The Cinema Museum, London

The Chaplin Machine

Tue 28 Jun 2016 @ 19:00 · Events

The General LinePluto Press presents a special launch event to mark the release of The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde by Owen Hatherley.

Too often, the Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s is treated as a high-minded affair of dialectics, rarefied theory-making and stern propaganda. This talk will bring out another, often forgotten side: the constant dialogue with American silent comedy, something which was always fundamental. Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd shuffled the same deck as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kuleshov and Vertov – equally concerned with Fordism, industry, the modern city, scorn for traditional high culture and an obsession with the effects of mechanisation on the human body – but they were put down in a very different order.

Modern TimesThis talk will attempt to explain the strange and under-investigated connections between comedy, industry and communism via the silent comedy and its more ambiguous successor, the musical.

Owen will be in conversation with journalist and critic Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir (Verso) and will show a selection of clips from Soviet and American films.

The Chaplin MachineThe Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde is published by Pluto Press, one of the world’s leading radical publishers, specialising in progressive, critical perspectives in politics and the social sciences. The book will be available to purchase on the night or it can be preordered for £15 (£16.99 RRP) here. Read The Guardian’s review here. Visit their Facebook page.

Doors open at 19.00, for a 19.30 start.

Refreshments will be available in our licensed cafe/bar.

TICKETS & PRICING

This is a free event but seats are limited so please reserve your ticket here.