Pivot is published through Open Journal Systems (OJS) at York University

Abstract: This article considers Charlie Chaplins 1936 feature Modern

Times as highly influenced by the sound transition. Even though the
film appeared when film sound had undergone narrative integration
and synchronized sound had ceased to attract the spectators
attention in its own right, Modern Times frames cinematic sound as
unnatural. Thereby it employs techniques and experiences from the
sound transition and uses them for comic purposes. At the same time,
the relations between the films depiction of machines, its use of
sound and music, and the flow of time is constantly under nego-
tiation. What results is a pre-digital hum that is constituted by an
impossibility of silence in film after the sound transition, an overall
mechanical hiss
of the cinematic
apparatus that
inscribes itself
The Impossibility of
into the film, and
the aesthetic-
Silence in Chaplins
ization of rhythm
and noise in the Modern Times
modern era. Ilka Brasch

Film criticism has read Chaplins 1936 comedy Modern Times either as
an articulation of Chaplins left-wing idealism in a time of crises, or as
his last effort to produce a silent film in which the Tramp as silent
films most prominent character found his last appearance on screen
(Maland 127-139; 157n). Chaplin as both actor and filmmaker has
been characterized as a stoic whose financial independence enabled
him to cling to the bygone relic of the silent feature (Sklar 120). The
two features he made in the 1930s, City Lights (1931) and Modern
Times (1936), met with reasonable success despite their status as
silent films at a time when sound film already prevailed because of
The Impossibility of Silence Pivot 3.1

Chaplins status as one of Americas most highly valued filmmakers.

Chaplins refusal to make a dialogue film, Charles Maland writes,
nearly a decade after sound films were introduced, made Modern
Times a stylistic anachronism (157-58). From this, Maland concludes
that some movie viewers probably passed up Modern Times because
it was a silent film. By maintaining what seemed to be an old-
fashioned style and simultaneously venturing into previously
unfamiliar areas of social significance, Chaplin was risking his
preeminence as a star in Hollywood and America (157-58). Similarly,
George Potter cites a London review that described the film as ten
years behind the time, and he claimed that the action proceeded
slowly due to the use of silent film titles (78).

While I would agree with the possibility that Modern Times attracted a
smaller audience than Chaplins films usually did because it lacked a
substantial amount of dialogue, I suggest that rather than reading the
film as a late occurrence of silent era art, Modern Times should be
considered as informed by the sound transition. The film critically
reflects the technological obstacles of early sound technology and
addresses them to both critical and comic ends. After all, Modern
Times is essentially a sound film: not a film including dialogue, but a
film with and about sound. In a recent publication, Lawrence Howe
admitted that Modern Times is a silent film only in the strictest
sense; Chaplin adopted sound technology in a number of inventive
ways (50). These ways, according to Howe, offset the capital class
that controls the technology through which it articulates its demands,

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The Impossibility of Silence Pivot 3.1

and a laboring class silently subjected to capital (50). Howe thus

attributes the use of sound in Modern Times a political function. More
subtly, Garrett Stewart referred to the film as a self-conscious
anachronism, in which silences poetic license was being revoked by
the spoken epochs dubious new hegemony. Chaplins Modern Times
is in part, brilliantly, about just this (303). In the following I will take
a closer look at the nature of these self-conscious, inventive ways
(Stewart 303; Howe 50), which result from the transitional
experiences in the evolution of film sound technology and are thus
intricately attached to the historical moment in which they appear.

In what follows, I propose a juxtaposition of Modern Timess

engagement with the mechanics of sound as it was used during
Hollywoods transition from silent to sound film, and its treatment and
criticism of assembly-line labour. In foregrounding both sound as
mechanism and the mechanization of manual labour, the film employs
sound to ridicule the assembly line while simultaneously using a
depiction of the modernized work environment as a metaphor to
frame synchronized sound as specifically unnatural, that is, mechanic.
Before the intervention of human agents such as mechanics or
speaking film actors, both the assembly line and sound film merely
provide a pre-digital hum, which is constituted by the rattling
machines in the factory and the hissing of microphones and recording
machinery. In conclusion, that pre-digital hum will be read as the
sound of modernity, and as the sound of Modern Times.

