Aug 9, 2010
Being Bit By Charlie [Chaplin]
So I’m coming off the high that was Film Forum’s Charlie Chaplin Festival and I can’t stop thinking about what makes Chaplin so singular as a performance artist for me. Perhaps there are no words — fitting for a mostly silent star. As I learned over the course of the series, Chaplin also shone brightly in speaking parts, but his true genius is centered mostly in his body as a threshold for human movement — especially as movement gathers force in his seismographic face. I could wax on for hours about that exquisite piece of tissue — framed by those twitchy brows and set off with an iconic exclamation point of a mustache — and its mimetic power. When Chaplin smiles, the audience cannot help but smile with him. In James Agee’s essay on Monsieur Verdoux he expresses regret that his words can only approximate Chaplin’s greatness: “I can only hope that these notes may faintly suggest the frame-by-frame appreciation; the gratitude; and the tribute which we owe this great poet and his great poem.†In that spirit, here are a few of my favorite Chaplin moments, film by film.
MODERN TIMES: Chaplin must perform a song to a packed house. He forgets the words and makes up something that sounds vaguely Italian, complete with saucy gestures. Side-splittingly funny.
THE CIRCUS: A slew of monkeys make a late entrance and predictably steal the show.
CITY LIGHTS: The tramp and his rich tippler of a friend sit down to eat. Spaghetti, confetti, what’s the difference?
THE GREAT DICTATOR: Chaplin as Der Phooey is full of hot air.
THE IDLE CLASS: This short contains one of my favorite Chaplin moments of all time. Watch it all the way through — there’s a big payoff that involves a cocktail shaker!
working my way through these… had two technical questions.
1) if they can have him singing, why can’t they have him talking?
2) why do they do those intertitles instead of subtitles, the technology is not that hard is it?
1) the singing is not synchronous — it is dubbed after the fact. synchronous sound did not occur until that moment in the jazz singer.
2) the intertitles vs. subtitles is an interesting question — some people think that it stems from literary conventions. you would “read” cinema the same way that you would read a book.
I saw far less of this Chaplin retrospective at Film Forum than I would have liked (I still haven’t seen The Great Dictator or A King in New York). But put aside what some might consider his penchant for sentimentality…as these clips show, Charlie Chaplin was one hell of a physical comedian. The whole first 15 minutes or so of Modern Times shows off his gifts to brilliant, exhilarating effect.