The film Modern Times is a silence movie, but there are still a few times that language happens. At the beginning of each scene, there’s a sentence as an introduction of this plot. It helps the audience to know the topic of each part and understand what this plot is talking about. The first time we heard the language is the order from the president of the factory. The president gives order to the worker through a screen. He supervise his workers all the time, and in his mind, the productivity is the only thing important. Even in the bathroom, there’s a screen connected to the president. Also, there are still some dialogs during the film. These dialogs explain the details, which is hard to be expressed by behavior and expression. Besides, the language also appears at the end when the male main character sings. It’s said that this part, which has no meaning and logic, consists of different languages. This can remind us of Dadaism.

In additional to the language and dialogs we heard, we also heard other voice during the film, such as the machine noise, the belling for shift, and background music. Generally, the appearance of voice in silence movie is even more important than the voice in talkie. Because the deficiency of dialogs and voiceover, these kinds of voice have function to make the performance to be more vividly, and the voice is regarded as plot device as well. For example, the background music appearing in the factory has the same rhythm as the workers’ behaviors. Also, the machine noise shows how busy the workers are.

This film truly reflects the image of the society at that time. In the factory, workers are like to be stuck on the production line. They can’t leave their position even one second. The male main character is even crazy at the end in the first plot that he would twist any rounded stuff. Additionally, when there’s a new machine invented, the workers are chosen to make an experiment. In this way, machine is even more important than human right. Precisely, because of these conflict between machine and workers, there are many strikes happening during the movie. Another interesting point is that the jail is regarded as “heaven”. In the jail, people don’t have to work but they have a place to sleep and they won’t be hungry. For the people who is struggling in hunger and poverty, so called “freedom” is worthless like garbage, so that after the male main character getting out of jail, he tries to get back to jail.

All in all, even though Modern Times is a silence movie, the exaggerated and funny performances makes this film to be even more interesting than many talkies.