Chaplin's Films Research Articles

“Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney

“Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney

Trans Chaplin

Trans Chaplin Rox Samer (bio) A body in process, in transformation, an incomplete body able to merge with other bodies—or other things—and create new bodies … this new body, for all its composite weirdness, strikes us as immediately recognizable rather than entirely alien: an insight into our own bodily experience, whether remembered from childhood or glimpsed in dreams. —Tom Gunning1 The lift of an eyebrow, however faint, may convey more than a hundred words. —Charles Chaplin2 In the weeks following my top surgery in December 2019, I enjoyed many a movie and television series with my care web.3 As my body healed and I turned my attention to preparing for the spring 2020 semester, including a course on US film history, I was taken with the most iconic and popular of historical media figures: Charlie Chaplin. The filmmaker's short films and silent features supported the recalibration of my body-mind as I prepared to re-enter the social world. They would also become films that I'd return to, that my own body would recall over the coming year, as I started taking testosterone and continued to transition with the minimal surveillance from cis society, quarantined at home with my cats and partner as my only witnesses. Chaplin's films, surprisingly, gave image to both the changes I yearned for and those I joyfully experienced. Until quite recently, transgender media studies has centered the study of transgender representation, meaning the analysis of film and television's few canonical trans characters. But the last five years have seen a renaissance in the field with a number of studies devoted to trans aesthetics, genre studies, [End Page 175] and industry studies revealing what is trans about the most mainstream, most popular, and oldest film and television fare.4 Among these, Cáel M. Keegan's Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (2018) demonstrates how the Wachowskis established a cinematic language for sensing beyond gender's dictated forms, and Quinlan Miller's Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History (2019) reveals the camp humor of 1950s and 1960s sitcoms to be brimming with gender nonconformity or queer gender. Their archives and methods are welcome in contemporary trans political discourse where trans activists, journalists, and scholars' paranoid readings routinely cite anti-trans violence—particularly the murders of trans women of color. Time and again, this discourse reduces trans women of color to a signifier for white supremacist and transphobic violence.5 As Jules Gill-Peterson argues, it's high time we shed "the predictive control that is the hallmark of paranoia for the much messier and potentially more pleasurable terrain of perverse laughter."6 Trans life is teeming with awkwardness and joy. Thus, while it may sound antithetical to much popular trans discourse, we find ourselves addressed by much film and television, past and present, including the futures of science fiction and humor of comedy (and not only when the butt of jokes). Here I demonstrate how the silent film comedian Charlie Chaplin, through a pantomime of agile, embodied shifts across not only gender but also species and kingdom, gave early moving image to trans phenomenology. Cinema and media studies has long acknowledged how "queer positions, queer readings, and queer pleasures are part of a reception space that stands simultaneously beside and within that created by heterosexuals and straight positions."7 Here I show how trans positions, readings, and pleasures likewise exist beside and within those of cisgender scholars and spectators. In what Tom Gunning once called Chaplin's "cinematic body" and "plastic ontology" and what André Bazin called the character Charlie's "unlimited imagination in the face of danger" and "total indifference to the category of things held sacred," one can perceive a trans way of life in all its awkward sensational and somatic glory.8 This trans retrospectatorship, which not only decodes but also encodes meaning, invites further reencounters and models a media studies methodology that affirms the very possibility of gleeful transition in the present.9 [End Page 176] Chaplin's oeuvre is replete with fluctuating forms of queer gender. In several short films, Chaplin evokes the early-twentieth-century figure of...

Silent Film Comedy and American Culture

Silent Film Comedy and American Culture

The Tramp & the Culture Industry: Adorno, Chaplin, and the Possibility of Progressive Comedy

The Tramp & the Culture Industry:Adorno, Chaplin, and the Possibility of Progressive Comedy George Potter (bio) A man stands in front of a conveyor belt, hands incessantly tightening bolts on featureless products as they pass before him one after the other, the belt's speed increasing with each demand from a distant, vigilant supervisor. Never speaking, the man does his best to increase the speed of his quick twists of the wrist to keep up with the movement of the conveyor belt. As the pace increases, the man eventually falls behind and runs alongside the conveyor belt, desperately trying to complete the job. Instead of catching up however, the man is pulled onto the conveyor belt and is swallowed by a hatch into which the products have been falling. The scene shifts to a screen full of large cogs, the man pulled across and between them, from one to the next, his hands still turning in the same twisting motion, as if he still were able to turn the bolts on the nameless products rather than being pulled between the cogs of the industrial machinery made large. Miraculously, he is neither crushed nor spit out the other end, but pulled back to safety, his hands still turning, as he deliriously falls into a ballet, wanting to turn every bolt-like object before him—buttons, body parts, a fire hydrant—until he eventually collapses into a shell of the man he once had been, overrun by the machinery, unable to see anything but cogs until he has a nervous breakdown. On its surface, this series of images from Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times would appear the perfect expression of T. W. Adorno's conception of the culture industry, in which "the progressive technical domination of nature becomes mass deception and is turned into a [End Page 73] means of fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves" (Culture 106). After all, for Adorno, industrialization and capitalism meant the steady and willful oppression of the masses into a ready supply of labor, such as that represented in Chaplin's film. However, Adorno also believed that art became a means of conditioning the masses into believing in the lie of progressive possibilities derived from their own "freedom" within a capitalist system that constrained them: People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all. (103)1 And chief among the art forms that were used to deceive the masses was the new technology of film, which both used industrial processes to reproduce itself and was replicated so widely that, for Adorno, it became the singular means by which to condition the masses. In film, Adorno wrote, "the mass product is the thing itself," and rare was the film, particularly outside of Eisenstein's work, with any more cultural value than the cars that rolled off Ford's assembly line (180). In fact, as part of the culture industry, Adorno viewed films as "neither guides for a blissful life, nor a new art of moral responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe the line, behind which stand the most powerful interests. The consensus which it propagates strengthens the blind, opaque authority" (105). Certainly, when one watches Mr. Smith go to Washington amid the Great Depression and on the verge of World War II, the lens through which Adorno viewed film becomes even easier to understand. At the same time one might expect Adorno to appreciate Chaplin's attempt to use the new form to foreground the mechanization of culture. Instead, when addressing Modern Times in a letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno writes: The idea that a reactionary individual can be transformed into a member of the avant...

'Monsieur Verdoux': Notes on an Ambiguous Case

A commentary of Charles Chaplin's film 'Monsieur Verdoux' (1947) focusing on the ambivalent dynamics of identification and of abjection proposed by the film, and on the way they relate to the cultural, ideological and personal/psychological context of the film's production.

Charlot franÇais: Charlie Chaplin, The First World War, and the Construction of a National Hero1

In 1927, Henry Poulaille recalled the arrival of Charlie Chaplin's films in France during the First World War. Soldiers in the trenches and civilians at the home front “went wild for Charlot […] It...

‘Films that are applauded all over the world’: Questioning Chaplin's popularity in Weimar Germany

Statements on Chaplin's popularity in Weimar Germany are usually based on textual sources, such as articles by intellectuals or promotional materials. This article questions Chaplin's popularity with audiences in Weimar Germany using contemporary film revenues and surveys on the popularity of films and stars. These primary sources demonstrate a group‐specific preference for Chaplin films. The social groups that formed Chaplin's core audience in Germany were urban workers and intellectuals, but not the audience at large.

No place for Peace-Mongers: Charlie Chaplin, Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Czechoslovak Communist Propaganda

During the escalation of the Cold War, Hollywood stars were framed in Czechoslovak Communist propaganda as possessing two qualities. Firstly, they were perceived in this most Western Soviet satelli...

Subverting Satire: Edgar Hilsenrath's Novel Der Nazi und der Friseur and Charlie Chaplin's Film The Great Dictator

Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator, a straightforward satire of Hitler and the Nazi movement, serves as a point of departure for Edgar Hilsenrath's Holocaust novel Der Nazi und der Friseur (The Nazi and the Barber). A comparison of their satiric elements and strategies demonstrates that the novel subverts the film's humanitarian appeal by ridiculing both perpetrators and victims of the Nazi atrocities. The novel's pervasive black humor undermines the satirical impulse and instead questions the validity of absolute categories in the representation of evil. For this reason, Hilsenrath's work occupies a special place within the tradition of Holocaust literature.

Tramps and nomads

The film Modern Times was singular in its historical moment as a work that considered youth as a creative and social force in itself. Indeed, while there are many ways to read the major themes in a film such as Modern Times, this article, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, engages Charlie Chaplin's film as a vehicle for exploring a certain kind of becoming-youth as a question of force. The kind of force that is explored here is the production of youth as a specific kind of radical social subjectivity; that is to say, as a subjectivity comprising multiple collisions, contestations and struggles between sets of proscribed social roles. The article investigates how the film engages the question of youth-adult identity as a social binary that can be collapsed into a relation that flees the social containment of both youth and adult.

チャールズ・チャップリンの映画作品における都市と建築空間

In this study, we aim to clarify the spatial characterization of film, which is influenced from not only film set but also casting role and a story. In this paper as the first step of the study, we focus on famous sixteen Charles Chaplin's films. To consider the locales of the films, we extract it and set criteria of background locale. Next we analyze the ratio of and the temporal transition of locale description, more over considered the attribute of the casting role. At the result, the character of the street symbolically expressed the feature of the background locales; Slum, Country, City-outside, City-inside and Special. We broke the temporal transition down into three patterns; Stay-type, Wandering-type and Pass-type, and clarified the contrast between main locales of each film by analysis of the locale organization.

Wyndham Lewis vs Charlie Chaplin

ABSTRACTThis article extends and refines the relations between cinema and modernist literature with a close reading of Wyndham Lewis' novel The Childermass in light of his severe critique of Chaplin's mimetic gestures. The Tramp persona, by the time of the novel's composition, had become a symptom, for Lewis, of what he found unoriginal, fraudulent and inauthentic in the culture industry. The two lead characters are compelled to enact routines from Chaplin films by the totalitarian Bailiff, who presides over the afterlife, at times appearing to his subjects as Chaplin. Performative mimesis, as exemplified by the Tramp persona, is transformed in the afterlife into a mechanised cliche which severs movement from volition, and supplants the authentic, anti-mimetic self. The endless reproducibility of individual gestures on film signifies, for Lewis, the deadness of mass-produced Hollywood group personality. The critique of Chaplin reinforces his attacks on Bergson's theory of duration in The Childermass and Time and Western Man.

Double Exposure

Double Exposure

First Sight: Blindness, Cinema and Unrequited Love

First Sight: Blindness, Cinema and Unrequited Love Thérèse Davis The true picture of the past flits by. The past can only be seized as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. —Walter Benjamin1 Charlie Chaplin's romantic comedy City Lights (1931) is widely regarded as the most melancholy and most beautiful of his films.2 The story revolves around the little tramp's love for a blind flower girl, who mistakes him for a wealthy gentleman. As with all Chaplin films, City Lights is also a playful critique of modern life. Here, the trope of "blind love" not only provides a string of comic sight gags. It can also be read as an allegorical staging of the forms of loss Walter Benjamin invoked in his argument about the impact of modernity on human sense perception. Made some two years after the introduction of sound, the film's nanative of too-lateness can be read as a longing for the particular sensibility of silent cinema, one greatly appreciated by Benjamin. It is well known that at this time Chaplin was very much concerned about his future as a filmmaker and a star.3 The poignancy of the now famous final sequence of close-ups in which the flower girl fails to recognize the tramp as her true love vividly displays the cost the girl pays for the restoration of her sight, namely the loss of her ideal image of love. Reviews at the time suggest this depiction JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.1 (Winter 2003): 48-62. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. First Sight: Blindness, Cinema and Unrequited Love 49 of loss was understood by audiences as a comment by Chaplin on his own recognizability, his struggle to secure a place for himself in the future of film. One critic (wrongly) predicted that the film's widespread appeal would reverse the trend in the film world for "talkies." In 1930, just one year prior to the release of City Lights, the German psychologist M. von Senden published his influential study, Space and Sight: The Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenitally Blind Before and After Operation. An interpretive study of two centuries of research on the congenitally blind before and after operation, Space and Sight seeks to contribute to the theory of our ideas of space, while its purpose , the author writes, is to "throw light on the full meaning of the task of teaching congenitally blind patients to see after operation" (14). It is an understatement to say that methods in this task have rapidly developed since this time. Nevertheless, von Senden's study of the state of being between blindness and sightedness remains of interest. It is a rich source book of studies of blindness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But more importantly, von Senden's interpretations of this research emphasize the process of psychological transformation that patients undergo as they re-orient their perceptual life from one that has been predominately tactual to that which is now dominated by visual modes of perception . As with Chaplin's romantic comedy, the stories contained in von Senden's work are not only nanatives of sensory restoration. They are also vivid records of the trauma associated with changes in sensory perception. And in this way, these quite different cinematic and scientific nanatives are not merely and, as it happens, by chance, contemporaneous with Benjamin 's writings on historical changes in human perception.4 They also open up a way to explore the physiological dimensions of Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image, to gain a better understanding of his theory of knowledge as an experience of simultaneous illumination and blindness . M. von Senden's seminal text on blind modes of perception, Space and Sight, is based on historical studies of patients after operations to recover the sense of sight. Von Senden explains that after such operations, patients are likely to experience "an initial stage of purely visual sensation," or 50 JNT what he calls an experience of "first sight." He offers this citation from the surgeon Grafe's (1891) work as a...

Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive Image in Red Scare America

This article examines the battle over popular culture in the age of McCarthyism. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under J. Edgar Hoover, targeted Charlie Chaplin because of his status as a cultural icon and as part of its broader investigation of Hollywood. Some of Chaplin's films were considered “communist propaganda,” but because Chaplin was not a member of the Communist Party, he was not among those investigated by HUAC in 1947. Nevertheless, he was vulnerable to protests by the American Legion and other patriotic groups because of both his sexual and political unorthodoxy. Yet, although countersubversives succeeded in driving Chaplin out of the country, they failed to build a consensus that Chaplin was a threat to the nation. Chaplin's story testifies to both the awesome power of the countersubversive campaign at mid-century and to some of its limitations as well.

From Haptic Interfaces to Man-Machine Symbiosis

From Haptic Interfaces to Man-Machine Symbiosis

The Chaplin encyclopedia

During Charlie Chaplin's 50-year film career he made over 90 movies. This book is a comprehensive A-Z detailing Chaplin's entire movie career, including lesser-known foreign-distributed versions of Chaplin's films.

Objects of Abjection: The Animation of Difference in Jean Genet's Novels

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD Nothing is inherently animate or inanimate. Call objects animate when they present a problem, when they make one notice, question, or challenge their nature; inanimate when they do not. Inanimate objects precisely play their parts in a predictable world. Receptive and supple to the touch, they assert a complete and discrete function that is also a sort of authority: Touch or move me as you wish, I am unchangeable in shape, meaning, aspect. In Rilke's account these objects are full; in Genet's they are rendered useful. To this category belong the sweet, flat icons of advertising that Mark Miller describes, whose self-satisfied place in a system predicated on the cash nexus depends only on our passive affirmation. One may draw examples from Genet's work: A judge's gavel is rendered useful when it is banged to regulate a (real) trial, a general's uniform when worn to war, a bishop's miter when donned for a christening. Each may be important when in use, but its importance is determined by its context and depends on a socially shared determination of meaning.(1) Such objects remind us that the system of meaning - of language, of ordered - depends on the separation of signifiers from one another (oat from goat, cat from hat, and so on) within a legible and comprehensive overall system: These small necessary differences never lead to a sense of incommensurability. Such objects never generate a difference that goes beyond the system's ability to promise linguistic uniformity. Though difference is inevitable between objects, no one of these objects is out of the loop. Nothing means something in itself.(2) Completely flush to the system, such simple objects have what Genet calls stiffness and poverty, what Proust calls Habit. In his book-length study of Genet, Derrida calls such objects remain (s). Genet learns little from such objects, and they matter little to his writing. On the other side of human experience lie animate objects. Sometimes we find ourselves examining something more closely than had ever seemed necessary before: It has managed to catch our attention somehow. While there is no object that has this quality inherently or constantly (Lacan's claim for the phallus as the object extraordinaire of lack and excess notwithstanding), problem objects constantly surface in everyday life. A car can be just part of your way of getting around one day, but the next (when you've heard of a friend's crash) a site of anxiety.(3) Literary and philosophical texts choose to cite as their exempla of this sort of animation a remarkable range of material objects (Fisher). To Rilke, it is the incompleteness of dolls that draws forth a visceral response from humans: Other toys are satisfied with being only mechanical, but dolls evidence a lack.(4) To Proust, the madeleine pierces the veil that keeps Marcel pleasantly stupefied in the present: It threatens to bring back a past inaccessible in the world of ordinary material objects, inaccessible to those who reminisce without a material prop. To Andre Bazin, the almost-disastrous gestures of Charlie Chaplin remystify the world: In Chaplin's films, objects have a life of their own, an intention and mobility that saps or shapes human actions.(5) And to Karel Capek (in an account that resonates with my own experiences as a klutz) it is the genuine oaf (Chaplin only plays one) who reveals the secret ambitions of the material world: Shoelaces really want to be tied to each other, the purpose of corners is to crack skulls, and doorways want to make us stoop unnaturally. There are a great number of ways in which life can accrue around objects in the ordinary world. For example, at certain times everything in the world can be charged with agency. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, projects a feeling out from Dalloway's mind onto all the objects around her, a sort of glowing emotional supercharge: Somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best. …

Charlie Chaplin and his times

One of America's most distinguished biographers, Lynn goes far beyond a mere recounting of the well-known events in Chaplin's career. By setting his life, his art, and his controversial politics in the context of his times, Lynn gives the book extra richness and dimension. In penetrating and exquisite detail, Lynn also traces the deep psychological connections between the man and the artist and brings his own keen critical intelligence and historical awareness to the meanings of Chaplin's films. And he has at last succeeded in separating the facts of his life from Chaplin's own artful fictions. Combining the strengths of a seasoned literary biographer and social historian, Lynn debunks the Chaplin myths passed on by unquestioning film critics, biographers, adulatory documentary filmmakers - and by Chaplin himself. He returns to the original sources to trace the origins of Chaplin's comic routines, and relates the story lines of his films to events in his childhood as well as his adult preoccupations. Lynn documents Chaplin's meteoric rise as a film actor, his failed early marriages and love affairs with glamorous stars, his communist sympathies, the infamous Joan Barry case, his voluntary exile in Switzerland with his young wife, Oona O'Neill Chaplin, and his triumphant return to America in 1972. And through it all is the gleaming thread of Chaplin's films. By delving deeply into the unique combination of slapstick and sentiment, wit and whimsy that characterize Chaplin's art, Lynn deftly captures both the magnetism of the man and the magic he created in his films.

A postmodern endeavour: from history as representation of ‘the past’ to historical thinking

This paper starts from the postmodern assumption that there is no ‘there, there’. The question that gives the paper its structure concerns the predicament that this assumption poses for the modern subject history. If we let go of the modernist assumption, then we face the demise of the subject called history. Instead, we have historical thinking, a move to thinking about thinking. The second part of the paper illustrates the experiencing of postmodern thinking historically through reflexive thinking. I use a Chaplin film to promote dialogue on what is normally taken for granted in life. The participants in dialogue explore their own responses to the film, learning to think reflexively as a way of being. ...if we accept the creative impact of narrative upon our constructions of the past, are we to give up on finding ‘a there, there’ altogether? (Gabella 1995: 141)