CHRISTIE PITS pARK
Sunday, july 7, 2024

Modern Times

With the short film The Necktie (Le noeud cravate)

For the first 2024 screening at our oldest festival venue, Christie Pits Park, we reach back to the transitional period between silent and sound cinema. In Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, the bumbling but loveable protagonist Chaplin portrayed in many of his films gets to work in a series of increasingly precarious jobs. Over the course of this riotously funny and surprisingly progressive film, our hero becomes a factory worker, a shipbuilder, a night watchman, and a singing waiter (as well as several stints in prison). It’s hard out here for a tramp, but alongside his companion, a plucky young woman also struggling to make ends meet, Chaplin confronts the travails of modern life with irrepressible optimism and humour.

Montréal-based animator Jean-François Lévesque’s short film The Necktie (Le noeud cravate) calls to mind Chaplin’s iconic factory scenes with its darkly funny depiction of a life wasted in repetitive, mindless drudgery. Creatively combining stop-motion and hand-drawn styles of animation, Lévesque tells the cautionary tale of a young musician who hangs up his accordion to work in an office tower that becomes more sinister with each passing year. This programme of cautionary but ultimately hopeful semi-silent slapstick comedies offer a timely reminder of the consequences of abandoning your dreams for the sake of a job that won’t love you back.