Charles Chaplin’s ethnographic gaze:

critique of capitalism in Modern Times

Abstract

Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times is one of the most revealing cultural documents about the deep sense of capitalist organization of work. How does that old-time film interpellates our contemporaneity? Could something be extracted about that old fictional document for an anthropology of capitalism? Through an analysis of Chaplin’s cinematography, and especially of Modern Times first scenes, this article sets that chaplinian fiction allows critical questioning about some essential characteristics of capitalist rationality and its intrinsecal violence. Thinking Chaplin as a sort of ethnographer of capitalism, we examine his critique of the relationship between capitalism and marginality, of the modern experience of time, and of the meaning of technology of capital. Stopping at these medullar points of problematization, we analize the chaplinian critic of the mode of production that, centered on private accumulation, produces a collective discomfort of multiple dimensions.