This is the blog about “ Zeitgeist of the 20th Century: From Modern Times to the Era of Great Dictators” in response to the task given by the Head Of the Department, Dr. Dilip Barad. This blog deals with the Zeitgeist of the 20th century with the help of the movie “The Modern Times” and “The Great Dictator” By Charlie Chaplin, which directly attacks the ‘Mechanism’ and cruelty of ‘Hitler’ and his ‘Dictatorship’.Both movies are written and directed by Charlie Chaplin and he was the leading actor as well in both films. for 'Modern Times' click here- https://avanijani18.blogspot.com/2022/12/modern-times.html
The Great Dictator :
The film is obviously a satire on Adolf Hitler, represented by Adenoid Hynkel, and its story is based on Hynkel looking exactly like " a Jewish barber ": both are played by Charles Chaplin. But it begins with a notice: " Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator incidental ". [ Prologue ] This is a story of a period between two World Wars -- an interim in which Insanity cut loose. Liberty took a nosedive and Humanity was kicked around somewhat
20 years after the end of WWI, in which the nation of Tomainia was on the losing side, Adenoid Hynkel has risen to power as the ruthless dictator of the country. He believes in a pure Aryan state and the decimation of the Jews. This situation is unknown to a simple Jewish Tomainian barber who has been hospitalized since a WWI battle. Upon his release, the barber, who had been suffering from memory loss about the war, is shown the new persecuted life of the Jews by many living in the Jewish ghetto, including a washerwoman named Hannah with whom he begins a relationship. The barber is ultimately spared such persecution by Commander Schultz, whom he saved in that WWI battle. The lives of all Jews in Tomainia are eventually spared with a policy shift by Hynkel himself, who is doing so for ulterior motives. But those motives include a desire for world domination, starting with the invasion of neighboring Osterlich, which may be threatened by Benzino Napaloni, the dictator of neighboring Bacteria. Ultimately Schultz, who has turned traitor against Hynkel's regime, and the barber may be able to join forces to take control of the situation, using Schultz's inside knowledge of the regime's workings and the barber's uncanny resemblance to one of those in power.
The Great Dictator—Charlie Chaplin’s masterful satire of Adolf Hitler—began filming in September 1939, right at the start of World War II. By the time it was released in 1940, the Axis had been formed, and Nazis were already occupying much of France. The threat was not at all abstract: critic Michael Wood notes that the movie premiered that December, in London, amid German air raids. The following December, of 1941, would yield its own devastating threats from the air—this time on American soil, which would clarify for Americans the realness of this war by bringing it home. It was, in other words, a strange moment to be making a comedy about Adolf Hitler—even a satire holding him to account, and even one in which Chaplin himself, who was at that point one of the most famous movies stars in the world, famous for playing the ambling, lovable Little Tramp, took on the role of Hitler. In 1940, Germany and the US had yet to become enemies; feathers, it was worried, would be ruffled by a movie like this. But Chaplin was already unwittingly bound up in the era’s iconographies of evil. His likeness, the Little Tramp, with that curt mustache and oddly compact face of his, had already become a visual reference for cartoonists lampooning Hitler in the press. And he was already on the Nazis’ radar: the 1934 Nazi volume The Jews Are Looking At You referred to him as "a disgusting Jewish acrobat." Chaplin wasn’t Jewish. But he was frequently rumored to be. And when he visited Berlin in 1931, he was mobbed by German fans, proving that his popularity could surpass even the growing ideological boundaries of a nascent Nazi Germany—hence their hatred.
Chaplin was aware of all of this—and of the fact that he and Hitler were born only four days apart, in April of 1889, that they had both risen out of poverty, and that they had enough points of biographical comparison, overall, to spook any sane person. Let’s not overstate their similarities: One of these men would go on to make the world laugh, and the other would go on to start a world war and facilitate the Holocaust. Humorously, that split would come to be echoed in The Great Dictator. Chaplin does double duty, playing the movie's two central roles. One, the character of Adenoid Hynkel, is a Hitler spoof by way of a short-tempered and preposterously powerful personality, a dictator of the fictional country Tomainia. And in the opposing corner, Chaplin offers us a variation on his classic Little Tramp, a Jewish barber who saves a high-ranking officer’s life in World War I and, after a plane accident and years of recovery in the hospital, wakes up to the seeds of World War II being sewn in his country.
