only thing that mattered to the businessmen was making more money. This was how life was working in the factory and it shows that the industries are taking advantage of the immigrants and forcing the less fortunate to work in deplorable circumstances.
...ve-it” basis. Many of the workers were injured or killed in industrial accidents each year because of the unsafe conditions they worked in. men and women weren’t the only ones to work in the harsh conditions there was child labor they were used to move, clean, or fix large machines since they were so small and fit between the parts. The kids that worked were all under the age of fifteen, they missed air, sunshine, fresh air, play, and the chance to attend school and get an education.
Young girls were not allowed to open the windows and had to breathe in the dust, deal with the nerve-racking noises of the machines all day, and were expected to continue work even if they 're suffering from a violent headache or toothache (Doc 2). The author of this report is in favor of employing young women since he claimed they seemed happy and they loved their machines so they polished them and tied ribbons on them, but he didn 't consider that they were implemented to make their awful situations more bearable. A woman who worked in both factory and field also stated she preferred working in the field rather than the factory because it was hard work but it never hurt her health (Doc 1), showing how dangerous it was to work in a factory with poor living conditions. Poor living conditions were common for nearly all workers, and similar to what the journalist saw, may have been overlooked due to everyone seeming
The Great Depression is seen as one of the most sorrowful and desolate times in the history of the United States. This time was the longest period of recession ever seen by this nation so far. It lasted from 1929 to 1939, over ten years of complete confusion and despondency within the people. Many Americans were affected greatly by this tragic time and sacrificed much of their lives so that they and their families may have the chance to live. This act of desperation can be seen throughout the movie, The Cinderella Man, where a professional boxer, Jim Braddock, becomes crippled by the depression, both economically and spiritually. The observer can see this through the explicit cinematography of the movie and depiction of the Great Depression made by the director. However the director left out a key aspect of the happenings of the depression, the stock market crash. Perhaps, this catastrophic event was irrelevant to the plot and message of the movie, but it is important to the actual Great Depression of the United States. Furthermore, the nation of 2010 is well on its way to repeating history. There are frightening similarities between that dreadful time of the 1930’s and the present that should not be overlooked, or the United States might condemn itself back into that horrific state it has so long tried to avoid.
This movie is a wonderful production starting from 1960 and ending in 1969 covering all the different things that occurred during this unbelievable decade. The movie takes place in many different areas starring two main families; a very suburban, white family who were excepting of blacks, and a very positive black family trying to push black rights in Mississippi. The movie portrayed many historical events while also including the families and how the two were intertwined. These families were very different, yet so much alike, they both portrayed what to me the whole ‘message’ of the movie was. Although everyone was so different they all faced such drastic decisions and issues that affected everyone in so many different ways. It wasn’t like one person’s pain was easier to handle than another is that’s like saying Vietnam was harder on those men than on the men that stood for black rights or vice versa, everyone faced these equally hard issues. So it seemed everyone was very emotionally involved. In fact our whole country was very involved in president elections and campaigns against the war, it seemed everyone really cared.
The movie opens up with rural images of thousands of migrant workers being transported in trucks with a short introduction by Edward Murrow and some occasional interventions of parts of an interview made to the secretary of labor after he saw the impacting images, and to the different people who have seen the lives the workers lead. Most of the secretary’s commentaries depict the exclusion that these people have since they are basically people who are silently crying out for assistance to stop harvesting the fields of their shame, or at least to hope for potential raises and better work conditions. From Florida to New Jersey, and from Mexico to Oregon, these people including women and children travel around the states following the sun and the demand from the seasonal goods while working around a hundred and thirty-six days earning and average of nine hundred dollars a year.
The film O brother, where art thou? is set in the Great Depression of the 1930’s and emphasizes the struggle between the upper and lower classes by using a variety of cinematic devices. Through the use of these cinematic devices and comedic relief the realities of the Depression are viewed without creating a stark, melancholy, documentary-styled film. Examples in this film of these cinematic devices used to show these realities include:
The capitalist ideas so prominent in the Reagan / Thatcher era are as clearly instilled in the youth of the 1980s films as their, usually middle class, screen parents. Only “Pretty In Pink” (and indirectly, “The Breakfast Club”) actually confronts class differences; in the other films, the middle class way of life is accepted as default. Almost every John Hughes film is set in affluent suburbia with the repetition of certain imagery (the big house, gardens and tree-lined quiet streets, and often a wood-paneled station wagon) with a certain population (rich, white families), which is reflected in the body of the attended, well-equipped schools.
Charlie Chaplin is an American modern and contemporary history’s symbolic person. He is an actor and a director who was severely criticized about the society in those days through his films. One of his most famous works is the Modern Times. Modern Times is an immortal work, because many people still love the film. There is a person who says, “History is repeating, so we should learn from it.”
The novel focuses on the negative aspects of capitalism and sheds a positive light on communism. Steinbeck proves that there are many problems in capitalism with the way the migrants suffered during the era of the Great Depression. The economic slump, which many people assume affected the urban populations, was even harsher on the migrants. Steinbeck, throughout his novel, reveals the plight of the migrant workers during the Depression and how capitalism has crushed them. He reaches out to his readers and plants the idea that the glorified capitalism in America is not what it seems, and that any path, even communism, is preferable.
Throughout Society, many families have seen struggle and lived through poverty. The economy is not always thriving which takes a toll on people who suffer through unemployment or low wage jobs. The Frontline documentary, “Two American Families”, is the perfect example of struggle in the United States. It shows the lives of two struggling families and their efforts to survive. Two essays, “The Sociological Imagination” by C. Wright Mills, and “The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All” by Herbert J. Hans, support the analysis of the video strongly. They express many ideas that relate to the world and struggle throughout society. Also, there are many sociological terms that depict the events that occurred in the documentary.
“The Great Dictator”, an elegant speech composed by the magnificent Charlie Chaplin, was a particularly moving one that has gained widespread recognition and praise since it was given back in the 1940s. On the surface, it appears as if Chaplin is directing soldiers to think for themselves and to break away from dictators’ indoctrination, as “dictators free themselves but they enslave the people!” is a line that is reprehended throughout the speech. Further analysis of Chaplin’s speech seems to reveal, however, that he rather wants the soldiers to break away from the deeper aspect of tyranny that has been embedded within them, essentially controlling them. Chaplin wants the audience to take action and think for themselves; to help one another and to save humanity from war using three key rhetorical tools: ethos, organization and pathos.