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Could Buster Keaton have starred in Battleship Potemkin?
Did Trotsky plan to write the great Soviet comedy?
And why did Lenin love circus clowns?
The Chaplin Machine reveals the lighter side of the Communist avant-garde and its unlikely passion for American slapstick. Set against the backdrop of the great Russian revolutionary experiment, Owen Hatherley tells the tragic-comedic story of the cinema, art and architecture of the early 20th Century and spotlights the unlikely intersections of East and West.
Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley was born in Southampton, England in 1981. He received a PhD in 2011 from Birkbeck College, London, for a thesis on Constructivism and Americanism. He writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review, Icon, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and New Humanist, and is the author of several books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso 2012), Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012) and Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015). He also edited and introduced an updated edition of Ian Nairn's Nairn's Towns (Notting Hill Editions, 2013). He lives in Woolwich and Warsaw.
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