Modern Times

I never really got into the silent movie things and I found it rather difficult to sit through this movie. Even though, just when I became disinterested, something funny always managed to pull me back in. A few major things that I noticed in the movie, thematically speaking are the constant paralells of people and machines. The movie is all about work and the transition in American history when life depended on whether or not you could find work as well as maintain the job along with everyone else, to work like a machine. The picture at the beginning of the movie shows the tramp in the gears of a machine, thus hinting further that this transition forces humans to connect with machines. Along with that, in the beginning of the movie, the institution of work proves to be monotonous and as I noted before, instead of working with the machines to accomplish their task they are pushed to become machines themselves. Along these same lines, the feeding machine idea is just rediculous, truly taking the last bit of humanness out of the workers' lives. From the minute they walk into work to the minute they leave they must produce and not once relax, not even for a bite to eat. The tramp's character really proves that human error is inevitable and also that if we rely too much on machinery and it should fail, we will be helpless, there has to be a happy medium there.
Another note I want to make which I found interesting is that the institution of jail and the institution of work are comparable in this movie. Both prisoners and workers were addressed by the superiors as numbers, not names. This furthers the proposition I made earlier that every bit of humanity is taken out of life if the focus is entirely on technology and production without consideration for the people involved.