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The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the International Communist Avant-Garde
There was something uncanny about Charlie Chaplin. His fellow actors spoke of him as inhuman—automaton-like. His stiff, comic movements could be viewed as an attempt to parody the newly developed production lines of Henry Ford’s revolutionary factories. As wide-scale application of this technology spread to Soviet Russia, Chaplin’s slapstick comedic style also found a following among the artists carving out a new society under communism.
In The Chaplin Machine , Owen Hatherley unearths the hidden history of Soviet film, art, and architecture. Turning upside down the common view that the communist avant-garde was austere and humorless, he reveals an unexpected comedic streak that found its inspiration in the slapstick of the American performers Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
What did it mean for socialists to combine the ideas of Chaplin and Ford? Were their experiments indicative of a new future conception of work and leisure? And to what degree was this emphasis on comedy a precursor to the strangely festive despotism of Stalin? By asking these questions, The Chaplin Machine challenges our understanding of twentieth-century art in America and abroad.
In The Chaplin Machine , Owen Hatherley unearths the hidden history of Soviet film, art, and architecture. Turning upside down the common view that the communist avant-garde was austere and humorless, he reveals an unexpected comedic streak that found its inspiration in the slapstick of the American performers Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
What did it mean for socialists to combine the ideas of Chaplin and Ford? Were their experiments indicative of a new future conception of work and leisure? And to what degree was this emphasis on comedy a precursor to the strangely festive despotism of Stalin? By asking these questions, The Chaplin Machine challenges our understanding of twentieth-century art in America and abroad.
200 pages, Hardcover
First published April 15, 2016
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May 23, 2021
A real mess of a book.
The best part of the whole book, by far, is the introduction, I wonder if it was written separately from the rest because it's an excellent piece of writing, nicely introducing to the themes of the book, and it itself could stand on its own. The central conceit of this book, one so genius it kind of makes my head boggle in the connections he has managed to make, is that the Bolshevik fascination with Americana (and indeed, it was always a slightly fantasised, mythologised image of America), was one that operated on many levels. Embodying the best of the principle of dialectics, the Bolsheviks, as opposed to some crude, one-dimensional denunciation of America as the Great Satan, irredeemably capitalistic and reactionary, actually tried to take what was best about America, and improve on it. Whatever we on the left have to say about America, it is hard to deny there is something alluring about it. Equal opportunity, the Statue of Liberty's beautiful words, embracing the whole of humanity, it's culture, it's life, it's soul, it's pezass, from jazz music to Hollywood, it is hard to deny American capitalism has not created some wonders. It is equally not hard to see why European socialists in the early 20th century could have looked at America as it least somewhat better than the rancid reactionary cage that was Europe, which had only just destroyed itself having just been run by various crazed, deluded semi-incest aristocrats and monarchs. As Hegel noted in his time "America is the country of the future, and its world historical importance has yet to be revealed in the ages which lie ahead...It is the land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical arsenal of old Europe". America, to Marxists, is the first liberal democracy on Earth, and therefore deserves some praise for defeating forces of semi-feudal imperialism, and yet also one founded upon a worship of property rights, ethnic cleansing and then slavery. But still, it would be hard to deny in the founding of at least some aspects of America it does not have proggressive seeds more beneficail to socialists than in other countries (as Harvey J. Kayne points out, Paine is as much a part of America's soul as Hamilton, something one can hardly say for Britain) As Hatherley writes, for the Bolsheviks too, America was:
"...home to the Klu Klux Klan, of the Pinkerton strike breaking gangs, of the Red Scare and the mechanisation of labour; but 'America' is also the home of Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright, awe-inspiring industrial monuments, mass abundance - and the mechanisation of labour. 'America' was the place where mankind had begun to shape nature to its will, the 'Motherland of Industry', a land of social peace and astounding technological dynamism, and occasionally our protagonists had to remind themselves that it was also a political adversary." (p.6).
It was this dialectical tension then, between America as the sight of some of the most viscous forms of oppression in the world, the most unrestrained capitalism, and yet also as a place, relative to anywhere in Europe at the time, of a developed and semi-progressive political system with a lively culture and modernist spirit, that tormented the Bolsheviks throughout. Such an approach to America, and to modernity more generally, has lessons which should be learnt by the modern left.
