EdgeCode: (Post) Modern Times
2006 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Brian Johnson
Genres: experimental, silent
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times is re-examined through the lens of postmodern culture. The experimental short pairs silent-cinema conventions with music to question postmodernism's limits.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A postmodern deconstruction of Chaplin feels like homework until you realize Johnson's actually using the tramp as a mirror for late-capitalism's infinite scroll—except most people will miss it, which somehow makes it better.
Johnson positions Modern Times as a palimpsest, letting silent-cinema grammar collide with contemporary sound design to ask what's genuinely subversive and what's just nostalgia wearing a theory t-shirt; the film's formal rigor lies in never letting us settle into either answer.
The decision to keep Chaplin's physical vocabulary intact while reframing the soundscape transforms the entire register of the work—it's a single editorial choice that makes you hear both the original and its moment differently.