Gunning, Keaton and Chaplin and the Modern Cinematic Machine

Exposure to new technologies brought about by modernity after the 1870s, generated a perceptual environment of chaos, overstimulation and sensation that Georg Simmel has characterized as “the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions”. Leo Charney, In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity, in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Eds. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz, (Berkley: The University of California Press, 1995), p. 279.

The presence of technological modernity in the film is evident thorough the use of sound. Sound and music means that the film becomes a series of moving images rather than a representation of life. The absence of dialogue means that the viewer must engage more intimately with the film to read deeper into its narrative and its meaning rather than if the story was being propelled by a constant dialogue between characters.

The medium of silent film mechanizes the filmic process- likening movements actions and characters to parts of a larger machine- the film itself. Where the cinema of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton uses mimicry to illustrate modernity, technology and ‘the machine’ through the bodies of the actors, illustrating the fate of humanity at the hands of technology, Piccadilly utilises silent film (absence of dialogue and the presence of accompanying music) to highlight the technological and machine like nature of the medium of film itself.

In fact the intrinsic narrative of a film is generally lost when the dialogue is removed- making it seem visually and narrationally disjointed.
-“Words. Words. They're all we have to go on.” (Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.)
Likewise, without dialogue, the film Piccadilly becomes fragmented and machine-like.

The process that the film adopts is non-naturalistic, and presents a technology of mirroring and of kaleidoscopic images. The overall feel is that of a mechanical ballet, of dislocation and disjointedness. This relates to the theory of the cinema of attraction. Tom Gunning argues that what the "cinema of attraction reveals about earlier spectators has less to do with any notion of naiveté then revealing a ‘lack’ which both Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer term the ‘fragmentation of modern experience’”. The modern human experience is characterised by a feeling of being overwhelmed and lost, not unlike Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Aside from the mechanization of cinema through the lack of dialogue and utilisation of techniques of silent film, there is also an interpolation of interior and exterior spaces- an issue at the crux of the modern experience. Piccadilly is fundamentally expressionistic and shot in a way that internalises the interaction of viewer and viewed- it is very interior. There is no natural landscape, rather, the outside becomes insider space as interior and exterior combine and become interchangeable. The “club” itself implies exclusivity and an ambiguity of private/public thresholds. It is a place of regulated flow and of advertisment and commodity- all intrinsically modernist characteristics.





A further note by Gunning on narrative/disjointedness the cinema of attraction and modernity:

“… Even with the introduction of editing and more complex narratives the aesthetic of attraction” can still “be sensed in periodic doses of non-narrative spectacle. Yet, our interaction with this sensory expression is not just characteristic of our contemporary experience of the loss of engaged participation; rather it tells us something that is intrinsic to our being”.

This theory of the cinema of attraction highlights that even in “narrative, representational cinema” the audience does not merely react to narrative logic and realism by taking a passive role as spectator. Rather, the contemporary viewer interacts and connects with and reads the film in terms of individual sensory experiences drawn from it.