In Modern Times (1936), a factory owner is seen monitoring his workers via 2 way video surveillance. Would this have seemed like science fiction at time time?

by [deleted]

I was watching the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times (1936) tonight and there are several scenes in a factory where the owner monitors and communicates with the workers via 2 way video communication. You can see examples here and here (same video, 1m35s and 2m20s if the links don't work).

Television systems were in their infancy around this time. Would the average movie goer have been familiar with the concept of video systems or was this seen as science fiction?

The_Alaskan

Contemporary accounts in the New York Times and Chicago Tribune don't seem to record anything exceptional about those scenes, except that they're among the few times in the movie when another human being speaks.

Here's an excerpt from a Feb. 9, 1936 review in the Times:

"The other players are silent, except in two or three scenes in which Mr. Chaplin is willing to accept the phenomenon of human voice because it comes through radio, television and phonograph. To compensate for this wordlessness, he has composed ─ or borrowed ─ an expressive musical score and has indulged (rather too freely we feel) in subtitles."

In analyzing the film critically, the choice of speech by video is an artistic one intended to play upon the themes in the rest of the film: Work has divorced humans from each other, and normal human interaction is broken by excessive work.