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A great deal of critical conversation surrounding the films of Charlie Chaplin has focused on Chaplin's reluctance to move from the silent film technology of the 1910s and 1920s to the talkies of the 1930s. Despite the fact that it was produced in 1936, several years after the advent of sound film, Chaplin's Modern Times remains principally a silent film; its brief moments of sound seem designed to mock the technological shift in the film industry, and Garrett Stewart is right to call the film a "self-conscious anachronism."1 Chaplin himself said he could not imagine his Tramp character entering the sound era. "Some people suggested that the tramp might talk," he reflects in his 1964 autobiography. "This was unthinkable, for the first word he ever uttered would transform him into another person."2 Chaplin's resistance to sound technology continued into his 1940 film The Great Dictator, which grapples thematically with silence and speech, and which often preserves a silent film aesthetic. Most critics and reviewers of that film affirm Chaplin's view that granting the tramp a voice would transform him into another person; they suggest that when Chaplin delivers a speech at the end of the film, he steps out of his film persona and speaks in his own voice.3
Critics have offered a variety of explanations for Chaplin's reluctance to embrace sound technology. Kyp Harness expresses the common view when he writes that Modern Times thematizes the Tramp's triumph over that which ultimately killed him: namely, sound film, which, for Chaplin, represented industrial uniformity, dehumanization, and troubling technological progress.4 Sound technology, in Harness's reading, is connected with and symbolized in Modern Times by the technology of mass production; the Tramp's comic victory over the assembly line early in the film mirrors Chaplin's own Pyrrhic victory over sound film. George Potter agrees, claiming that "using a sound film … would have represented a capitulation to industrialization in a film ostensibly aimed at critiquing the mechanization of society."5 Ilka Brasch suggests Modern Times laments the transition to sound film and depicts modernity as filled with unnatural technological sound; meanwhile, the film depicts silence as a more natural, premodern aural environment.6 Garrett Stewart agrees that the film offers a critique...