One side of their fascination in America was the rather alarming adoption of Taylorist and Fordist labour policies. Rigidly authoritarian, bindingly restrictive to worker's freedom, hated by labour and constantly opposed, yet to the Bolsheviks, it seemed to fit pass and parcel with their vision of what Soviet Russia needed to be - adopting the most up to date and efficient mechanisms of current capitalism, use them, compete with them, and make it better. The Bolsheviks project was one of fulfilling the dreams of modernity, which had seen its peak in America, and try and make it work for workers (remember Lenin's phrase "socialism is electrification plus labour power", it pretty much sums up the spirit and ethos of his whole project). While reactionary in America in rural, backwards Russia it could become progressive, doing away with outdated and outmoded labour relations and injecting some spirit of technological efficiency into the degenerate Russia.
So far so conventional, this part of the Bolsheviks has been subjected to much criticism, for its 'elitism', it's high modern arrogance, it's technocratic authoritarianism. Some even see in this obsession with control of the workers through the regulation of their movements some kind of incipient totalitarianism, the seeds of Stalin already there from the start like a computer programme that reached it logical conclusion in the 30s. But, as Hatherley shows, this misses out the opposite side of their fascination with America - slapstick comedy.
The Bolsheviks, surprisingly enough, considered (rightly) the silent and then sound comedies of specifically Charlie Chaplin (but also folks like Buster Keaton) were part and parcel of the avant-garde movements sweeping Europe at that point, and compatible with the radical side of the Constructivist movement, Russia's rough equivalent of the Bauhaus. In brilliantly point this out, Hatherley nicely debunks the widespread postmodernist distain for projects of modernity as elitist, out of touch and oppressive.
As Hatherley writes "the Constructivist obsession with American mass media could not be further from the more recent celebration of popular culture as consisting in little 'resistances' against sundry 'totalising' forces, whether state power, class analysis, economic planning or modernism itself. This was one of the central claims of postmodernism in the 1980s, emerging at a couple of removes from the notion of popular subcultures as a form of 'resistance through rituals', developed by the likes of Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall at the Birmingham School of Sociology. By contrast, the 1920s largely didn't see an uncritical celebration of popular culture, or a patronising elevation of an undialectically formulated 'popular taste' above the efforts of intellectual avant-garde. Rather, there were a series of critical engagements, where certain elements in a given object or form would be borrowed, some emphasised, while others were rejected or not politically useful" (p.8-9). Here then we see the liberating effects of dialectics can provide.
What he shows with piercing insight, the Bolsheviks were able to see Chaplin and Ford as part of the same process, noting that Chaplin's films were actually enormously planned and precisely manipulated, each part of his body like a clockwork automaton. In this sense, they sought to combine the oddly Verfremdungseffekt-esque nature of Chaplin's films and movements, the occasional break in form and narrative in the silent comedies that reminded them of avart-garde techniques, and put them to use in the new Russia, one that would combine the modernity of modern production with the cutting edge of avant-garde cinema. In this sense, the Bolshevik project to modernise Russia was not just one of brutal lurching forward through increasingly brutal means, distant and contemptuous of "ordinary people's" way of life. Surprisingly, Hatherly shows the Bolsheviks liked to play. Nearly always, even in the most extreme forms of Bolshevik Taylorism, like in figures like Gastev, there was an equal emphasis on creativity and spontaneous joy, and trying to achieve slapstick esque motions through Taylorist means. We must then, as Hatherly writes "discuss Chaplin and Ford and Lenin, to connect Edison and Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Rathenau - to discover a more conflicted, comic, collective form of American dreaming" (p.8). "Americanism was not only a technological advancement, advanced tempos and Taylorist regimentation of the worker's body, but also of an unprecedented engagement on the part of those allegedly representing 'high art' - experimental, 'leftist' film-makers, designers, theoreticians - with 'popular' forms of art, whether it was the imported 'vulgar' comic cinema, the circus, the burlesque or jazz. In all of these, the body's mechanisation is the generator of pleasure, not merely a conduit to the increased production of pig iron" (p.20). As untenable as it may be to some, Taylorism and Fordism was part of the same programme as Chaplism in Bolshevik's constructions of modernity.