The Great Dictator is a classic for a reason. It's startling in its depictions of violence, which stand out less for their outright brutality than for how memorably they depict the Nazis’ betrayal of everyday humanity. And it's renowned as well as for its resourceful and original humor, which combines Chaplin at his most incisive and balletic with raucous displays of verbal wit. This was Chaplin’s first sound film; his previous feature, the 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, was by the time of its release considered almost anachronistic for being a silent film in a sound era. Dictator avails itself of this technological progress, making perhaps its most successful bit out of the way Hitler speaks, the melange of rough sounds and brutish insinuations that have long made footage from his rallies as fascinating as they are frightening.
The Great Dictator understands Hitler as a performer, as an orator wielding language like the unifying, galvanizing power that it is. But it also understands him as a psyche. This of course means it’s full of what feels like sophomoric jokes, gags in which Hitler’s insecurities, his thirst for influence, his ideological inconsistencies (an Aryan revolution led by a brunette?), and zealous dependency on loyalty come under fire. It isn’t a psychological portrait, but The Great Dictator feels much the way movies like Modern Times did: like a story about the travails of an every-man who’s suddenly, with no preparation, launched headlong into machinery too great, too complex, too utterly beyond him, for it not to result in comic hi-jinks.
That’s the how barber’s first scenes out of the hospital, as beautifully staged and timed by Chaplin, feel: like watching the Little Tramp turn a corner and walk, completely unaware, into a world war. He sees "Jew" written on his barbershop, for example, but because he’s an amnesiac just released from the hospital, he has no idea why it’s there and starts to wash it away. This is illegal, of course, and when the Nazis try to tell them so, he, thinking they’re run-of-the-mill brutish anti-Semites, douses them with paint and runs away. Much of the humor, at least in the clearly-marked "Ghetto," where the Barber lives, plays out this way: a terrifying game of comic irony in which what the Barber doesn’t know both empowers and threatens to kill him.
The Hitler scenes, by contrast, are a ballet—at times almost literally—of alliances and petty tasks. The highlight must of course be a scene of Hitler alone, having just renewed his faith in his plan to take over the world, dancing with an inflated globe of the planet, bouncing it off his bum, posing like a pin-up on his desk as the globe floats airlessly skyward. You can’t help but laugh. But that laughter doesn’t mute the brooding danger of it. You see the globe, the ease with which he lifts it up, manipulates it, makes a game of it, and realizes that this is precisely what a dictator wants. It's a guileless and child-like vision, from his perspective, of his own power.
The Great Dictator’s famous climax finds these two men merging, somewhat, into one. It’s a rousing speech ostensibly delivered by the Jewish barber, who (for reasons best left to the movie to explain) has been confused for Hynkel by the Nazis and is called upon to speak to the masses. And then he opens his mouth—and the man that emerges is Chaplin himself, creeping beyond the boundaries of character, satire, or even the artificial construct of a "movie," as such.
The speech makes a case for humanity in the face of grave evil. "We think too much and feel too little," Chaplin says. "More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness." You’ll recognize this theme—"more than machinery we need humanity"—throughout Chaplin’s work, and it rings especially true here. Chaplin emerges, fully human, as himself, breaking free of the film’s satirical trappings, to deliver one from the heart. It’s a scene that plays well on its own, as a standalone speech. For a long while, it was hard to find a version online that hadn’t been modified with dramatic "movie speech" music by way of Hans Zimmer. Youtube comments imply a recent upswing in activity, of people finding the speech anew in the Trump era, and that makes sense. But the scene plays even more strangely, more powerfully, in context, where it’s less easily lent to meme-able political messaging, where it has to brush up against everything else in the movie that’s come before.
It’s startling, frankly. The Great Dictator’s tone to this point never feels so earnest. How could it, what with its balletic Hitler and its foreign dictatorships with names like Bacteria. From the vantage of 1940, Chaplin couldn’t quite see where the war would take us, and it remains the case that some of the film play oddly—but all the more insightfully for it—today. What’s clear from its final moments, to say nothing of much of the rest, is the power in this tension. Insofar as it can sense but not see the future, you could say that The Great Dictator is a film made in a cloud of relative ignorance. Yet look at how much it says, how far it goes. It makes it hard to make excuses for films made since, which often have the benefit of hindsight yet little substance to say about what they see in the rearview. We know more, much more, about Hitler today than we did in 1940.