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The Impossibility of Silence Pivot 3.1

The Sound of Mechanisms / the Mechanics of Sound

Modern Times begins with the famous factory scene, in which the
Tramp performs the repetitive task of tightening two bolts on an
endless amount of small boards running by on an assembly line at
increasing speed. Chaplins Tramp proves unable to adapt to the
structure of assembly-line labour and fails to maintain a steady speed
in his work. He constantly falls behind or gets distracted, until he is
eventually swallowed by the machine. Consequently, the assembly
line first stops and then moves backwards in order to set the Tramp
free. In an interesting analysis, Howe takes this cross-section view of
the Tramp being drawn through the gears and sprockets as a visual
allegory for film stock being drawn through the mechanisms of the
camera and the projector (53). Having been released from the clutch
of the machine, the Tramp dances through the factory and with
gestures of insanity continues the repetitive tightening of bolts on his
co-workers noses, buttons and similar objects.

The sound score in these instances is composed of classical silent-film

music and sections of synchronized sound that accompany the start
and stop of the machine. The scene also provides intermissions of
recorded voice, which are framed as mechanically produced within the
diegesis of the scene. Instead of entering the production hall, the
president of the Electro Steel Corporation addresses his employees in
the plant via a screen image. Thus the mechanical quality of the
presidents voice, which is an unavoidable side-effect of 1930s sound
technology, is legitimized within the diegesis of the scene. The screen

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machine1 produces a short sound before the president can speak,

and, after his command to speed up the work process, a mechanics
switching of gears causes the machine to produce another mechanical
sound. The music then starts simultaneously with the cranking up of
assembly line five (Modern Times). Although the classical sound of the
extra-diegetic soundtrack seems to refer to the bygone tradition of
silent film, the fact that the music follows the mechanical steering of
the machine makes it appear exceptionally framed. Instead of
accompanying the film in a traditional sense, the music refers to the
nature of its own mechanical recording by responding to the machine.
The sound suggestively produced by the assembly lines increase in
speed at the same time functions as a sound that might appear if one
rewound and started a recorded concert. This diegetic incorporation of
non-diegetic music into the film blurs the lines between the inside and
the outside of the cinematic narrative.

Moreover, the rhythm of the music matches the mechanical

movements of the Tramp as he works on the assembly line. When the
Tramp finally loses his mind over his repetitive task, the music
becomes slow as he slows down and rewinds as the machine rewinds.
Afterwards, it accompanies the Tramps frenetic dance through the
factory with single notes that highlight his search for objects that are

1
Garrett Stewart has read the presence of this screen machine as a forbearer and
criticism of the introduction of television to American homes: in the scenes
miniature documentary on the presidents dictatorial voyeurism, his (Chaplins)
satiric genius has jumped forward to a glimpse of film (or TV) as an intrusive,
bullying manipulation of the viewerpropaganda quite literally stripped of its
aesthetic distanceforward even to Orwells vision of film personified as an
obscene presence that can actually see and hear us (Stewart 309).

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similar to the bolts he was meant to tighten. It remains inconclusive

in this instance whether the Tramps actions are accompanied by the
music, or whether the Tramp performs a dance to prerecorded sound,
anticipating single notes and planning his movements accordingly.
The film thus leaves us undecided about whether the music serves to
synchronize the picture, or whether the action on screen at certain
instances follows the dictate of the sound.

