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

Owen Hatherley's The Chaplin Machine sets out to chart the surprising convergence of Hollywood slapstick, the "scientific management" of Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, and the Soviet avant-garde. For instance, the inspiration for the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold's discipline of biomechanics, a system for training actors that privileged physical reflex over character psychology, was American slapstick, which he then tried to put to distinctly Soviet ends. Hatherley points out that the film director Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas (1931) utilizes the antinaturalism of Hollywood slapstick in order to celebrate the grim work of the communist steelyards. If Americanism was everywhere in the twenties and thirties, many in the Soviet avant-garde had, as Hatherley puts it, a more specific formula: "Ford plus Chaplin plus Lenin."

The Chaplin Machine contains material that pops up in the margins of scholarship on slapstick film, but to my knowledge its subject has never received book-length treatment. Hatherley is not the first to call attention to the connection between slapstick and the automation of labor. That connection is the explicit conceit of Chaplin's Modern Times (1934), as its original audiences understood, but it surfaces repeatedly in many of Mack Sennett's comic films of the teens and of course in the work of Buster Keaton. In the case of Keaton, especially, the relation is ambivalent. At the end of The General (1926), for instance, Buster may succeed at returning his train and getting his girl, but he's been turned into an unthinking machine in the process. What is distinct in the Soviet case, and what interests Hatherley, is that so many artists and intellectuals of the avant-garde understood such comic films in a utopian sense. They thought of the work of Chaplin and Keaton—even that of Harold Lloyd—as pointing toward a future in which a comic or eccentric approach to everyday life might be successfully and happily combined with the standardization of work and thus the realization of a genuinely communist society.

The introduction and first chapter of The Chaplin Machine are heavy on the reception of slapstick in Europe and in the early Soviet Union, which will be of value to scholars who are interested in the international life of Hollywood slapstick, especially those who are interested in the reception of Chaplin. The Chaplin Machine has some worthwhile discussions of Walter Benjamin and Sigfried Kracauer, and readers who pursue the history of critical theory will be surprised to learn about its connections to slapstick. While much of the book assumes knowledge of twentieth-century Russian history and of the avant-garde, there are several fascinating readings of individual films (both American and Soviet) as well as nice digests of European and Russian writers coming to terms with the surprising profundity of Chaplin's and Keaton's films. Moreover, Hatherley begins with a clear argument for the relation between slapstick and Taylor's scientific management. Well excerpted, this material will be useful for teaching students to place early comic films in historical and ideological context.

The Chaplin Machine did begin life as a dissertation with a wider subject (it was titled "The Political Aesthetics of Americanism"), and Hatherley has since developed a reputation as a critic of modernist architecture. Unsurprisingly, these parts of its history are sometimes visible. The book veers toward long citations and, in later chapters especially, frequently leaves behind its stated theme to pursue descriptions of Soviet architecture. For scholars of humor, it will seem more like the work of a Russophile than that of someone dedicated to the study of comedy. That said, it's difficult to fault the book's ambition. To its credit, The Chaplin Machine risks connections across big leaps of time and space. Hatherley's book is patient with the paradox that members of the avant-garde might not simply have been interested in but also borrowed from the formal strategies of...