Having had the good fortune to be able to attend and take part in Cineteca di Bologna's Chapliniana-a celebration of the symbolic end of Progetto Chaplin, the several-year-long project in which Charlie's films have been restored and documents have been scanned and uploaded onto the Charlie Chaplin online archive-I decided to devote this month's newsletter to the events taking place during Cinema Ritrovato week (always the first week in July) in Bologna. In keeping with the interview format, however, for this year's newsletters, I decided to formulate one question and ask several Chaplin-interested folks in attendance to respond to it. That question and its responses will appear at the end of the newsletter.
accompanied
Bryony Dixon's compilation of a group
of films that would have been typical
for a 1915 movie program in the UK.
She included a roll call of the dead
(WWI, you know), a short dramatic film
concerning military heroism, a newsreel
about the Lusitania, and Chaplin's
The Bank. The Charlie Chaplin
Archive team gave an interesting and
informative presentation about the new
archive website that will be launched
very soon. David Robinson spoke on Marcelline,
the clown, one of Chaplin's admitted
inspirations, and showed a recently
discovered film clip of him. Serge Bromberg,
of Lobster Films, showed two films featuring
Charlie without his moustache and accompanied
them himself. Sam Stourdzé, the
creator of the "Chaplin in Pictures"
exhibit, gave an illustrated talk on
Charlie's physicality. Kevin Brownlow
talked about the making of The Tramp
and the Dictator and then showed
the film itself. And Bernard Eisenschitz
talked on Chaplin and modernity, or
rather showed Chaplin's influences on
filmmakers who followed him. All of
these presentations were illustrated
by restored films and, of course, the
highlight was the Keystones. I think
my personal favorite was a simply incredible
print of The Masquerader. As
I am discovering with all of these restorations,
the Keystones are not nearly the plotless
pastiches that we all once thought them
to be. It turns out that they only suffer
greatly because of the many omissions
and poor film quality of the versions
we have all seen.The highlight of the festival, however, was the accompanied screenings, and there were an incredible three over the course of the week. The first two were housed in the Teatro Communale, an eighteenth century opera house in Bologna that easily satisfies anyone's ideas and fantasies about what such a thing must be. The first Saturday night we saw The Kid and The Idle Class with the Teatro's orchestra being lead by Timothy Brock. It was a very good way to start the week. Wednesday we were treated to Tim's own restoration of Charlie's score for Modern Times, a score which I've been wanting to experience since I missed its debut in LA all the way back in June 2000. It was definitely worth the wait. And, by this time, another important guest had arrived at the festival-actor Ben Gazzara and his wife-and they stole the pre-show amusements
by disregarding their assigned seats and
choosing their own, with dog in-tow. More
important to me (and most others) was
the fact that Michael and Christopher
Chaplin introduced the film that night,
and if Christopher could look any more
like his father, someone please tell me
HOW. And the last night, the final Saturday
of the festival featured Tim Brock's brand
new restoration of Charlie's score for
The Gold Rush. This one was performed
with the film on the Piazza Maggiore,
the large square in Bologna. In other
words, it was outside. So, the gentle
breezes and overwhelming crowd came together
to affect Charlie's film and music and
really, it was almost an overwhelming
experience. We all forget how beautiful
the score is for The Gold Rush.
And, to top it all off, if indeed
anything further is needed, was Sam Stourdzé's
"Chaplin in Pictures" exhibit (Chaplin
e l'immagine) housed in Bologna at the
beautiful Sala Borsa. I have written about
this exhibit in a previous newsletter,
so will not do so here, except to relate
the opinion of my friend Alessandra Garofalo
who mentioned that the juxtaposition of
Charlie's photos and the renaissance architecture
of the building worked together to make
the exhibit a sort of work of art in itself.
After seeing the exhibit again at the
Sala Borsa, I'm very sad that I was unable
to do what I had originally wanted to
do-that is, experience the exhibit in
each of its venues, for certainly, it
would be a new adventure each and every
time.
Finally, as promised, I decided to take advantage of the fact that the festival often turns out to be one of the rare gatherings of Chaplin scholars. I chose four men who I felt could give very different perspectives and also who had not been interviewed for the newsletter before. They are:
Chuck Maland is the
author of the acclaimed Chaplin
and American Culture: The Evolution
of a Star Image, for which he received
many awards and a nomination for the
Pulitzer Prize, and Professor of English
and Cinema Studies at the University
of Tennessee Knoxville.
Chuck is also interviewed from time to time for Chaplin documentaries of one sort or another (BBC radio and A & E Entertainment, to name two). He has recently completed a book on City Lights for the British Film Institute and will be working on one for Progetto Chaplin this year and next.