In either case, the musics close relation to the functioning of the

machines lets the sound of Modern Times appear particularly
unnatural. In fact, the Tramps famous tap dance scene can also be
read as an indicator of the Tramps inability to become accustomed to
synchronized sound film. First, he is urged to sing but cannot
memorize his words, and then his public performance immediately
results in his companions arrest. In a self-reflexive reading of the
scene, the arrest would symbolize a direct punishment for the
Tramps attempt at sound film. The films ending then shows the
Tramp and his companion, the Gamin, walking away from the camera,
towards the horizon, in silence, as a gesture towards the Tramps
retirement from cinema. In connection to the character of the Tramp,
silence is thus framed as a natural environment, because the ending
is set in the countryside, with the Tramp metaphorically escaping
from sound. Sound, by contrast, is inherently connected to the
mechanicthat is, to the unnatural2. This classification of sound
proposes an inversion of a similar dichotomy, which was present

2
Thus relating to and reversing the dichotomy as addressed by Shane Denson in
the context of Frankenstein (Incorporations 212).

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during the sound transition, when sound was deemed the naturalizing
alternative to silent pictures.

Analyzing the influence of the sound transition as apparent in the

Tarzan films of the 1930s, Shane Denson describes how synchronized
sound was envisioned to be a naturalizing element in film that would
contribute to cinemas realism and eventually disappear behind the
story. But during the sound transition, roughly between 1927-1932,
when sound had not yet undergone a full narrative integration,
synchronized sound repeatedly drew attention to itself as a technical
artifact. Whereas audiences understood sounds potential to enhance
realism, during the first years, sound often distracted the audiences
because they appreciated its novelty and marveled at the cinematic
sound apparatus (Tarzan 114-115). Film experience during the
sound transition was thus constituted by a constant back and forth
between an immersion in the films story and an awareness of the
sound mechanisma tension that Denson fittingly terms a dichotomy
of science and fiction (Tarzan 118). This back-and-forth,
however, was something a filmmaker sought to avoid in favor of a
spectators immersion in the fiction. Already by 1934, the second
Tarzan feature includes instances that frame the transitional-era
foregrounding of sound as primitive. While saving Jane from a
civilized suitor, the ape-man is distracted as a nearby gramophone
attracts his attention. According to Denson, in this instance the film
draws an analogy between Tarzans fascination with the gramophone

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and the appreciation of sound technology expressed by film audiences

a few years earlier (Tarzan 119).

While Hollywood employed synchronized sound to naturalize the film

experience, Chaplin saw potential in the transitional-era experience of
sound. Modern times fosters a controlled medium awareness by off-
setting the sound sequences from silent ones, and it then uses the
spectators awareness of sound for comic ends. What had been an
unwelcome by-product a few years earlier became a modus of
comedy. This becomes possible because Modern Times frames sound
as specifically unnatural and thus prevents it from disappearing
behind the diegesis. This unnatural nature of sound, in turn, comes
into being as the film refuses to grant the ability of speech to diegetic
characters. All we hear is the sound of mechanisms: from the
assembly-line machines, to the technical workings in the ministers
wifes digestive tract. Because it marks sound as unnatural, Modern
Times is specifically not a relic of bygone styles, but an informed
comment on the transitional-era film experience.

When Modern Times appeared in cinemas in 1936, the sound

transition had taken place and silent film was a thing of the past. The
obstacles of early sound production had been overcome and self-
reflexive highlighting of sound was now rare (Tarzan 119).
Nevertheless, producers and audiences in 1936 may very well have
been aware of the transitional eras complications. Early sound film
technology consisted of heavy machines, whose operation produced
hissing noises that threatened to manifest themselves on the films

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sound score. In other words, early microphones recorded not only a

speakers voice, but their own sound. As a consequence, Robert
Spadoni notes, flowing nondiegetic music became a scratchy quiet
that engulfed the figures and their speech (7). Just like the machines
in the factory provide an ever repeating pattern of noise, a scratchy
hiss of the recording machinery made itself heard throughout film at
the time (Kelleter 116). Actors had to speak louder than their
enabling technology, just like the factory workers have to turn up the
sound in order to hear their supervisor over the rumble of the
machine in Modern Times. Thus in transitional-era film, silence
becomes technologically impossible because the sound mechanism
provides an indeterminable hum.

