Wheeling Film Society Conversation: Modern Times (Lunch With Books)

September 15, 2015
12:00pm - 12:00pm

Wheeling Film Society

4^th Annual Season: 2015-2016

Co-sponsored by:

Ohio County Public Library

Oglebay Institute’s Towngate Cinema

Wheeling Jesuit University’s Fine and Performing Arts Department

The Wheeling Film Society (WFS) announces its fourth annual season of screening-discussions of classic Hollywood films.  John Whitehead, professor of film studies at Wheeling Jesuit University and author of Appraising The Graduate: The Mike Nichols Classic and Its Impact in Hollywood (2011) and Mike Nichols and the Cinema of Transformation (2014) will serve as host for the screenings and conversations. 

Sept. 11 - Towngate at 7

Screening: Modern Times(Charlie Chaplin, 1936) - 87 mins.

Sept. 15 - Library at Noon

Conversation: Modern Times

The world’s most famous movie star for the first quarter-century of motion pictures and still one of the most familiar icons of cinema, Charlie Chaplin was so powerful a director-star that, nearly a decade into the sound era, he still had the power to deliver a film like Modern Times, a hybrid of the silent and sound eras, in which his character never speaks a word.  Set during the Depression that still raged in the country (and around the world), Chaplin’s classic comedy satirizes industrialization, as Chaplin’s Little Tramp literally becomes a human cog in the machine.  You’ll never forget the daredevil stunts Chaplin performs on roller-skates next to an abyss, nor will you forget the film debut of the Little Tramp’s love interest, Paulette Goddard, glowing as “the Gamin.”