The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde by Owen Hatherley (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 755 significance of colour — one of which comes from a film entitled A Carnival of Colours — fail to support his arguments, simply because they are reproduced in black and white. The high price tag attached to the Companion makes this shortcut all the more disappointing. These comments are not, of course, intended to detract from the considerable achievements of this ambitious volume. The Companion makes a significant contribution to the scholarly field, containing much that will interest, inform and inspire academics working in Russian cinema studies and in cinema studies more broadly. Scholars of the cultural history of Russia and the Soviet Unionwillalsodiscovermuchofvaluehere,aswillthegeneralreader.Likewise, undergraduate, taught postgraduate and postgraduate research students will find the Companion an extremely useful addition to their university library, and many of its chapters — and, indeed, the volume as a whole — are sure to feature on their reading lists. UCL SSEES Rachel Morley Hatherley, Owen. The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde. Pluto Press, London, 2016. vii + 232 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £16.99. Discussing the legacy of Charlie Chaplin — and his comic coevals Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd — in 1958, James Agee remarked that Chaplin’s character of the Tramp ‘is as centrally representative of humanity, as manysided and as mysterious, as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion’. It is Chaplin’s far-reaching humanistic appeal to early Soviet artists and his poignant motion, along with other less jubilant facets of 1920s Americanism, that constitutes the focus of Owen Hatherley’s The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, FordismandtheCommunistAvant-Garde.AsHatherleycontends,thesynthesis of Chaplinism, Taylorism and Fordism that took shape in Soviet avant-garde art of the 1920s reflected a pressing desire to supersede the attractive, yet ideologically insufficient American model. Soviet left artists ‘knew full well that they could better it’ (p. 33), and thus they aggressively adapted facets of America to their vision for Soviet society. While many have explored ‘Americanism’ in early Soviet culture, Hatherley aims to counterbalance what he perceives as excessive scholarly emphasis on aesthetics over politics. Discussing America’s unique blend of comedy and industry, Hatherley highlights ways the slapstick antics of silent comedy, along with skyscrapers and the industrial efficiency championed by F. W. Taylor and Henry Ford, emerged as an enticing paradigm for early Soviet culture SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 756 and Communist ideology. To bolster his perspective on Soviet Americanism, Hatherley draws on evocative accounts of Soviet life by Western visitors, from Harpo Marx to René Fülöp-Miller. Delving into early Soviet cinema, architecture and a widespread embrace of the circus, Hatherley produces a vivid portrait of the era’s Americanism. As Hatherley himself admits, the focus of The Chaplin Machine may be ‘disjointed’ (p. 34), but like any film by Chaplin or Keaton, its intellectual play dazzles and rarely disappoints. Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd all feature in Hatherley’s study, which first probes the impact of the silent greats on post-1917 constructivism. Hatherley focuses not on the Chaplin of Modern Times fame who satirized Fordism in the 1930s, but rather on the Chaplin of early silent shorts who captivated audiences worldwide with his comic ability to humanize mechanized movement. Chaplin ‘is the machine that cries’ (p. 42), serving as a prototype for the ‘new [Soviet] man’. In the constructivist film journal, Kino-Fot, the author encounters a celebration of the silent film star as ‘a fellow traveler with the leftist avantgarde ’ (p. 49). Also explored are Meierkhol´dian biomechanics on the Soviet stage and the circus-inspired ‘eccentrism’ of FEKS films that defamiliarized the everyday while promoting Bolshevism. In subsequent chapters, Hatherley turns his attention to the built, urban environment. Keaton’s One Week, a 1920 short showcasing the potential pitfalls of prefabricated housing in the US, provides a comic backdrop — and basis — for the utopianism of early Soviet architecture, be it buildings featured in film posters, the sets of innovative films by Eizenshtein and others, or the creative advertising designs displayed on modern structures in Moscow. The transformation of America’s alleged dystopia into the Soviet state’s utopian ‘new everyday life...