This is an invaluable insight, one that punctures hole in the dreary conventional reading of the Bolsheviks as either deluded naïve idealists rushing headlong into a catastrophe, or cold bureaucrat paving the ground for Stalin. And yet, arguably Hatherley fails to pull off the gambit of his ambitious thesis. The rest of the book is a turd, it slogs along. Hatherley pushes example after example, in a myriad of areas, to make his point. This becomes extremely tedious after a while, the litany of Russian names from hopelessly obscure areas of Russian cultural life become bewildering and boring after a short time. It is organised extremely messily, going from one to the next in rough chronological order, but seemingly either labouring the same point or muddling it in the process.
It's also not really clear the Bolsheviks really succeeded in their aims. While much of early Bolshevik culture is rightly celebrated (the films of Sergei Eisenstein, for example, are rightly lauded) much of what they did seems insane. Performances so bizarre and abstract one cannot actually imagine liking any of it. Their efforts seem disappointing, ranging from misguided to outright wrongheaded. But still, one cannot look at the sometimes crazy efforts of the people without at least admiring the attempt to do something creative, to push as much as they could the wildly uneven and combined nature of Russia at that point, groaning under the weight of the calamitous civil war, while trying to recreate aspects of American popular culture for a worker's audience. They at least tried, and their efforts alone justify the existence of Bolshevism, proving it was not just one fucking road to totalitarianism, and the trite comparison to Nazism the USSR gets conflated with these days are clearly obscene in light of their efforts.
Tedious and highly specialists, the book is not really recommended. It's extremely hard going and the point its making gets buried amongst a avalanche of detail.
The best part of the whole book, by far, is the introduction, I wonder if it was written separately from the rest because it's an excellent piece of writing, nicely introducing to the themes of the book, and it itself could stand on its own. The central conceit of this book, one so genius it kind of makes my head boggle in the connections he has managed to make, is that the Bolshevik fascination with Americana (and indeed, it was always a slightly fantasised, mythologised image of America), was one that operated on many levels. Embodying the best of the principle of dialectics, the Bolsheviks, as opposed to some crude, one-dimensional denunciation of America as the Great Satan, irredeemably capitalistic and reactionary, actually tried to take what was best about America, and improve on it. Whatever we on the left have to say about America, it is hard to deny there is something alluring about it. Equal opportunity, the Statue of Liberty's beautiful words, embracing the whole of humanity, it's culture, it's life, it's soul, it's pezass, from jazz music to Hollywood, it is hard to deny American capitalism has not created some wonders. It is equally not hard to see why European socialists in the early 20th century could have looked at America as it least somewhat better than the rancid reactionary cage that was Europe, which had only just destroyed itself having just been run by various crazed, deluded semi-incest aristocrats and monarchs. As Hegel noted in his time "America is the country of the future, and its world historical importance has yet to be revealed in the ages which lie ahead...It is the land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical arsenal of old Europe". America, to Marxists, is the first liberal democracy on Earth, and therefore deserves some praise for defeating forces of semi-feudal imperialism, and yet also one founded upon a worship of property rights, ethnic cleansing and then slavery. But still, it would be hard to deny in the founding of at least some aspects of America it does not have proggressive seeds more beneficail to socialists than in other countries (as Harvey J. Kayne points out, Paine is as much a part of America's soul as Hamilton, something one can hardly say for Britain) As Hatherley writes, for the Bolsheviks too, America was:
"...home to the Klu Klux Klan, of the Pinkerton strike breaking gangs, of the Red Scare and the mechanisation of labour; but 'America' is also the home of Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright, awe-inspiring industrial monuments, mass abundance - and the mechanisation of labour. 'America' was the place where mankind had begun to shape nature to its will, the 'Motherland of Industry', a land of social peace and astounding technological dynamism, and occasionally our protagonists had to remind themselves that it was also a political adversary." (p.6).
It was this dialectical tension then, between America as the sight of some of the most viscous forms of oppression in the world, the most unrestrained capitalism, and yet also as a place, relative to anywhere in Europe at the time, of a developed and semi-progressive political system with a lively culture and modernist spirit, that tormented the Bolsheviks throughout. Such an approach to America, and to modernity more generally, has lessons which should be learnt by the modern left.
