Modern Times (1936)

Thursday, April 05, 2018 @ 7:00 PM
Lougheed House - 707 13 Avenue SW, Calgary, AB
$15 General Admission

Join us for a screening of Charlie Chaplin's wondrous 1936 Modern Times comedy in the warmth of our Victorian mansion.

Modern Tmes is not only a fun night out with Charlie Chaplin at the top of his game, but a great way to understand the 1920s & 30s, which our current Art Deco exhibit explores.

In Modern Times Chaplin's brilliant pantomime has fun with our fears of industrialization and job displacement so common in the Art Deco era. It is also the moment and movie of Charlie Chaplin's political awakening and his concerns about fascism, later explored fully in The Great Dictator.

Being impacted - and even replaced - by technology is still such a prominent issue in 2018 that it was the spark for our exhibit The Future Looked Bright: Art Deco in Everyday Life.

Released in 1936, Modern Times was Chaplin's final "silent" film and his first movie after a five-year hiatus during which he considered the viability of his career after "talkies" appeared in 1927. Modern Times is a "silent" film, although it is filled with sound effects as the Little Tramp struggles with modern technology and is helped by a homeless woman (Paulette Goddard).

Roger Ebert: "It's a fable about (among other things) automation, assembly lines and the enslaving of man by machines...he hit upon an effective way to introduce sound without disturbing his comedy of pantomime: The voices in the movie are channeled through other media. The ruthless steel tycoon talks over closed-circuit television, a crackpot inventor brings in a recorded sales pitch, and so on. The only synched sound is Charlie's famous tryout as a singing waiter; perhaps after Garbo spoke, the only thing left was for Charlie to sing."

"I go to a lot of movies, and I can't remember the last time I heard a paying audience actually applaud at the end of a film. But this one did." - Roger Ebert

Come early to the film screening and walk through the 40+ artifacts in our Art Deco exhibit, making the connection between the exhibit and the movie. "The rate of new technologies being developed in the Art Deco era was unprecedented, and an unanticipated side effect was unrest among workers who were being impacted – or displaced – by machines," said Caroline Loewen, Lougheed House Curator. "This parallels what is happening today as automation and artificial intelligence technologies replace jobs that were, historically, done by people."

Doors and cash bar (order a Hanky Panky or Tom Collins, two cocktails invented in the Art Deco era) open at 6:30, and the film runs 7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.

Calgary Showtimes: Modern Times >

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