Comparison :
After viewing ‘The Great Dictator’ I would like to compare the situation of Jews with Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu And Kashmir. The majority of Jammu and Kashmir made Kashmiri Pandits and other minorities leave their native place. The militants tortured them barbarously and made them leave that place. Many Movies have portrayed this incident but we can not rely on Movies because it has many fictions in them the story of real and well-known Kashmiri Hindus in their own words, clears the picture very well. Here’s the link to the very famous news channel NDTV, covering the story of Kashmiri pandits: NDTV Interview And here’s the famous book of Rahul Pandita, he’s a journalist and well-known author for which he describes Kashmiri Hindu Minorities: Our Moon has Blood Clots.
Since 1989, Jammu and Kashmir have been affected by the conflict between the Indian state and a movement demanding independence. This book explores the effect of that conflict on the Hindu Pandit minority of the Kashmir Valley. The displacement of the Kashmir Pandits has been drastic with the majority having fled Kashmir within the first year of the conflict and relocating to Jammu and elsewhere. They are one of the most prominent internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the region. Kashmiri Pandits are historically associated with state bureaucracies from the precolonial to postcolonial regimes and have been prominent landowners in Kashmir. While Kashmiri nationalism declares independence from the Indian state, the Pandits are located in the union between India and Kashmir. This book attempts to explore their experiences by looking at their relationship to Kashmir and the place they have relocated to, where they have rebuilt their lives. Focusing on ‘camp colonies’ (the same way Jews were living ) and the lives of Pandits across the city, the book reveals a tension between the recovery of ordinary life after loss and the inability to feel truly settled and to find one’s place in the world. This book explores how they seek recognition as victims through engagements with political parties, organizations, and organs of the Indian welfare state. But this process is caught in a struggle between the uniqueness of victimhood and the universality of violence and suffering. Thus, this book attempts to understand experiences of dispossession among people who occupy a politically ambivalent location.
There are some fine memoirs by Pandits who had to leave Kashmir. But perhaps the most authoritative account of how and why they left is contained in an essay by Sonia Jabbar, The Spirit of Place, published in Civil Lines 5. Across three pages of closely printed text, Jabbar lists 36 Pandit men and women murdered by jihadists, their names, their dates of birth and death, their native village, and their family members. The matter-of-fact listing is followed by this paragraph in the writer’s own voice:
“These are just a few of the names of the Pandits who were killed by the militants between 1989-1991. I’d love to add some nine hundred more for you to get the complete picture. These women and men were not killed in the crossfire, accidentally, but were systematically and brutally targeted. Many of the women were gang-raped before they were killed. One woman was bisected by a mill saw. The bodies of the men bore marks of torture. Death by strangulation, hanging, amputations, and the gouging of eyes, were not uncommon. Often their bodies were dumped with notes forbidding anyone—in pain of death—to touch them. 900 brutal killings out of a population of around 350,000 Pandits over 24 months is a startling figure. Anyone who says Jagmohan engineered the Pandit exodus is a liar.” (From Hindustan Times)
The first and greatest tragedy of the Kashmiri Pandits was that they were forced to flee their homeland. It was their own people who turned on them or looked the other way as they were turned upon when the forces of jihad made the Pandits their manic victims. The cultural, poetic, and mystical ties that once bound the Pandits to Kashmiris of other faiths were brutally sundered by Islamic fundamentalists. Now, only their memories, mostly bitter memories, remain.
Hitler was proud of being ‘Aryan’ and was torturing others who were non-Aryans. And people followed him largely! And were considered him a hero by addressing him very often with “Hail Hynkel” the same way the misguided majority of Jammu and Kashmir were idolizing Ashfaq Majeed Wani, Shaheed Shabir Sideeqi, and other militants as ‘pure’ and many more. Here is one Facebook post regarding the pureness of this militant in comparison to ‘Aryans’/Hitler: Ashfaq Majeed Wani
It's not happened during the 19s’ but till today in Jammu and Kashmir, the majority locality is threatening Kashmiri Hindus. Here’s the article which covers the whole incident: Dainik Bhaskar Article
It's not only Kashmiri Hindus that are suffering but the Muslim community, Asians all are suffering from recisim and many more throughout the world. Charlie Chaplin presented very close image in 'The Great Dictator' which is still relevant and will continue to be relevant in future also.
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