One side of their fascination in America was the rather alarming adoption of Taylorist and Fordist labour policies. Rigidly authoritarian, bindingly restrictive to worker's freedom, hated by labour and constantly opposed, yet to the Bolsheviks, it seemed to fit pass and parcel with their vision of what Soviet Russia needed to be - adopting the most up to date and efficient mechanisms of current capitalism, use them, compete with them, and make it better. The Bolsheviks project was one of fulfilling the dreams of modernity, which had seen its peak in America, and try and make it work for workers (remember Lenin's phrase "socialism is electrification plus labour power", it pretty much sums up the spirit and ethos of his whole project). While reactionary in America in rural, backwards Russia it could become progressive, doing away with outdated and outmoded labour relations and injecting some spirit of technological efficiency into the degenerate Russia.
So far so conventional, this part of the Bolsheviks has been subjected to much criticism, for its 'elitism', it's high modern arrogance, it's technocratic authoritarianism. Some even see in this obsession with control of the workers through the regulation of their movements some kind of incipient totalitarianism, the seeds of Stalin already there from the start like a computer programme that reached it logical conclusion in the 30s. But, as Hatherley shows, this misses out the opposite side of their fascination with America - slapstick comedy.
The Bolsheviks, surprisingly enough, considered (rightly) the silent and then sound comedies of specifically Charlie Chaplin (but also folks like Buster Keaton) were part and parcel of the avant-garde movements sweeping Europe at that point, and compatible with the radical side of the Constructivist movement, Russia's rough equivalent of the Bauhaus. In brilliantly point this out, Hatherley nicely debunks the widespread postmodernist distain for projects of modernity as elitist, out of touch and oppressive.
As Hatherley writes "the Constructivist obsession with American mass media could not be further from the more recent celebration of popular culture as consisting in little 'resistances' against sundry 'totalising' forces, whether state power, class analysis, economic planning or modernism itself. This was one of the central claims of postmodernism in the 1980s, emerging at a couple of removes from the notion of popular subcultures as a form of 'resistance through rituals', developed by the likes of Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall at the Birmingham School of Sociology. By contrast, the 1920s largely didn't see an uncritical celebration of popular culture, or a patronising elevation of an undialectically formulated 'popular taste' above the efforts of intellectual avant-garde. Rather, there were a series of critical engagements, where certain elements in a given object or form would be borrowed, some emphasised, while others were rejected or not politically useful" (p.8-9). Here then we see the liberating effects of dialectics can provide.
What he shows with piercing insight, the Bolsheviks were able to see Chaplin and Ford as part of the same process, noting that Chaplin's films were actually enormously planned and precisely manipulated, each part of his body like a clockwork automaton. In this sense, they sought to combine the oddly Verfremdungseffekt-esque nature of Chaplin's films and movements, the occasional break in form and narrative in the silent comedies that reminded them of avart-garde techniques, and put them to use in the new Russia, one that would combine the modernity of modern production with the cutting edge of avant-garde cinema. In this sense, the Bolshevik project to modernise Russia was not just one of brutal lurching forward through increasingly brutal means, distant and contemptuous of "ordinary people's" way of life. Surprisingly, Hatherly shows the Bolsheviks liked to play. Nearly always, even in the most extreme forms of Bolshevik Taylorism, like in figures like Gastev, there was an equal emphasis on creativity and spontaneous joy, and trying to achieve slapstick esque motions through Taylorist means. We must then, as Hatherly writes "discuss Chaplin and Ford and Lenin, to connect Edison and Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Rathenau - to discover a more conflicted, comic, collective form of American dreaming" (p.8). "Americanism was not only a technological advancement, advanced tempos and Taylorist regimentation of the worker's body, but also of an unprecedented engagement on the part of those allegedly representing 'high art' - experimental, 'leftist' film-makers, designers, theoreticians - with 'popular' forms of art, whether it was the imported 'vulgar' comic cinema, the circus, the burlesque or jazz. In all of these, the body's mechanisation is the generator of pleasure, not merely a conduit to the increased production of pig iron" (p.20). As untenable as it may be to some, Taylorism and Fordism was part of the same programme as Chaplism in Bolshevik's constructions of modernity.