But that is just one way in which silence becomes impossible in post-
sound-transitional film. Whereas the Tramps relying on his distinct
physical movement was a given in silent film, the possibility of sound
provokes the question of why the Tramp does not speak. Before the
introduction of synchronized sound, silence was unmarked, but by
1936, the firm establishment of sound had marked silence as an
indicator of a missing element. Modern Times employs this notion for
comic ends when the Tramp sits next to the ministers wife in the
police station. The silent pause conveys the awkwardness of the
moment when neither of the characters knows what to say. The
clearly audible movements of both characters digestive tracts break
the awkward silence with an even more awkward sound. Silence
becomes unbearable, and the Tramp tries to find relief by turning on

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the radio, which fails to provide a sound alternative because the radio
plays a commercial for digestive tract problems. Although this scene
primarily serves comic ends, it points to the fact that sound can be
used to drown out all sound that shall remain unheard, because the
Tramps attempted tactic to hide the sound of his bowel movements
corresponds to the use of film music to hide the scratchy byproducts
of early sound production. This practice then results in a mass of
sound that encompasses all screen action and culminates in white
noise.

The Tramps Dying Venture into Sound

Modern Times is most remembered as the occasion for two relevant

events in film history: it was the famous Tramps last film, and it was
the first time the Tramp spoke in synchronized dialogue. But rather
than being a turning point in history, the Tramps venture into sound
is staged in a distinct moment, the tap dance, and afterwards the
little character resumes his former silence. Instead of trying to
implement his character in the world of sound film, Chaplin frames
the Tramps speech as a musical intermissiona format his audience
would have been familiar with since Warner Bros.s famous
introduction of sound in The Jazz Singer (1927). The Jazz Singer was
not a fully synchronized picture, but it featured seven distinct sound
fragments that included a lip-synced song with a few sentences added
before and after the musical performance. Even though Modern Times
featured a continuous sound track, in opposition to the technically
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less advanced forbearer of 1927, Chaplin highlighted the Tramps

song in a similar way. Modern Times thus frames the tap dance scene
as an attraction in its own right, as if to indicate the singularity of this
onetime event. In 1927, synchronized sound, as such, was enough of
a novelty to serve as The Jazz Singers main attraction (Kelleter 116).
Additionally, the films advertisement highlighted the fact that the
films protagonist was played by the famous vaudeville actor Al
Jolson. In Modern Times, sound itself could not serve as an attraction
anymore, but because Chaplin had refused to let the Tramp speak for
almost a decade, the tap dance scene sufficed to provoke an
awareness of sound that was otherwise considered pass (cf. Maland
157-58). This framing of the Tramps speech as a distinct attraction
rather than a break-through with future implications results in a
continued view of the Tramp as a silent character. The fact that he
fails to convey any actual informative content, since he forgets the
lyrics to his song, adds to the idea that even though we heard him
sing, we will not hear him speak. Nevertheless, the Tramp was not
the only mute character to make it into sound film. In fact, by the
time Modern Times appeared, Frankensteins monster had already
assumed the role of the classic non-speaker in sound film.

Shane Denson points to the history of muteness as it has been

addressed in Peter Brookss influential study of melodrama, The
Melodramatic Imagination. Brooks explains that, due to political
repression, the French melodramatic stage tradition was originally a
silent form (45-60). It influenced the American stage tradition, which

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was then taken up again in silent film. Tracing this genealogy to the
advent of classical Hollywood cinema in the late 1910s, Denson
establishes that rather than undergoing radical transformation,
sensational stage melodrama was essentially continued by filmic
melodrama of the early and transitional eras: not only the
narratives, but also the mise-en-scne and theatrical acting style of
these films (not to mention actors, writers, and others involved) were
simply imported from the theater (Tarzan 217-218). The character
of the Tramp strongly relies on melodramatic acting styles and broad
gesture, in part, because Chaplin himself entered the film business
after a theatrical career. Charles Maland traces a similar influence
when he observes that the authorities persistent threat to the
budding relationship between Charlie [the Tramp] and the gamin in
the last phase of the film [Modern Times] provides a melodramatic
situation, rooted in Chaplins apprentice years in the English theater,
similar to the one he had used well for emotional effect in The Kid.
Here Chaplins aesthetic view that the intensification of emotion is
important to art is evident (Maland 152-153). In this sense, Modern
Times is not simply a comedy film, but it is also rooted in a
melodramatic tradition that resulted from times of enforced muteness
on stage. The change towards sound film thus not only challenged the
sophistication of the Tramp as a character, but it impacted the style,
formula, and narrative structure that went with it.

