The Chaplin Machine

Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde

By: Owen Hatherley

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Hardcover | 20 May 2016

At a Glance

Hardcover
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
20.7 x 13.6 x 2.3

Hardcover

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There was something uncanny about Charlie Chaplin. His fellow actors spoke of him as inhuman-automaton-like. His stiff, comic movements could be viewed as an attempt to parody the newly developed production lines of Henry Ford's revolutionary factories. As wide-scale application of this technology spread to Soviet Russia, Chaplin's slapstick comedic style also found a following among the artists carving out a new society under communism.

In The Chaplin Machine, Owen Hatherley unearths the hidden history of Soviet film, art, and architecture. Turning upside down the common view that the communist avant-garde was austere and humorless, he reveals an unexpected comedic streak that found its inspiration in the slapstick of the American performers Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

What did it mean for socialists to combine the ideas of Chaplin and Ford? Were their experiments indicative of a new future conception of work and leisure? And to what degree was this emphasis on comedy a precursor to the strangely festive despotism of Stalin? By asking these questions, The Chaplin Machine challenges our understanding of twentieth-century art in America and abroad.

Industry Reviews

'Traces an enjoyably idiosyncratic path back and forth between film studios and factories on opposing continents ... offers intellectual excitement as well as rigour'

-- Pamela Hutchinson, Guardian

'Teems with exciting histories, possibilities, outrages and revelations. This brilliantly researched and beautifully written lightning bolt of a book approaches art and its history from a completely new point of the compass, and its readers will never again see the last century as they once did! An eye-bulging astonishment!'

-- Guy Maddin, director of films including The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg.

'Puts the Lenin back in Chaplin and the Chaplin back in the pre-Stalinist USSR. Brilliantly conceived, impeccably researched and concisely written. A definitive work'

-- Jon Beller, author of The Cinematic Mode of Production (Dartmouth College Press, 2006)

'A dark comedy'

-- Benjamin Noys, Review 31

'Captivating reading; lively, informative and entertaining'

-- Times Literary Supplement

'A precious and thoroughly researched book, shedding light on a very stimulating chapter of (film) history'

-- Brooklyn Rail

'A masterly presentation depicting the parody which existed under a communist regime; and showed how Soviet film, art and arhitecture could not avoid the influence of capitalist Americanism ... It is a pioneering work in the field of early film studies and politics'

-- International Journal of Russian Studies

'Engaging and provocative'

-- Open Democracy

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