This is work in progress. It was originally intended as a very much smaller part of a 6000 word chapter, in which the opening sequence of Modern Times would have been used with the work of Benjamin to point to set up what I wanted to call convulsive form. The discussion of Benjamin expanded, however, and also comprised his own affirmative account of Chaplin (not this film) and Mickey Mouse. Then the synopsis of the film became a bit unwieldy, as you'll see here. So it got pushed out of the chapter, which also went on through a detour on Deleuze to come back to Bataille. I think what will happen now is that I will extend the commentary at the end through a discussion of Malabou, as the title suggests.
The opening
section of Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936)
is roughly twenty minutes long and runs from the title sequence to the first
major change of setting. It consists of roughly 30 sequences.The
titles run over the image of a clock face. Light orchestral music accompanies
throughout. This fades to back and is followed by an overhead shot of a flock
of sheep, which cross-fades into the image of a crowd of workers. We follow the
crowd across a number of shots as it approaches and then enters a factory.
Shots of the interior of the factory, the Control Room, the President’s office.
The President at his desk idly toying with a jigsaw, reading the newspapers,
taking the pills brought by his secretary. He switches on a video screen which
shows different parts of the factory, contacts the Control Room and demands
that the man there ‘speed up’ Section 5 to level 4.1. We return to the shop
floor and the camera pans left to frame the assembly line (henceforward ‘the strip’).
Chaplin is the third of three workers on the strip, tightening bolts with a
spanner in each hand, as the line moves to the right and descends into a kind
of chute.
We hear
a voiceover saying that there is Trouble on Bench 5, the nuts are coming
through loose. We see Chaplin tightening the nuts as the strip moves to the
right. He has to scratch under his left arm, and has to rush to the left to
catch up with the nuts he has missed while doing this. The foreman passes and
speaks to him. He pauses the nut-turning to speak to the foreman but then has
to rush to the right again to catch up with what he has missed. Cut.
Close up
of Chaplin as a bee buzzes around his face. Cuts to a wider shot as a passing
man tries to swat the bee. Chaplin has to rush to the right to catch up with
the strip again.
Back to
wide shot of strip. Chaplin’s spanner gets stuck and he is dragged to the right
by the strip. The second bench worker, who is hammering the nuts, hits
Chaplin’s hand. This second worker puts his hands in the air to stop the
machine.
The
foreman threatens the second worker with the sack. Chaplin mimics him. The
second worker, a well-built man, kicks Chaplin’s arse. Chaplin kicks him back.
The strip starts up again. Chaplin points to the line. They set back to work on
the strip.
Cut to
Control Room. The President orders more speed. Cut back to the strip, which
speeds up. A passing man is trying to take over Chaplin’s place, but he is too
involved. Eventually he gives the spanners to the man and moves off to the
left, his body convulsing with the same rhythm and movement as the nut-turning,
but now uselessly, in the air. Cut to shot of Chaplin walking towards the
camera, his arms and legs jerking, until he ‘shakes it off’ and clocks out.
In the
bathroom, Chaplin is smoking a cigarette. The face of the President appears on
the screen and orders him to get back to work.
Chaplin
gestures at the sink, but does not speak. He goes to clock back in.
Back at the strip Chaplin stands behind the man who took over from him and takes out a file to work on his fingernails. The man notices him and they run around each other a bit, Chaplin mimicking the President and the foreman in ordering the man to concentrate on the turning. Eventually he resumes the nut-turning.
Cut to
the President’s Office. A long sequence in which an automatic feeding machine
is demonstrated by its inventor, and a recorded sales talk is played.
Title_-Lunch Time.
Back at
the Strip, the conveyer belt shows down. Chaplin, however, can’t stop the jerky
movements of his body. A lady (the secretary) passes and bends over in front of
him. She has buttons on the back of her dress which resemble the nuts on the
strip. Chaplin gives them each a turn. He looks dazed. Chaplin moves off left,
and we see the second worker pour soup from a flask into a bowl. Chaplin
re-enters from left and almost sits in the soup. He picks it up to pass it to
his colleague, but the continuing jerks of his body, mimicking the bolt-turning
gesture, make him spill it. He folds his arms in an attempt to control the
convulsions and once more manages to shake it off.
The next sequence is the testing of the feeding machine, for which Chaplin is chosen as guinea pig. Needless to say it goes horribly wrong. Interesting to note that among the mishaps is Chaplin accidentally being fed some metal nuts from the feeding machine similar to the ones he was tightening on the strip.
Back to work. The President orders the Controller to ‘give her the limit’. The strip visibly and audibly speeds up. Chaplin seems to reach a limit; he cannot physically or mentally keep to time with the strip. He has a kind of spasm and has to move right again to catch up with what he has missed. This happens again and he is forced to dive onto the strip where he is dragged along with it and into the chute. Intertitle: ‘He’s Crazy!’.
He is dragged back out of the chute, lying on the strip, but is dragged back in and enters the machinery, still turning nuts where he can. The controller reverses the machinery and we cut back to Chaplin coming back out, still turning.
But his
convulsions transform into fluid ballet movements, as he ‘tightens’ whatever
bodily protuberances, resembling nuts, that come into view: the nipples and
nose of his fellow workers.
He sees
the secretary and puts the spanners against his ears like bull’s horns, chasing
her.
Outside,
he finds a water hydrant and turns the bolts on that. A buxom lady, of a
certain age, is walking down the street towards him. She has buttons like nuts
on the front of her dress. He spies her
and chases after her. She accosts a policeman who then chases him back into the
control room and the strip where he plays subversively with the machinery.
Eventually he is taken off in a police wagon. Fade to black and up again on the title ‘Cured of a Nervous Breakdown but out of a job……’
Much of
the literature about this celebrated opening sequences of Chaplin’s Modern Times focuses quite rightly on
the parodic portrayal of Taylorist
workflow management techniques, and the critical perspective Chaplin develops
here on the effects of prioritizing efficiency on the human element in the process.
It is evidently of primary importance that the whole sequence is introduced by
the visual metaphor of the crowd as a flock of sheep, implicitly pointing to
the denial of the individual by the Taylorist management processes depicted.
And it is also highly pertinent that the whole conveyor belt sequence is
accompanied and interrupted by the sequences involving the factory’s
surveillance mechanism. The production process is monitored and controlled by
the ‘President’ by means of the intercom-screen device, which allows him a
panopticon-like grasp of the space, but also allows him to intrude into the
private spaces normally reserved for bodily functions, here depicted as a
potentially subversive space in which the individual believes he can escape
surveillance and control. The production of the convulsive body, this tells us,
takes place in a context of biopolitical control and regulated surveillance;
the production process relies on the production and maintenance of a certain
kind of body. Following Judith Butler’s proposition
that the this mode of subjection and production always risks producing an
excess which can in turn subvert the norms it is intended to support, the
performance it is supposed to generate; the convulsive body that Chaplin
becomes ends up subverting the production process and the surveillance
technology in an anarchic flight that can only be stopped by the concept of
madness and the related apparatus of its policing.
What I
want to focus on here, however, is the interaction of the conveyor belt, which
I am calling ‘the strip’, in order to make explicit the analogy between the
assembly line and the materiality of film, and Chaplin’s body. The biopolitical
issues are evidently in play here too, particularly in so far as there is a
direct control of the body through the capacity to speed up (or slow down) the
strip. Perhaps more significantly, however, the strip does not stop, except as
scheduled by the management or in emergent situation. One of the ‘propositions’
the strip makes to the body is this continuity, and the demand to maintain a
constant attention. The strip, in order words, is ‘voracious’, in the sense
that Barthes employs when he writes of the ‘incessant voracity’ of film. The
strip demands the body’s attention, and the attention of a specific kind of
body, a body that is adapted to its specific needs. Other bodily needs (to
scratch, to sneeze, to speak) interrupt the strip’s procession, and either
produce gaps in the strip’s production, or the need to ‘catch up’ with each
incidence, with each ‘frame’, as it were.
The
second proposition that the strip makes to the body, and the one that interests
me most here is that of plasticity. I refer here to Catherine Malabou’s account
of plasticity as the donation of form, the reception of form, and the explosive
capacity of form. There are, I think, two instances where the strip imprints
its form and its structure onto Chaplin’s body. The first is gestural and
corporeal. The strip demands a certain gesture or movement of Chaplin’s body
which is as if prosthetically attached to it. This gesture continues as a
convulsion of the body beyond attachment to the strip. In other words the strip
has imprinted a form onto that of the body and this form resembles the strip
insofar as it has a repetitive and regular form. The impression, the imprint,
is short-lived and temporary, however, since Chaplin’s body can ‘shake it off’,
can relax the contraction which has been put into it. The second instance of
the strip’s plastic effect extends beyond the gestural to the perceptual, to
what I would like to call the fundamental mimetism of the body. The gesture –
turning the bolts – is here allied to the perception of similarity; Chaplin
applies the gesture to buttons or body parts that look like nuts. The ‘sense
for sameness’ (W. Benjamin) which is inherent to the strip in its repetitive regularity is
carried over to the body and space beyond the strip, into Chaplin’s perceptual
apparatus. The mimesis on which the production depends – the body’s capacity to
bend to the gestures demanded of it and take on the characteristics of the
machine are internalized or translated onto a mental level in Chaplin; the
mimetism that results – Chaplin’s fixation on things that look like nuts and
his compulsion to tighten them – threatens to subvert the production process as
a whole.
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