This is an invaluable insight, one that punctures hole in the dreary conventional reading of the Bolsheviks as either deluded naïve idealists rushing headlong into a catastrophe, or cold bureaucrat paving the ground for Stalin. And yet, arguably Hatherley fails to pull off the gambit of his ambitious thesis. The rest of the book is a turd, it slogs along. Hatherley pushes example after example, in a myriad of areas, to make his point. This becomes extremely tedious after a while, the litany of Russian names from hopelessly obscure areas of Russian cultural life become bewildering and boring after a short time. It is organised extremely messily, going from one to the next in rough chronological order, but seemingly either labouring the same point or muddling it in the process.
It's also not really clear the Bolsheviks really succeeded in their aims. While much of early Bolshevik culture is rightly celebrated (the films of Sergei Eisenstein, for example, are rightly lauded) much of what they did seems insane. Performances so bizarre and abstract one cannot actually imagine liking any of it. Their efforts seem disappointing, ranging from misguided to outright wrongheaded. But still, one cannot look at the sometimes crazy efforts of the people without at least admiring the attempt to do something creative, to push as much as they could the wildly uneven and combined nature of Russia at that point, groaning under the weight of the calamitous civil war, while trying to recreate aspects of American popular culture for a worker's audience. They at least tried, and their efforts alone justify the existence of Bolshevism, proving it was not just one fucking road to totalitarianism, and the trite comparison to Nazism the USSR gets conflated with these days are clearly obscene in light of their efforts.
Tedious and highly specialists, the book is not really recommended. It's extremely hard going and the point its making gets buried amongst a avalanche of detail.
June 3, 2023
I really enjoyed this concise little book!
I had a big problem with the author’s language. Sometimes felt like he was using but words for the sake of them. Sometimes his writing came out from under him and he couldn’t handle the ideas. He seemed annoying af too I fear.
His knowledge was expansive, tho! I loved all the discussions about our social relationship to popular culture, and the very specific historical moment that the book covers. Chaplin and Eusenstein get the best treatment, and I loved the writing about communist art so much. I have to look into more of it ! So much cool stuff.
Fordism didn’t get enough space. And also the avoidance of a lot of aesthetics of America in the period, because most of everything reminded discussed in the avant- grade realm.
I LOVED THIS DESPITE IT FLAWS!
I had a big problem with the author’s language. Sometimes felt like he was using but words for the sake of them. Sometimes his writing came out from under him and he couldn’t handle the ideas. He seemed annoying af too I fear.
His knowledge was expansive, tho! I loved all the discussions about our social relationship to popular culture, and the very specific historical moment that the book covers. Chaplin and Eusenstein get the best treatment, and I loved the writing about communist art so much. I have to look into more of it ! So much cool stuff.
Fordism didn’t get enough space. And also the avoidance of a lot of aesthetics of America in the period, because most of everything reminded discussed in the avant- grade realm.
I LOVED THIS DESPITE IT FLAWS!
February 1, 2018
A fascinating idea, exploring the connections between the slapstick comedy of Chaplin, Keaton et al., the manifestos of the Constructivists, Futurists and others, the rise of the assembly line and the de-skilling of labour and the political upheavals of the early 20th century, particularly those in Russia.
There was undoubtedly an awful lot to chew on, but it was pretty hard going at times. The main reason behind this is that the book is a cut-down version of part of the author's Ph.D. dissertation -- and it reads like it. Still, if you want to explore some unusual cultural and political connections and you're not afraid to work hard for them, you may find this book rewarding. I'm glad I read it but I can't say that much of it has stuck in my mind.
There was undoubtedly an awful lot to chew on, but it was pretty hard going at times. The main reason behind this is that the book is a cut-down version of part of the author's Ph.D. dissertation -- and it reads like it. Still, if you want to explore some unusual cultural and political connections and you're not afraid to work hard for them, you may find this book rewarding. I'm glad I read it but I can't say that much of it has stuck in my mind.
August 4, 2024
Not my favourite Hatherley I've read - based on his PhD thesis so a bit drier and less companionable than usual. But still a fascinating treatment of how the aesthetics of the revolutionary Russian avant-garde were informed by a productively ambivalent attitude towards the idea of America.
December 1, 2025
fascinating concept that didn't really pan out and so overtly intellectual that it was hard for the point t to come be conveyed. might try to read again with fresh eyes.
June 28, 2024
Interesting insights but scattershot. Splits the difference between introductory, and populist, and just academic analysis — and not always successfully. Very informative, though, and provides the reader with a lot to take away.
September 12, 2016
Sorry to say , i found this book really hard going .
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews