 |
 |
|
|
| Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times | | (And The Speed Of Life) | | 01 July 2005 | | The speed of light is denoted by "c", and is approximately 186,282.4 miles per second. We know this because we looked it up in Wikipedia.
The speed of life, on the other hand, is nowhere so straightforwardly defined, but it is getting faster. We know this partly because our grandmother keeps telling us; but also because we've recently re-watched a couple of old Charlie Chaplin movies, and they provide a strange, but irrefutable, proof.
We started with The Great Dictator, Chaplin's satire on Hitler and Nazi Germany.
This movie was a beginning and an end for Chaplin - his first real "talkie", but also the last movie in which he visited his classic character of The Tramp, portrayed here as a Jewish barber struggling against the forces of the fascist state.
It's a classic, we are told - full of wit and comedy. But to be honest, we just found it very, very... long! The seminal ballet of the globe seemed to go on for ever without really going anywhere or having any particular beauty that we could see; and the final speech at nearly 700 words, is about 500 words too many, and decidedly lacking in poetry.
Some weeks later, we picked up Modern Times and within 10 minutes we were thinking the very same thing. The conveyor belt skit was mildly amusing, but only for about the first minute or so... and it was at that moment that we understood - our grandmother was right! Life was slower in the 1930s, so all we needed to do was to hit the "Fast Forward" button to speed things up to something approaching what we'd call normal.
With a little trial and error, we found x2 to be optimal - double the original speed. Being (to all intents and purposes) a silent movie, narrated with dialog cards, we could follow with perfect clarity. We laughed at the jail "break" and we swooned at Paulette Goddard. You might almost say... we enjoyed it. |
|
|
The point is we are all connected... through love... through loneliness... through one lamentable lapse in judgment!
|
|
FairgroundTown.co.uk /
Reflectable Ltd
2010