The following content is provided under a Creative
Commons license.
Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare
continue to offer high quality educational resources for free.
To make a donation or view additional materials
from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare
at ocw.mit.edu.
DAVID THORBURN: All right.
Hello people.
Welcome back to the second week of our course.
I'm happy to have this wonderful live audience.
But I also would like very briefly
to address our video audience, who
will no doubt be watching this long after I'm
dead on MIT's OpenCourseWare.
So think of this as a voice from the grave.
You and the video audience will sometimes
notice that as I'm lecturing to this lively group,
I will turn this way and look up.
You should realize that what I'm turning toward and looking up
at is this projection screen, which we will show you.
And it sometimes has this outline on it,
which hopefully guides us through each lecture
and sometimes has other information and material on it.
Sometimes it isn't worth shifting over
to show the video audience that image.
But that's what I'm looking at when I look so strange.
I'd like to begin today by taking a step back,
by reminding you that the order in which we're
watching the movies in this course
is a little bit arbitrary because I
wanted to use the feature films as the defining date.
And that's the reason that we made
Keaton come first because The General is an earlier film.
It was almost a decade earlier than Modern Times.
But the truth is Chaplin entered film before Keaton.
And Keaton had certain advantages
by the time he entered the movies, in part because
of Chaplin's example, although also
because of the fairly complicated way
in which silent film had already elaborated itself
after the first 10 years or so of the 20th century.
So I want to take a step back into that early phase,
just before Chaplain becomes a filmmaker really in 1911,
I think is when he joins the Keystone Studios.
Just to remind you of a story that is told systematically
in David Cook's History of Narrative Film,
which is part of our required reading in the course.
And I hope you will attend especially
to the details Cook offers about those early years in Hollywood.
If you read those chapters from Cook
about the early years of Hollywood
before Chaplin, the movies before Chaplin,
you'll recall that one of the most fundamental things that
happens before Chaplin even appears
is the establishment essentially of the industry I
was describing last time.
The migration to the West Coast is worth mentioning.
Because movies, of course, begin their career
in the United States on the East Coast.
Edison's first movie studio was in East Orange, New Jersey.
The Biograph Company was originally
located on the East Coast.
And almost all the original earliest
films, even the earliest films that were put into production
and shown commercially, were made on the East Coast.
Why did people move to the West Coast?
Why did Hollywood become the sort of center
of the movie industry?
What explains it?
It happens very early.
One might think of it as a very important moment
in the history of culture, of popular culture,
because for all the changes that the movie industry has
undergone, Hollywood remains the kind of center
of what is now a kind of global enterprise of movie making.
What helps to explain the move to the West Coast?
Nothing fancy.
In the back, yes.
AUDIENCE: Film year around.
DAVID THORBURN: They could film the year around.
Why is that important, especially in the early days?
AUDIENCE: You can make movies whenever.
You don't have to produce them in the summer.
DAVID THORBURN: Yes.
You're not as dependent on the weather.
The Sun always shines in California.
If it's overcast, you can still film.
And there's no snow.
There's virtually no rain.
The weather is very conducive to the making of film.
And especially in this early phase,
when film stock was relatively primitive compared
to the complexity of film stock we
have-- today, the film stock is so subtle
that you can film in the dark.
You can film by fire light.
Even amateur folks owning camcorders
can film virtually in the dark.
They can film by electric light inside a room.
Or tape, they can videotape in that way.
In the earliest days of film, you
needed a tremendous amount of light to expose the film.
And what it meant that you were dependent on the weather.
So that was one major reason.
But there's another one that's even more important
in some ways, even though that would seem a sufficient reason
for explaining why the migration to the West Coast occurred.
There's another even more powerful one.
It has to do with the idea of patent warfare.
Yes.
What's your suggestion?
You don't have to give the right answer.
Give a--
AUDIENCE: Different types of terrains fall into those--
DAVID THORBURN: Oh, that's also true.
Yes.
The environment of Southern California
is particularly conducive to a variety of film projects.
There are mountains nearby.
There's ocean nearby.
There's desert nearby.
And, of course, that's also something
that makes it a uniquely valuable environment.
Maybe not a unique environment, but a particularly
valuable environment.
And that's a good answer.
And you're right about that.
But there's something else.
And it has to do with conditions in the East and Thomas Edison.
Remember, Edison in a certain way
wanted to lay claim to virtually every invention
in the early part of the 20th century.
And he was primed to do so.
He was already recognized as a great genius,
as the premier entrepreneurial inventor of his era.
And he immediately, as he had done
with other projects of his, began
to take out patents to try to control
the use of movie technology.
He wanted to become the Edison monopoly.
He was fantasizing that he would control the movie-- whatever
the movie industry would become, Edison's company
fantasized it was going to take control of that.
And, in fact, the Edison Company hired law enforcement officers
and, according to some historians,
even in some places hired goons, thugs, to go and break up
the sets and the shooting of rival producers who were,
according to Edison, infringing on Edison copyrights.
So the other reason-- another reason for the move to the West
Coast was a lot of the entrepreneurial movie makers
wanted to get free of the patent police.
They wanted to get out from under the scrutiny of Edison
and his police.
And by running to the West Coast, they were able to do so.
And, in fact, Edison was unsuccessful in controlling
the technology, as Cook and other historians
have made clear to us.
So the move to the West Coast is a very important one.
And I will return to the cultural, the historical,
and ideological or intellectual implications
of that move to the West Coast in a few lectures,
maybe next week if I get the opportunity.
Because I want to talk a little bit more
about what it meant for American movies
that film was made on the farthest western verge
of the society, away from cultural centers,
unlike the way in which movies developed in Europe.
