The Immigrant (1917)

Media: VHS tape
Title: The Immigrant

I am taking a film study class which starts in two days and one of my preparatory assignments is to watch a number of Charlie Chaplin shorts. The Immigrant is the one that most struck me (even as One O’clock was probably the laugh-out-loud funniest.) I guess I passively knew that Chaplin mixed social commentary with his pratfalls, and in The Immigrant I finally experienced this mixture first hand. The scene that best encapsulates Chaplin’s commentary in this film occurs in a startling juxtaposition of two images. Image one, immigrants aboard ship see the Statue of Liberty in the harbor. Chaplin captures the initial moment of pure hope and pride in the immigrants’ faces. Image two, cut to the immigration workers literally cutting off the immigrants from their dream with a rope, roughly herding them like cattle. (In 2007 we also bring to the film the knowledge of the dehumanizing inspections to come.) The paradox for us to consider is powerfully set in these images. Hopes of liberty, wealthy and freedom juxtaposed with the immigrants’ current reality of poverty, bigotry and cold indifference. Throughout this short Chaplin plays with the twin reality of opportunity and hardship in America, which you may or may not want to ponder in-between the laughs.