FILM STUDIES 1

FILM STUDIES

Subject : FILM STUDIES

(For undergraduate students)

Year : 1st

Paper No. & Title : 1A

Social History of Cinema
(Group A: Western Cinema)

Topic No. & Title : 2b

Silent Comedy

Lecture No. & Title : 1

Charlie Chaplin Lec. – 01

Video Programme Link: 1A.2b.1

SCRIPT

Chaplin’s cinematic body defies verbal description -

and that’s the point. His body transforms before our
eyes; it even occasionally sprouts wings and flies.
However, as the crumpled body of Chaplin’s Icarus-
like fallen angel in The Kid shows us, he never loses
his physical nature; his grace defies, but cannot deny,
gravity. In the face of propriety he asserts the body’s
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less than genteel functions. But besides enacting the

clown’s traditional role of affirming the body’s
appetites against social convention, Chaplin’s physical
nature also exceeds his human identity and
transforms itself into the mechanical, the animal and
even the vegetable. His body seems at points to
disaggregate itself, with limbs operating
independently of each other, or to merge with other
bodies and create new creatures. Chaplin slides up
and down the great chain of being, achieving a plastic
ontology in which inanimate objects become bodily
appendages, and the body itself suddenly seems inert.
-Tom Gunning

Charles Spencer Chaplin, better known as Charlie

Chaplin, is probably the most well known, the most
readily recognised figure in the whole history of
cinema. I mean, he would be recognised by anyone as
an actor and filmmaker, especially as an actor
performer in any corner of the world, even by people
who might not have seen many films in their lives.
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And this happened pretty early in his life. He joined

the film industry in 1914 and by 1916 he was
considered a figure who was known all over the world
for his films. If you look at the early life of Charlie
Chaplin, he was born into a rather poor family. His
mother was a music hall artist. These music hall or
vaudeville are the places where basically where the
stage shows would take place and performers would
do all sorts of things on the stage. They would do
comic acts, they would do dances, they would sing
and so on and so forth and other things; there would
be magic shows and so on.

Charlie grew up in that kind of atmosphere. Both his

father who was estranged from his mother at a very
early age and his mother Hannah Chaplin were music
hall performers. And when Charlie was only 10 or 12
years old, they had a life of poverty and privation. So
they had to earn money and his mother was the only
earner in the family. She had to retire because her
voice broke down. And Charlie by force of
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circumstances was pushed into the stage. He became

a boy perform, somebody who would sing, somebody
who would dance on the stage. In 1914 by that he
was quite well-known in a music hall performance
circuit in England. In 1914, he travelled to the US with
a company – a group called Fred Carnot group. And at
that time in the US, the people who were associated
with the early American film industry noticed him. And
they offered him a work in the film industry. Charlie
decided to try his luck and he stayed back. He joined
the Mack Sennett’s company. Mack Sennett was a
figure who was very important in the early silent
comedy filmmaking.

So Mack Sennett took him in into filmmaking and we

will soon find that other great comedians of the silent
era, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Harol Lloyd and
Roscoe (fatty) Arbuckle, Laurel and Hardy in the film.
All these people were some way or the other
associated with either Mack Sennett himself in his
Company or Keystone company or some of Mack
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Sennett’s associate’s. So this was the hub of silent

comedy production. Charlie soon became a very
important figure in this silent comedy production. He
initially did not wear the typical costume that you now
see. We all know him by his baggy trousers, his tight
undersize jacket, his short cap which is undersized,
oversize shoes and so and so his stick, and his
moustache.

These things were not immediately adopted by him. It

came through experimentation. If you look at the very
first film, Charlie looks different in that. But then from
the second or third film onwards, he decided to wear
this costume and we could immediately see that he
appeared in the character of a tramp. The character
tramp Charlie is almost automatically, organically
naturally coming out of this costume. So with few
modifications he kept that costume almost till the end
of 1940-41, till The Great Dictator (1940). Because,
after that he made films, but he actually decided to
abandon the tramp character. He played other kinds
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of roles.