As I mentioned earlier, at the advent of sound, producers and

exhibitors believed in its potential to enhance realism in the moving

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pictures. However, silent pictures had their own myths. As Denson

summarizes, the medium of film itself, due to its non-verbal means,
was figured widely in the transitional period [to Hollywood film, in the
1910s] as a universal language legible to literate and illiterate, rich
and poor, recent immigrant and long-established citizen alike
(Tarzan 218). Silent film was thus considered a natural language
that united its spectators despite linguistic language barriers. That
idea preceded the thought that sound enhanced a films realisma
realism based on a supposed resemblance of the audiences natural,
non-cinematic experiences that include sight and sound.
Consequently, from the 1910s onward, the cinematic medium
referred to some myth of naturalism. A mute character in sound film
therefore refers back to another cinematic era, another style of
acting, and another notion of naturalism.

Frankensteins monster, Densons example for a carry-over from

silent to sound film, cannot speak as a consequence of his dubious
creation by the hands of Dr. Frankenstein. The monster is an
altogether engineered and essentially unnatural character. Therefore
his muteness, which would have matched silent films mute universal
language, is now explained by means of his unnatural birth. As
Denson concludes, whereas mute gesture (and film itself) allegedly
reaches the plane of natural language at its origina universally
legible form of expressionthe muteness/monstrosity of the creature
is a result of unnatural forces that account for his incomprehensibility
(Tarzan 219).

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What we gain from Densons analysis is the insight that James

Whales Frankenstein, which appeared during the sound transition in
1931, already marked muteness as specifically unnatural, although it
referred to the natural universal language of silent cinema. Five years
later, Chaplin reconsiders the universal language myth by juxtaposing
the Tramp as a naturally mute character to an unnatural notion of
sound as a mechanic invention of modernity. The figure of the Tramp
thus carries its own pre-sound-transitional notion of naturalism into
an environment of sound that is in contrast marked as unnatural. The
Tramp romanticizes his own past and engages in self-historicization
before disappearing from screen forever. Thus, whereas Chaplin, as a
director, works with the options enabled by sound film, his character
of the Tramp is severely entrenched in the tradition of silent film.

Whereas Modern Times deliberately marks sound as unnatural, many

films during the transitional period received criticism because the
sound unintentionally appeared unnatural to their audiences. Their
experience that synchronized speech sounded awkward resulted from
the technological infancy of the apparatus, which often provided
human voices with a mechanical twitch. Corinna Mller writes that
silent film characters often appeared to have a godlike aura that lifted
them above profane existence. When Chaplins Tramp finally talked,
Mller resumes, he ceased to be the famous Tramp because he lost
his poetic illusion (285). Robert Spadoni adds to this observation by
asserting that the novelty of synchronized speech had the power to

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make filmic characters appear uncanny in the Freudian sense. He

claims:

sound also brought to the foreground certain uncanny qualities

that had always been present in the cinematic image. It
complicated the general viewing sensation of the presence of the
figures speaking and moving on the screen. Sound changed the
visual appearance of these figures in ways that made them look
to some viewers like ghosts. This widespread, sporadic,
uncontrolled, and temporary film reception phenomenon possibly
influenced Hollywood film production trends in ways that long
outlived the three and a half years of the sound transition period.
(4)

Although Spadoni acknowledges that some viewers found a new

intimacy with their favourite screen characters, the spectators also
felt further removed from the action on screen. They felt a renewed
awareness of the filmic apparatus that was similar to the film
experience of the cinema of attractions (cf. Gunning). This awareness
was partly caused by the sheer novelty of sound film, but the
awareness of the medium as well as the audiences uncanny feeling
also resulted from the sound machinery and microphones that
produced awkward side-effect sounds and thus caused voices to
appear artificial, or unnatural. Additionally, the sound originated from
a single box behind the screen and many viewers would have
attributed the sound to any source but the mouth of the person on
screen (Spadoni 4-7).

