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.)
Showing posts with label Charlie Chaplin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlie Chaplin. Show all posts
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Chaplin: Silent Movie Mondays
Media: silent film with live musical accompaniment
Title: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Vagabond (all 1916)
Director: Charlie Chaplin
The first of 4 fantastic weeks of Silent Movie Mondays began at the Paramount this past week. We will see Charlie Chaplin’s silent masterpieces from 1916 and 1917 produced by the Mutual Film Company. The Paramount is presenting these 12 films in chronological order.
The first two films, The Floorwalker and The Fireman, are more Mack Sennett (whom Chaplin worked for at Keystone) than Charlie Chaplin. Basically a situation is set up, Charlie works in a fire station for example, and the film explores every slap-stick situation Charlie can get into in a fire house. It is all hilarious frenzy.
Then by film three, The Vagabond, something happens and you get Chaplin’s full genius, perhaps for the first time. Actually it is even more interesting than that, the true Chaplin genius kicks in half way into the film after an initial Sennett-like chaotic chase through a neighborhood with city toughs in pursuit of Charlie. The genius that will mark Chaplin’s best films arrives with Charlie in the country where he has fled. Added to the surface slap-stick is a deep inner core of real emotion, often manifest in the form of that little tramp Charlie, loving a woman who is his social better. In The Vagabond, as in other Chaplin films, it is made clear the love is mutual and would persists if the two were able to remain alone in the world, but crumbles when exposed to society’s eyes. A superior woman cannot be allowed to love a little tramp.
There is a perfect scene in The Vagabond. Charlie who has rescued a young woman from a violent relationship washes the country grime from the woman’s face. On the surface it is pure hilarity as he sticks the washcloth in the pliant woman’s ears and nose to get the wretch clean. Simultaneously it is beautiful, lovely and filled with genuine care, like a mother washing a child. It is as scene as sweet and moving as it is crude and hilarious, and it is that combination of a hilarious surface mixed with deep genuine feeling which will remain Chaplin’s greatest gift for many years to come.
Title: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, The Vagabond (all 1916)
Director: Charlie Chaplin
The first of 4 fantastic weeks of Silent Movie Mondays began at the Paramount this past week. We will see Charlie Chaplin’s silent masterpieces from 1916 and 1917 produced by the Mutual Film Company. The Paramount is presenting these 12 films in chronological order.
The first two films, The Floorwalker and The Fireman, are more Mack Sennett (whom Chaplin worked for at Keystone) than Charlie Chaplin. Basically a situation is set up, Charlie works in a fire station for example, and the film explores every slap-stick situation Charlie can get into in a fire house. It is all hilarious frenzy.
Then by film three, The Vagabond, something happens and you get Chaplin’s full genius, perhaps for the first time. Actually it is even more interesting than that, the true Chaplin genius kicks in half way into the film after an initial Sennett-like chaotic chase through a neighborhood with city toughs in pursuit of Charlie. The genius that will mark Chaplin’s best films arrives with Charlie in the country where he has fled. Added to the surface slap-stick is a deep inner core of real emotion, often manifest in the form of that little tramp Charlie, loving a woman who is his social better. In The Vagabond, as in other Chaplin films, it is made clear the love is mutual and would persists if the two were able to remain alone in the world, but crumbles when exposed to society’s eyes. A superior woman cannot be allowed to love a little tramp.
There is a perfect scene in The Vagabond. Charlie who has rescued a young woman from a violent relationship washes the country grime from the woman’s face. On the surface it is pure hilarity as he sticks the washcloth in the pliant woman’s ears and nose to get the wretch clean. Simultaneously it is beautiful, lovely and filled with genuine care, like a mother washing a child. It is as scene as sweet and moving as it is crude and hilarious, and it is that combination of a hilarious surface mixed with deep genuine feeling which will remain Chaplin’s greatest gift for many years to come.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Charlie Chaplin
Media: Lecture
Title: The Fool in the Frame: Film Comedy and 20th Century America
Professor Bean is teaching this 5 session course and she began this week with a quick history of the beginning of film and then focused on its first big star Charlie Chaplin. I’ve done a good deal of my own reading on the subject but this class is helping cement my understanding of early film. A few facts I enjoyed:
The first exhibition of film for an audience was in France 1895. (Edison had motion picture machines first but they were one person arcades.)
The first fictionalized film was slap stick comedy (most early documented real events like a train arriving). Its subject, a kid tricking a man to look into a hose and getting a face filled with water.
Chaplin entered film via Max Sennett at Keystone studios, the gold standard of early film comedy, just as film was about to explode in popularity. Chaplin rode atop that explosion for a good 15 years becoming the first international film star, and the richest. There is no real comparison for his fame until Mickey Mouse.
Chaplin started with Sennett 1914-15, worked with Mutual 1916-17, worked with First National 1918, and started United Artists in 1919 which he was involved with until his death.
I'm anxious to get to the next class, I wish I didn't have to wait two weeks.
Monday, January 15, 2007
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.
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.
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