Commenting on the appearance in 1936 of what was essentially a silent picture, film critic Otis Ferguson snipped, “Modern Times is about the last thing United Artists should have called this film.”

Chaplin was the only figure in Hollywood who could have successfully made a silent film almost eight years after the U.S. film industry converted to synchronized sound film making. While the talkies had become the standard of the day, Chaplin’s popular screen identity — the little tramp figure that we all know and that was known and beloved around the world — had been fully formed in the silent cinema of the teens and early twenties. The silence of the tramp was an issue that Chaplin had fretted over when producing his previous film, City Lights, in 1931. And while that film was a huge success four more years had gone by and the silent era was already being represented as ancient history. Continue reading →

Between 1930 and 1939 in Britain some sixty filmmakers working together in collaborative film units produced over 300 documentaries, a body of work central to the historic development of the documentary and documentary film practice. Several of the films made by the filmmakers associated with the Empire Marketing Board (the EMB), from 1930 to 1933, and with the Government Post Office film unit (the GPO), from 1933 to 1939, became crucial references for almost every subsequent documentary movement. Continue reading →