So in 1914 his film career begins and quickly moves

through other companies because he was demanding
higher and higher fees. And he was becoming
extremely popular and more than that he did not want
to remain only a comedian actor. He had a vision of
his own. He wanted to see things that he wanted to;
he believed in that he wanted to say. He wanted to
direct his own films. He wanted to have control over
the entire process of filmmaking. So what happened
was by 1915-16, when he was passed through a
company called SNA, then First National, then comes
to a company called Mutual – very quickly changing
his production commitment to various production
companies. By that time he comes to Mutual Company
in 1916, we get the mature tramp Charlie character of
the early short film period.

Let’s remember that the full length films like The Kid
(1921) or Gold Rush (1925) or City Lights (1931) are
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yet to come. They will come in the 1920s the following

decade, not yet. So, by 1916 he was in a position not
only to demand a very high fee from the producers,
but also his own productions space, his studio space;
he was to build up his own production mechanism, so
that he could think of sets, mies-en-scene, all other
elements of filmmaking independently. He could have
total control over his stories, the plotlines and
narrative. He could spend a lot of time on each film
because he was in those days in the short films – the
one reelers, two reelers. The one reelers would be
about 15 minutes; two reelers would be about 30
minutes. They were churned out by these companies
in very large numbers.

But Charlie quickly realised that in order to distinguish

himself, he had to put his own personal stamp on this
films, which is why we immediately recognise these
films to be Chaplin films today. Many of his
contemporaries are actually not so well remembered.
Many of them are lost. We don’t see their films any
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longer. If you look at television, we don’t see silent

films any longer being telecast by channels, but
Chaplin silent films from 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918 are
still shown even today.

The reason is that Chaplin got his own kind of space,

his own freedom to choose his actors, choose his
stories to spend a lot of time on making these films
individually. So in each act, those things that we see
him doing with his body, whether running around,
bumping against something, doing a somersault or
falling from a height and so on are extremely difficult
things and these are not what we do nowadays, these
are not optically or digitally manipulated. They had to
do these most of these stunts on the set and Charlie
insisted on making them perfect.

So from 1916 onwards, when we look at films like One

AM (1916) or a little later A Dog’s Life (1918), A
Shoulder Arms (1918) and The Pilgrim (1923) we
could see that his own world is not only just getting a
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few laughs here and there; it’s not only as bumping

against things, falling into all sorts of silly and kind of
stay in circumstances –that’s of course there and that
very much part of in the comedian’s smell, but at the
same time he is also trying to build a world of tramps,
immigrants, homeless people and of funny looking
people who are rich, powerful but essentially absurd
and strange and so on. It’s time to explore all sorts of
working-class life situations, alcoholism, family
quarrels, this and that. You look at Pay Day (1922) for
example; it's a typical example of that. Even One AM
is a very typical example and The Pilgrim is also
typical examples of a certain kind of social life coming
alive – comically, sometimes gratuitously, but at the
same time one cannot miss that these are not just
getting laughs. These are also comments being made;
commentaries being made on the kind of early 20th
century life that Charlie found in the US.

He came from a background where he faced really

difficult times, faced hunger, faced all sorts of
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desperation, fear. He and his brother Sidney in their

childhood had to spend a few months in the poor
house in London which is like an orphanage; because
their mother was not in a position to look after them
at that time. She lost her mind for a while. So he has
been through all things... a kind of atmosphere that
we find in Charles Dickens's novels. Chaplin has seen
them at first hand, experienced them and he was
politically and socially an extremely conscious person.
He was alive to his society.

He was not just clown doing all sorts of funny things.

Though let us remember, Chaplin did belong to a
glorious tradition of clowning. Let’s not also forget
that and if you read his autobiography and if you read
other kind of accounts of his life, he paid rich tributes
to people like for example Grimaldi of 19th century
who was a very very famous circus clown. He thought
that he belong to the tradition of clowning coming
from commedia del arte, coming from all sorts of a
popular performances, clowns like Pierrot for example,
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clowns like Pantalone. Pantalone was actually an

Italian clown because he wore these kinds of baggy
pants that we can associate with that word with
trousers. Pantalone, Colombina – all of these were
clown characters circulating in the theatre world,
circus world for about two centuries or more before
Charlie came into the scene.

