Chaplin: The Immigrant

Media: Film and Wurlitzer Organ
Title: The Immigrant
Director: Charlie Chaplin

These 4 weeks of Chaplin shorts were my second favorite Silent Movie Monday series since I first discovered them in 2001. (Only the Buster Keaton series was more enjoyable.

This week we saw The Cure, The Immigrant and The Adventurer. Though not the funniest of the group, The Immigrant was the most significant and the most pointedly political of all the Mutual shorts. It explores the ambiguities and paradoxes of America’s relationship with its immigrants and immigrants’ experience in their new country.

One simple cut powerfully captures the essence of the ambiguity. First, after an awful sea voyage the immigrants’ boat is finally pulling into New York Harbor and we get a stirring vision of The Statue of Liberty standing before 1917 New York. It is an emotionally powerful image to us in the audience, even 90 years later, and Chaplin reflects the emotion on his characters’ faces. (I would like someone to explore the use of the statue before this Chaplin moment.) Then cut to the immigration officers who immediately wall off the immigrants from their liberty with a taunt rope. In this moment the rope causes the characters to go from the highest state of humanity – pondering hope, liberty and possibility – to cattle marked with tags whose fate is subject to the whim of a bureaucrat. And America goes from a country beckoning to all who believe in their worth to enter and contribute, to an America who grudgingly condescends to open the door, threatening to slam it shut if it so chooses. Every ideal of liberty and tolerance, and every urge toward the ugliness of prejudice and fear in America’s twofold relationship to immigration is captured in this simple juxtaposition of scenes. It may be the most brilliant moment in all of these 16 short films and is one of the most powerful moments Chaplin has left to us.

(Watch the most recent version of Hairspray and see a rope used in similarly powerful way - to physically separate the white and black teenagers.\ - proving Chaplin is alive 90 years on.)