Benjamin and Charlie Chaplin: Film and Modernity

Vocabulary terms and concepts from the lecture notes on Walter Benjamin's media theory and Charlie Chaplin's filmic critique of industrial modernity.

Taylorism & Fordism

Industrial production and labor relationships characterized by scientific management, technological efficiency, and the application of science to economic constraints.

Efficiency (Engineering)

The ratio of output to input and benefits to cost, representing the application of science to the world of economic constraints.

Montage

According to Benjamin, the specific means by which a work of art in film is produced.

The Apparatus

Benjamin's term for the vast implication of technology in our lives to which humans must model a new relation, particularly as film actors perform in front of it rather than an audience.

Simultaneous Collective Reception

A characteristic of film that allows it to be an object of mass consumption, unlike painting, which Benjamin writes does not lend itself to the masses.

Tactile (Film)

A quality of film based on successive changes of scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator.

Reception in Distraction

A mode of reception and symptom of profound changes in apperception that finds its training ground in film, mimicking the sensory bombardment of modern life.

The Optical Unconscious

A new visual world opened by film technology that captures and reveals minute phenomena through close-ups, slow motion, and fast motion effects.

United Artists

The independent distribution company co-founded by Charlie Chaplin in 1919.

The Little Tramp

Chaplin's character persona that combined Old World, aristocratic Victorian values with New World egalitarianism and defiance of arbitrary authority.

Modern Times (1936)

A film by Charlie Chaplin that uses cinematic techniques and sound technology to negotiate issues of the machine age, Taylorism, and Fordism.