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When Modern Times was released, these first technical problems were
sorted out and spectators had become accustomed to sound pictures.
Nevertheless, the Tramps tap dance scene and his inauguration to
synchronized dialogue proved to be an attraction in its own right,
therefore threatening to produce a feeling of the uncanny. The scene
circumvents these issues in three distinct manners. Firstly, the
Tramps French-influenced mock-Italian refuses to produce any
meaningful content and thus enables the audience to focus on the
sound of his voice. Secondly, the strange sound of the made-up
language itself is intended to be awkward, relieving a possible
uncanny in comic intent. Thirdly, the intelligibility again draws
attention to the Tramps physical gestures, which the audience was
accustomed to enjoying. Another factor, however, deserves attention:
the hiss. In early sound film, the hiss and crackle produced by the
machinery always threatened to be heard. The voices thus rang over
a rhythmic background that seemed to originate from nowhere. The
scene re-stages this early form by recording the tapping of the
Tramps feet in the restaurant. The immense impact of tap sounds at
the time will be traced as one crucial aspect of the pre-digital hum in
Modern Times.

Tap and Click and the Pre-Digital Hum

So what is the pre-digital hum? It is a restructuring of time into ever

smaller rhythmic patterns. Modernity restructured time in a number of
ways, cutting human action and human sense perception into ever
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smaller sections. As Jodi Brooks ascertains in a profound article on tap

dance, American film and stage art in the 1920s assumes a Taylorist-
Fordist aesthetic regime that is driven by the clock (357, 360). The
sound of stage art such as tap dance, when produced by large
troupes, highlights rhythmic patterns that are similar to the sounds of
factories or the rhythms of typewriters in office environments. Sound
thus fosters an aestheticization of mechanization and mass
production (156).

Under this aesthetic regime, sound structures time. The relation

between time and sound changed in the middle of the nineteenth
century, when the invention of the telegraph enabled the possibility of
reading and writing in sound (364). Not only typewriters and tap
dance, however, foregrounded the new structuring of time according
to mechanicized beatsit was essentially film itself that foregrounded
the new structures of time. After all, the quick succession of images
was only perceivable by means of the accompanying rattle of the film
projector. In other words, the sound of the filmic apparatus structures
each second in concert with the succession of frames on screen. In
Brookss analysis, that sound signifies the animation of the machine.
As she ascertains, in tap, the click of the taps can appear to animate
the bodys movements, recalling and playing with ideas of the
machinic. This effect can be even more pronounced in screen tap,
where the sounds of the taps can serve to suggest or mimic the
suppressed sounds of the camera-projector apparatus (358). What
needs to be emphasized at this point is that sound is not essentially

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the driving force of dance or screen action; it serves, rather, as a

signifier for all those machines and practices (the film apparatus, the
assembly line, typewriting, tap dance) that changed the structuring of
time. The sounds of tap, of typewriters, of the machine become aural
signifiers of twentieth century modernity (356).

Brooks takes into account cinemas sound transition and explains that
tap dance had a potential to demonstrate the wonders of
synchronized sound (357-358). From the reception perspective of
film audiences, she argues, in tap, and in screen tap in particular,
the clicks of the tapsthose mechanical, typewriter-like soundsdo
not simply punctuate the figure and the image but can appear to
generate its movements (364; original emphasis).

