Robert Birdwell teaches English at the City College of New York. His book The Radical Novel and the Classless Society: Utopian and Proletarian Novels in U.S. Fiction from Bellamy to Ellison was published in 2018.
Robert Birdwell
Contributions
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and the Minstrel Tradition
At the culmination of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, the Factory Worker (commonly called “the Tramp”) breaks his long silence and sings. The moment is justly famous, as if audiences had been waiting decades to hear the voice of the downtrodden Worker. The Worker, however, does not quite attain to the voice, or the song, that he and his companion, the Gamin, had planned. The Worker has just lost his lyrics, which the Gamin has written on his shirt cuffs. These cuffs fly off his wrists at the start of his dance before the café crowd. “Sing! Nevermind the words,” urges the Gamin in an intertitle.