A long time ago, Charlie [Chaplin] achieved a perspicuity of style, or a readiness for being imparted…. Charlie had let go in a make-up and dance raising American acting to a world position, soon to offer comparisons with the histrionic poetry of the Japanese Noh.

There were differences. Instead of allowing him to say in concise Japanese verse, 'I am going on a journey down the road, it will lead me past' etc., and poising him graciously on the property, celluloid permitted him only movement and silence. The result was the composition of action on the screen: his back ambled off into the open. Drama was brought into the actual air. (p. 51)

Charlie's devices and "types" live with material thoughtfulness and thus historical meaning. It was some years ago that people began to see satire in Charlie, as distinguished from comedy to which rhetorics have tagged one definition or another and decided it ends well…. Charlie the actor never revealing his natural self is also Charlie in the set, an intelligence working itself out in the concrete. So that a new idea in a new Chaplin film is not merely a notion, a general sense of today, or an understanding of politics, art, life or whatever, but inventive existence interacting with other existence in all its ramifications: sight, hearing, muscular movement, coordination of all the senses acting on the surrounding world and rendering it laughably intelligent. (pp. 53-4)

A herd of sheep, driven, and their appointment is the pen or the slaughterhouse. Evaluated in this opening shot of Modern Times, taken from above, in the sportsmanship of the montage—the cinematic equivalent of material thoughtfulness—, are the backs of sheep bulging. They urge each other out of the picture. The satire of nerves and their obverse—events—follow. People fill a subway entrance and crowd the screen; then, a street; and the inside of the factory in which they work at the conveyor belt appears. The rest is the active sentience of continuity which includes a simple but strong plot, so effective it can be seen again and need not be told since as story it is like everyday's newspaper. Useful as a frame of reference it includes a multitude of things, material as well as fantastic things made possible: the screen action holding together in the timing, the sound devices, and the light. The elements of opposition in these cinematic effects and their emotional absorption into relations of the story further the historical validity of the screen by inventing out of the actual world of the spectator. (pp. 54-5)

Tears, said a master of the Noh, are justly not wrung out of one. In Chaplin, they remain finally in the satire and the movement. His direction, encompassing his acting, sees all around as well as arouses. The sportsmanship of the montage has been referred to in passing. The phrase reduces itself to the fact that nothing is fair on the screen unless shown in a relation (or a strained relation) that has the amplitude of insight impelled by the physical, to be found in actual events themselves. (p. 55)

Perhaps the one scene in Modern Times that will not bear seeing again is Charlie skating alone, blindfolded, over the unfenced mezzanine, while the girl looks on in terror. The feeling is that Charlie is not doing so well here as he did in The Rink. And it is significant in that the cinema is not a one-man show, or the tired symbolism (if that was intended?) of man always skating over the edge. Charlie cannot, in 1936, go back to a dance that he did, or to a sentimental spectator's idea of what his dancing might be, but must continue to develop the cinema. (pp. 56-7)

What distinguishes Charlie from film technicians of lesser calibre is that he is usually not taking his career as a standstill for a display of personal sensitivity, charm, or whatever. (p. 57)

In a shot in Modern Times, placing the romanticism of going out to find work against the rest of today's situation, Charlie is extravagantly and pathetically heroic when the beam of a crumbling shack falls on his head. To yoke oneself to the world of the facts and to keep a pace is of an altogether different order of decision than trying to swim in one's poverty. Finally and despite odds, Charlie and the girl decide to go off together in the film, and their arms bend up at the elbows, their fists are clenched, too powerfully fast for the spectator to speculate what Mr. Chaplin means. If the spectator is intent on the film and not on his own thought, what can the action of the shot mean but what it does—i.e. performs. (p. 58)