These experiences of sound as generating or governing a films action

can only come into being with synchronized, recorded sound.
Although silent film scores often included sounds suggesting gun-
shots, for instance, sound was always governed by the picture. In
silent film, the live music always literally accompanied the images,
and musicians saw the film while adding their sounds. The picture
existed before the soundin production, and oftentimes literally
during the performance. Synchronized sound, however, even if is only
a recorded musical score, challenges this presumption as audiences
cannot simply detect which came first, sound or picture. Modern
Times in many aspects plays with this indeterminacy.

I am nowhere near suggesting that Modern Times is a tap film. For

some readers, I may have already stretched the argument by reading
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it as a sound film, instead of as a silent film with sound fragments. I

am suggesting, however, that Modern Times is deeply affected by the
restructuring of time and of sound that Brooks describes via the
aesthetics of tap. The very first scenes of the film, taking place at the
infamous factory that produces nothing, negotiate questions of
technological, medial, and diegetic domination. This negotiation takes
place between a number of actors, the most profound among them
being time, click, or the pre-digital hum.

The first potentially governing agency, which Modern Times

introduces, is time. It begins by showing the credits against the close-
up of a clock3, which functions without producing a sound. Although
the inclusion and abolishment of individual sounds in Modern Times
could have arbitrary reasons, the existence of some sounds marks
silence as a lack of sound. This causes the spectatorship to read
meaning into the inclusion and exclusion of individual sounds in the
films score. The inaudibility of the clock could thus suggest that
audiences are about to watch a silent film, and that the clock
structures the day of the crowds; however, it could also suggest that
the clock itself is not the sole animator of sound, and that sound is
structured by apparatuses other than the clock. In fact, the sound of
the clock ceases to suffice to structure a film into at least 16 frames
per second. The clock, as the time-structuring element, is challenged
by other factors. The factory scene, which follows after the image of

3
Stewart, Howe and Potter read this introductory sequence in reference to Langs
Metropolis and Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera. However, I believe there could
also be a strong reference to King Vidors The Crowd, especially since Modern
Times was originally meant to be called The Masses (Howe n3).

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the clock face, can be read as a battle over the domination over the
structuring of time. Thus, let us return to the Electro Steel
Corporation once more.

The Tramps movement of tightening two bolts is first of all dictated

by the flow of the machine. But that flow, in return, is dictated by a
mechanic in charge of setting the speed, who in turn is dictated by
the factory boss, or, as it is, by a screen image of the factory boss.
The corporation presidents communication with his employees via a
visual telephone self-reflexively references the cinematic apparatus
itself. After all, he is subjugated by the filmic apparatus enabling his
existence. The scene thus questions the ruling capitalists power.
However, as predicted, this chain of dictate is challenged by both the
Tramp himself and by the sound accompanying the scene. When the
president requests that the machines run at maximum speed, the
Tramp struggles to keep up and ends up being swallowed by the
assembly line apparatus. Because his mishap causes the machine to
stop, the Tramp momentarily dictates the factorys speed. He breaks
the rule of command. Whereas the machine swallows the Tramp in
this instance, a little later the Tramp is forced, in turn, to swallow the
machinein form of two bolts being repeatedly shoved into his mouth
by a feeding machine. Eventually he swallows the bolts. The Tramps
frantic breakdown, when he cannot stop his trained repetitive
movement of the hand,4 is thus not only a consequence of assembly-
line labour. It is also triggered by the machines literal invasion of the

4
This urge to repeat trained movement could also be called, with reference to
Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove, the alien hand syndrome.

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Tramps body. These instances of swallowing and being swallowed

thus act out a fight between the Tramp and the machine.