Hooman Mehran is a co-editor of The Chaplin Review, and all around film comedy afficianado. Hooman has written widely on Chaplin and has presented his work most recently at the Charlie Chaplin conference hosted by the BFI in 2005 and this year's Kyoto Chaplin conference.
Frank Scheide is the other co-editor of The Chaplin Review and cataloguer of Chaplin's Mutual film outtakes for the BFI. Frank is also an Associate Professor of Communications at the University of Arkansas and is on the board of the Buster Keaton Celebration in Iola, Kansas (as is Hooman).
Lee Tsiantis is a
Rights Analyst in the Turner Entertainment
Legal Group in Atlanta. His work tools
are the studio legal documents of all
the films that Ted Turner bought in
1986 (the pre-1986 MGM, pre-1950 Warner
Bros. and RKO films). In working with
his clients in Turner Classic Movies,
who needed his research assistance to
respond to a viewer inquiry, he untangled
the rights to six long-unseen RKO films
made between 1933-38, including A
Man to Remember (1938), allowing
the channel to purchase the films' copyrights
and showcase them on TCM in April with
the theme "RKO: Lost and Found."
And here is the question I asked all four:
Charlie began to be concerned
that his work was "old fashioned" at
least in 1967 when the movie critics
overwhelmingly labeled his new film
A Countess from Hong Kong with this
adjective. Yet, in 2007, Chaplin and
his work seem to have had a resurgence.
Movie critics once staunchly opposed
to Chaplin's work as "too sentimental,"
have engaged in re-examinations of it
with the result that they are now both
admirers and promoters. Both Richard
Schickel and David Thompson are clear
examples of this. How do you explain
Chaplin's seeming health in 2007 and
do you think it will continue? Why or
why not?
The claim that Chaplin's work was old-fashioned actually predates A Countess from Hong Kong by at least three decades. Because he knew that the comic pantomime of the tramp character was central to his success, Chaplin wisely became an aesthetic conservative (even as he started to become more progressive politically) when he resisted dialogue entirely in City Lights and for the most part in Modern Times, which came out seven or eight years after nearly every American movie house had been wired for the talkies. That's a major reason that Otis Ferguson-one of the most consistently interesting American reviewers in the middle and later 1930s-wrote in his 1936 New Republic review that "Modern Times is about the last thing they should have called the new Chaplin picture." He went on to complain that many of the scenes, like the skating in the department store, seemed only like reworkings of the comic shorts from the 1910s. Yet "old-fashioned" is in the eyes of the beholder: what's old-fashioned to one person is mastery of comic form to the next.
It is true, though, that for a time in the 1980s and 1990s it became fashionable to criticize Chaplin's "sentimentality" in favor of Buster Keaton's stoic response to the world as expressed through his comic persona and films. I attribute this to a couple of factors. First, Keaton's silent features and many of his short films came available on laserdisc in the Art of Buster Keaton collection, which allowed cineastes to review his work the way they could earlier with Chaplin films on VHS. Also, in the U.S. at least, as film studies was institutionalizing, struggling for respectability, and film theory was becoming ascendant, Keaton's films somehow seemed more interesting while Chaplin's sentiment seemed too mainstream and Victorian, only remotely connected to the modern world.
I do think that's changed some in the
last decade. I attribute some of the
renewed interest in Chaplin-and acceptance
of the breadth of emotions evoked in
his films-to the work of Progetto Chaplin
and the encouragement of Association
Chaplin. By digitizing and making available
to scholars the rich variety of materials
from the Chaplin studios, they make
it possible for more people to study
and think about Chaplin and his movies.
And by encouraging public exhibition
of Chaplin's films with live orchestral
accompaniment and of museum exhibits
about his life and work, like the ones
we've encountered in Bologna this week,
audiences are able to experience Chaplin's
films in a way that makes them come
alive and shows viewers why Chaplin
has been considered one of the world's
great filmmakers and performers.
Because even more of the films are being
preserved-as in the current cooperative
venture to restore Chaplin's Keystones-we're
able to get a better sense of what Chaplin
was doing early in his career.
Back in the 1960s Andrew Sarris wrote
that "viewed as a whole, Chaplin's career
is a cinematic biography of the highest
level of artistic expression," and I
still find that assertion convincing.
Chaplin's sentiment-as expressed in
movies like The Kid and City
Lights-will never appeal to everyone.
Human beings are too complex and various
for that to happen. However, for anyone
interested in the history of cinema
and its major filmmakers, encountering
Chaplin's work should provide ample
rewards for a long time.
Chaplin was being called old-fashioned
by critics long before A Countess
from Hong Kong. There are scattered
references to this in reviews dating
as far back as the 1920s, and by the
time of The Great Dictator,
it had become a chorus. But having said
that, Chaplin's popularity never depended
on his technique - it was always the
way he connected with his audiences
that was important. He lost that connection
with critics and the audiences in the
1940s, but then had a critical resurgence
in the 1960s and 1970s, after which
his star fell at the expense of Buster
Keaton's. There does seem to be some
sort of a comeback in the eyes of critics
now at the beginning of the 21st century
(but NOT with American audiences, who
remain indifferent). If this resurgence
is ever going to amount to anything
substantial, it will hinge again on
his ability as an actor to directly
connect with the viewer, and not on
his sophistication as a storyteller.
Frank:
These questions bring a number of issues
to mind: Countess, is an issue
unto itself. The seemingly simple notion
of trying to define a perception of
Chaplin is complicated, because this
perspective changes every five to ten
years--not only from generation to generation
but from country to country. Countess
is definitely not a film of its time,
and I was really curious concerning
how it would be perceived when shown
as a part of Cinema Ritrovato this year.
Critics did indeed call Countess
old-fashioned at the time of its release.
Usually when this phrase is employed
it means that someone is continuing
to do something in an archaic fashion.
But Chaplin wasn't repeating himself
with Countess cinematically.
If this movie is old-fashioned, what
group of pictures are we comparing it
with? It doesn't look like the Rock
Hudson/Doris Day type of farce. It's
still different. If this movie harkens
back to another time in Charlie's career,
it was when he was working at the Circle
Theater with Jerry [Epstein] and Sydney
[Chaplin, Jr.]. And so, I don't think
A Countess from Hong Kong initially
was old-fashioned. It just wasn't the
type of movie that people were seeing
at the time it came out. We're now far
enough away from the late 1960s that
we can consider this picture outside
of the period in which it was made,
and it either works or it doesn't work
as a film in its own right. I think
that time has been rather good to A
Countess from Hong Kong. It was
meant to be the kind of light-hearted
farce that Charlie and his fellow collaborators
enjoyed producing at the Circle Theater.
Unfortunately, the
I believe that film scholars are currently showing a greater appreciation for Chaplin as actor, director, choreographer, composer, and commentator of his times, but general audiences may be a bit less receptive. Speaking as a teacher, I don't think casual viewers instantly gravitate to the art and novelty of black and white film the way they once did when channel hopping on television, for example. That said, many of my students still appreciate Chaplin films I show in the classroom after some preparation. If filmmakers from the past are to find a new audience, potential viewers may need the kind of exposure and training long demanded for developing an appreciation for such comparable specialized art forms as opera and ballet.
Lee:
Chaplin's work, the scholarly reception
of that work, as well as his reputation
seems to me alive and well in 2007 --
at least among the mainstream of film
scholars/film lovers; embracing silent
films in general, alas, remains problematic
for the mass market. Within this mainstream,
I'm willing to attribute Chaplin's health
largely to the fact that all of his
major work is available for viewing
on home video. One simply can't assess
(or, for that matter, reassess)
an artist's work unless the work is
able to be seen, preferably in
restored, optimal quality prints or
video transfers. Whatever the shortcomings
of the domestic 2003-04 release of the
MK2/Warner Home Video (PAL-to-NTSC transfer
issues which marginally cripple the
originals' pitch/speed), Chaplin's major
1918-57 output is available for all
to view -- and in source material that's
often generated from well-preserved
original negative materials thanks to
Association Chaplin and the restoration
efforts of L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratories.
It's my observation, largely from being
able to see the films from the vantage
point of public screenings at Il Cinema
Ritrovato festivals in Bologna in 2006-7,
that Chaplin's "sentimentality,"
which has usually been proffered by
detractors as his weakness compared
to his fellow genius Keaton, simply
does not appear to be as severe a liability
as these later film commentators would
have it -- in fact, and especially in
the case of the still heart-wrenching
The Kid, the film's pathos
(what I prefer to call it) is often
quite powerful emotionally, and reveals
itself as a distinct strength. Chaplin's
imagining Calvero the clown's (that
is, his own) death in Limelight,
has been cited as a high point of brazen
artistic hubris, but it actually comes
across, as Bernardo Bertolucci has so
accurately observed, as the death of
"The Tramp" as envisaged by
its creator. If this character is to
pass on, why not give it a fitting requiem?
The right has been earned.
As long as his films are able to be
seen by a mass audience, I think Chaplin's
reputation and his deservedly exalted
status in film history will prevail.