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Lesson 2: The Development of Cinematic Language
Other Voices - Machine Sales
Other voices in Modern Times are important as well. For instance, we hear the voice in the machine sales sequence.
Video 2.18: Mechanical salesman from Modern Times.
Mechanical salesman from Modern Times Video Transcript
- Good morning, my friends. This record comes to you through the Sales Talk Transcription Company Incorporated. Your speaker, the Mechanical Salesman. May I take the pleasure of introducing Mr. J. Widdecombe Billows, the inventor of the Billows Feeding Machine, a practical device which automatically feeds your men while at work.
Don't stop for lunch. Be ahead of your competitor. The Billows Feeding Machine will eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production, and decrease your overhead. Allow us to point out some of the features of this wonderful machine-- its beautiful aerodynamic streamlined body, its smoothness of action made silent by our electro-porous metal ball bearings. Let us acquaint you with our automaton soup plate, its compressed air blower, no breath necessary, no energy required to cool the soup.
Notice the revolving plate with the automatic food pusher. Observe our countershaft double knee action corn feeder with its synchro-mesh transmission, which enables you to shift from high to low gear by the mere tip of the tongue. Then there is the hydro compressed sterilized mouth wiper. Its factors of control ensure against spots on the shirt front.
These are but a few of the delightful features of the Billows Feeding Machine. Let us demonstrate with one of your workers, for actions speak louder than words. Remember, if you wish to keep ahead of your competitor, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of the Billows Feeding Machine.
What we're seeing here is mechanically reproduced speech by way of the phonograph that is being used to sell products. This is not to communicate on a human level, but designed to streamline selling.
This, for Chaplin, is doubly a problem, because in all of his films, the most human thing that there is, is eating. Many critics and people who loved Chaplin all commented on how this is his dominant desire in all of his films, because it's the most human thing that we do. In Modern Times, as is seen in all Chaplin's work, most of the Tramp's motivation comes from hunger. This is the most basic and universal human need.
The feeding machine, which is actually not that far off from several things that theorists of scientific management were offering in their writings, is sold not the basis of its goodness or its humanity, but its efficiency and its bottom-line value for competitive productivity and profit. And as the machine says, actions speak louder than words. What we get with the feeding machine, as you remember from seeing the film, is something that proves how impossible this is with somebody human, like the Tramp.