So he belonged to that tradition but at the same time

he was thoughtful enough and politically alive enough
to actually see that laughter can be directed at society
critically. You can expose all sorts of inequities, all
sorts of sufferings, people's desperation,
homelessness and hunger, all of these. They never
left Charlie Chaplin till the end of his life. Even though
he was enormously successful; at one point probably
the most highly paid person in the world. But he
would never forget this street life, the life of the
homeless, the life of the factory worker whose
factories have shut down. If you look at his late films
like Modern Times (1936) you see that Charlie Chaplin
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is acutely aware of the political economic crisis of his

times.

So from 1916 as I said, he slowly developed his style,

milieu set of actors and so on. He was free to choose
his material and he was free to spend a lot of time on
each of these films which finally led him to create his
own company. It was initially a distribution company
but then it became quite big. I mean, he sold his
share to other people later on. But we still see the
logo of this company, United Artists. He created
United Artists, a Hollywood studio and distribution
company initially but then also production company
with two very big stars of those days, Douglas
Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. With this company
United Artists, Charlie had even more kind of freedom
to plan his film. He became also the music director of
his own films. From this period onwards if you look at
his films, all of those will tell you that Chaplin has the
screenwriter, story writer, director, producer and
music director. So he created music also for his own
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films. Now, we might ask what is this music doing in a

silent film?

In the case of the USA, sound came formerly to

cinema in 1927. Till then, between 1895 and 1927, all
cinema was silent, true. But let us remember that
these films were hardly ever really silent for the
people who watched them. Because there would be
live orchestra which accompanied film showing. There
would be sometimes a small orchestra; sometimes a
bigger orchestra playing in the venue at the theatre
with these films which were being shown. And often,
we have no evidence of this happening to Charlie
Chaplin’s films. They didn’t have sound track. But it
was not a silent experience. Things were happening
silently on the screen but there was sound coming to
the audience as addendum. So these films are hardly
actually silent. They didn't have soundtrack but it was
not a silent experience. So they had to compose
music; Charlie started composing music for his own
films also.
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Now in the1920s, if you look at the dates, he takes

about 3 - 4 years or sometimes even more than that
to make one film. Nobody was doing that in Hollywood
at those days. You could not take four five years or
that kind of long interval between producing two films.
Only Charlie could afford to do that because of the
enormous fame and prestige. Let's also not forget it
was the enormous amount of money that he was
making as a result of the huge success of his films. In
1921 he made a major film The Kid; this is a feature
length film and it's no longer a short film or a two
reeler. This full-length feature length film became
immediately a worldwide sensation, you know; we still
watch it, many of us have watched it many times
over. The Kid played by Jackie Coogan also that boy
actor became extremely popular. He made a slightly
different kind of film in between called A Woman of
Paris (1923) with Edna Purviance his favourite actress
at that time and then another masterpiece in 1925
The Gold Rush. These films established his hallmark.
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Somebody who would mix pain, sense of deep

sadness with laughter. That is what the description
Chapliness is all about. Somebody who would give us
some of the finest performances on screen possible in
terms of that time in terms of the physical agility and
skill, in terms of gags and slapstick; these were all
slapstick comedies – bodily physical comedy.

The perfection to which Chaplin and one must also say

Buster Keaton, his contemporary took the slapstick
comedy in some height that you cannot have in a
sound film. Because, in sound cinema when we talk,
you cannot use some of these facial and bodily
expressions any longer. It’s an extension of
pantomime that they were doing. And performance-
wise, expressivity-wise The Kid, Gold Rush, if you take
just these two films from his 1920s work, one can see
that he has reached the perfection and nothing can be
surpassing than that kind of fineness and subtlety of
expression and that kind of hugely comic kind of
potential that he creates with his body and face and
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situations and so on.

But as I would emphasise again one must also

remember that these were not just situations of
laughter. There were also situations of reflection of
thinking about one's surroundings, of thinking about
real people's real suffering and desperation, despair
and struggle for survival, survival on the street,
survival from one job to another. Charlie Chaplin
would never forget this aspect of social reality. He
rightly says, “I always like walking in the rain, so no
one can see me crying.” We understand what he
means.