The famous opening shots of Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times set the tone for the film's overall satirical perspective on modernity and its effects on the lives of individuals. The first shot, a stationary close-up of a dignified clock face, stands as the backdrop onto which the credits appear. The credits dissolve into an ironic epigraph proclaiming, "'Modern Times.' A story of industry, of individual enterprise- humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness." This shot fades to black, and the second shot follows with a medium shot of a herd of multicolored sheep running toward the stationary camera. This shot dissolves into a third, medium shot of a crowd of men walking out of the subway.
Chaplin presents his epigraph, which will almost immediately be proven to be ironic, in an attempt to create a contrast between the viewers' expectations and experience. The nuance present in the juxtaposition of Chaplin's first shot with the following two, necessitates a more complex awareness in the viewer's mind in order to be understood and appreciated; as Hugo Münsterberg writes, "This inner division, the awareness of contrasting situations, this interchange of diverging experiences in the soul, can never be embodied except in the photoplay," (107). In this sense, Chaplin understands and utilizes cinema's ability to visually represent intellectual nuance, as Münsterberg suggests is possible.
Obviously famous for its wry comparison of modern industrial workers, represented in masses, to a herd of sheep, Chaplin establishes this irony through a graphic match linking the second and third shot. Not only does the camera position support the carrying over of visual imagery, but the color matching of dark and light sheep to the dark and light hats and coats worn by the men contribute to the overall transition. Although this graphic match is noticeable without context, it is only made ironic (and, as such, funny) by the contextual knowledge that explains how modern workers feel undervalued, de-individualized, and dispensable. Hugo Münsterberg writes that "the action of the memory brings to the mind of the audience ever so much which gives fuller meaning and ampler setting to every scene," (93). He suggests that memory contextualizes a scene and therefore gives it meaning. Chaplin's second and third shot demonstrate this concept by presenting the viewer with a graphic match that can only really be given meaning through memory's contextualization process.
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