Buster Keaton drives away his newly built house in One Week (1920). Owen Hatherley's engaging and provocative The Chaplin Machine, his latest book, is an erudite historical investigation into how, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the Soviet avant-garde looked to Hollywood film, including the work of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. They saw not just slapstick comedy, but something that spoke to their own sensibilities over work, aesthetics and performance.
At a similar time, they also drew on the writings of industrial theorist Frederick Taylor – attempting to improve workers' performance using scientific principles – and Henry Ford. "As a rule, these are treated as rather separate phenomena," writes Hatherley, of these two cultural themes. Though so ideologically different, the Soviets could see elements of the US that they could admire in both ideas, striving to pull together "Americanism in technology, Bolshevism in politics [and] slapstick in everyday life".
As with any cultural message, the tale was distorted in the telling. Hatherley's work, adapted from his doctoral thesis, tells how many in the USSR saw the US as a "gigantic act of collective dreaming," more akin to their own ideals than no doubt it was.
