Wahyu Uwabami

The Great Dictator (El gran dictador, 1940) is the film in which Charlie Chaplin openly satirizes Hitler and fascism, playing a dual role: a Jewish barber and Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator of Tomania. • It was Chaplin’s first sound film (though he uses sound in his own way: physical gags + voice as a political tool). • It is a comedy that, as it progresses, becomes increasingly bitter: the joke does not hide the violence, it exposes it. The barber: everyday life, persecution, the ghetto, solidarity. Hynkel: power as grotesque caricature (rituals, speeches, paranoia, narcissism). The crossover: identity confusion drives the ending.