Sound is, however, another actor in this network of commands. We

only hear the factory president when he is visible on screen within the
factory, that is, both the audiences and the diegetic factory workers
experience his commands only in form of recorded sound. Sound
therefore governs the speed of the production process rather than the
Electro Steel Corporations president. The impact of sound in terms of
music in this scene is also intriguing. Although it does not feature the
rattling of the machines, the rhythm of the music matches the
movement of the assembly line and the work performed by the
Tramp. When he finally attempts to take a break in the bathroom, the
factory boss appears there on screen as well and orders him back to
work. In the same instance, the supposedly non-diegetic music starts
while the Tramp still is in the bathroom. Is it thus questionable
whether the sound of the factory president or the rhythm of the music
orders the Tramp to workor whether the voice of the president
starts the music. During the Tramps frenetic dance, when he
tightens all objects that resemble two bolts such as the machines
screws, the noses of his co-workers or a pedestrians shirt buttons,
single notes in the films soundtrack match each turn of the screw.
The soundtrack accompanies the Tramps movement with highlighted
notes rather than the sounds of clicking metal. Instead of going
insane, it appears as though the Tramp might just be dancing to the
music. It is in fact indeterminable whether his actions and the

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machine dictate the speed, or whether the pictures and actions on

screen perform a dance that is made to match the recorded sound. It
could, after all, be the films sound that stops the machine and saves
the Tramp after being swallowed, just as the sound called him to work
when he was taking a break.

This close reading is not meant to suggest that Chaplin designed this
scene as moving images that are orchestrated according to the
musiclike in a music video clip. I wish to point out, however, that at
a time when sound, just as in tap dance, highly influenced
conceptions of time and aesthetics, Modern Times acts out a struggle
over the governance of sound, and thus of time, on screen. In this
way, it comments on the relatively recent development of sound film
by producing a scene without synchronized dialogue that could not
have been made without synchronized sound. In showcasing this fight
over command, Modern Times pictures a struggle that is essential to
modern times.

Let us now answer this sections initial question: what is this pre-
digital hum? It is the structuring of time into increasingly smaller
rhythmic patterns. These patterns, as a combination of time and
sound, combine into an all-encompassing hum. Throughout
modernity, this pattern increased its beats per second, just as film
moved from sixteen frames per second to, eventually, twenty-four.
This hum is not the same as postmodernisms white noise, as white
noise is not necessarily rhythmic. And it is pre-digital in the sense
that it is perceivable to human ears. Even though a fast rhythmic

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The Impossibility of Silence Pivot 3.1

pattern may be perceived as one sound, like a drum-roll, there is a

sound to be heard. Just as many frames add up to a moving image, in
which spectators cannot perceive single frames, they still see the
moving image. In the digital era, the fast movement of machines and
images ceases to produce an audible by-product that indicates the
machinic origin of the film.

This pre-digital hum appears when the sounds of Fords factory, of the
film apparatus, and of modernity, combine into a rhythm that drives a
films aesthetics. Modern Times, at times, follows the rhythm of the
machine, but also stops and recollects the rhythms impact by
marking sound, and the pre-digital hum, as inherently unnatural. The
soundtracks of sound film take up the rhythm of the projector and its
aesthetic regime. The Tramp fails to become incorporated into a film
and into a film era that is influenced by this aesthetic regime. Modern
Times thus juxtaposes a romanticized but impossible silence against
the prevalent hum of the pre-digital era. That hum is omnipresent,
not just in film and factory, but in tap dance and typewriter, and it
can be traced back to the invention of the telegraph. The clicks and
taps of modernity in the United States describe a relation of time and
sound that had not been present before. And although it works
without spoken dialogue, Modern Times is deeply informed by the
awareness of the impossibility of silence and the challenges of early
sound technology as well as by the reconfiguration of an aesthetics of
time on the grounds of a changing conception and density of sound.

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Works Cited

Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema: 1907-1915. Berkeley

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Brooks, Jodi. Ghosting the Machine: The Sounds of Tap and the
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Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,

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City Lights. Dir. Charles Chaplin. Perf. Charles Chaplin, Virginia

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Denson, Shane. Incorporations: Melodrama and Monstrosity in

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Gunning, Tom. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator

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Ed. Thomas Elsaesser. London: British Film Institute, 1990. 56-

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Howe, Lawrence. Charles Chaplin in the Age of Mechanical

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Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American

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Author biography (LINK) Return to contents (LINK)

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