And I'll talk about that implication a bit later.
Probably next week, when we talk about the great German silent
film that concludes our segment on silent films.
So even before Chaplin enters, the rudiments-- or more
than the rudiments, the basic system of mass production,
of studio-based production, of manufacture
of the films in one place and then
the distribution system that developed in which theaters
essentially rented or purchased films from the producers
was already in place.
And, of course, the two great figures here
is Thomas Ince-- and Cook writes very well about Ince
and his contribution to the movies--
probably the person to whom we could attribute the invention
of the movie studio, I suppose.
And Mack Sennett, who developed the Keystone Studios,
out of which so many important early comedies emerged
and the studio which Chaplin joined
when he came to the United States
to become a movie maker in, I think, 1911 or 1912.
So Ince and Mack Sennett are important.
And one might say one further thing about this moment.
As you know if you've read Cook, Sennett
created what came to be called the Keystone Studios.
And Keystone Studios were named, I think-- or maybe
it was the reverse.
I'm not sure-- was associated with their prime product
in the early days.
And they were called the Keystone Kops Komedies.
We're going to show you a fragment of those in a moment.
They were frenzied action, frenzied physical action.
So this is the era.
This is the moment, the period in the first 10 years
of the movie industry in the United States,
when the basic system is being, by trial and error, worked out.
And by the time Chaplin comes to join
the system after the first decade or so
of the 20th century, the system essentially is in place.
There are already a number of famous performers,
both in comedy and in drama.
There are emerging certain particular studios
who have refined the mass production
technique to produce their movies on a regular basis.
So an expanding market for the movies
is being met by a systematic manufacturing process
that Ince and Sennett begin to work out
in systematic and long-lasting ways.
In ways that in a certain sense continue
in residual form, in vestigial form,
to dominate the production of movies even today.
When we were talking about the primitive and the simplicity
of early film, there was one film I had on the stocks
we didn't have time to show you last week.
And I thought I would show this to you
as a way of illustrating again how relatively simple
the early films are.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
See how influential that first sneeze was.
The name of this film is The Whole Dam Family.
There's Mr. Dam.
There Mrs. Helen Dam.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There's their son, Jimmy Dam.
The simplicity of these movements
are part of what's interesting to us.
I mean this is still an era in which people are just
fascinated by the idea that movies capture movies.
But what's the joke here?
The joke is embedded I suppose in the title, The Whole Dam
Family.
There's Miss.
I.P. Dam.
There's Baby Dam.
What an actor.
You see how it's framed as if it's a painting, how
stationary the camera is.
There's the Dam Cook.
What's the joke here?
Finally, we're going to come to the Dam Dog.
What's going on here?
It's kind of risque.
Remember, we're talking about late Victorian,
post-Victorian era.
What's the joke here?
It's the play on the word "damn."
It doesn't strike you as shocking.
But, in fact, if you said, damn you in 1890 or in 1900
in certain quarters, people stepped back and said,
oh, my goodness.
There's a kind of semi-vulgarity there.
In other words, it's not an accident
that this is not the Thorburn family or the Smith family.
It's significant that it's the Dam family.
Why?
Because they want to make a joke.
What's wrong with the joke?
Why is it a stupid joke for a movie?
Because it's not a visual joke.
What does it depend on it?
It depends on language.
In other words, it's almost as if the whole point of this film
depends on a joke that depends not on anything that you
can experience visually, but that
is resident in a verbal trick.
And it's a trivial joke.
It's not much of a joke, but the film depends upon it.
And it's evidence in a very modest, but at the same time
dramatic and obvious way of this process whereby
the new medium, this new visual medium,
has to emerge out of media, some of which are not visual at all,
but are verbal.
And it's as if early filmmakers haven't yet learned fully
how to exploit the qualities of the medium they're working in.
So it's a verbal joke, rather than a visual joke.
Much more powerful and much more successful
were the Keystone Kops Komedies themselves.
And we have one example of that to show you.
I'm not sure that this is a characteristic example.
But it's close enough to give you
as a sort of sense of what the Keystone Komedies were
like before Chaplin entered the game.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The essential joke of the Keystone Kops
Komedies-- I don't even know how many there were,
perhaps hundreds.
There were certainly dozens and dozens.
They were immensely popular early short films.
Some film scholars have speculated
that one reason for their popularity
was that they made fun of policemen.
That was an implicit sort of mildly anarchic impulse
in these early comedies because authority figures,
people in uniform, were being shown
to be clownish in some way.
The primary element, of course, is
to find ways to exploit the movies' capacity
to show motion.
And one reason I want you to see this relatively crude example
is that there's a certain sense in which
the short film that you saw last week from Keaton, the film
Cops, is a sort of reprise of this tradition of movie making.
Although you can see how much more coherent and character
oriented Keaton's short film was,
but the way in which especially the cops are mocked and shown
to be completely clownish figures.
Almost all of the Keystone Kops Komedies to my knowledge,
involved incompetent policeman, who
engaged in mad active chases, which often ended badly
for the policeman.
Sometimes they would end up all flying
into a river, or an ocean, or some other natural disaster.
And I think you can also see-- that was actually
a very dramatic effect for an early film.
So there's an awful lot about this
that would have interested early--
seeing that car turn over, some people in the audience
might never have seen that in the movies before.
And one could say that these films in a certain way
anticipate a great deal of the ridiculous action adventure
activity that we see in films even today.
But this is typical of those early films, where they'll
make incredibly implausible jokes just for the sake
of making the joke.
And I'm not sure-- all right, a Mack Sennett comedy.
This is the kind of comedy then that
was being made by the Sennett Studio before Chaplain arrived.
They were also certain figures-- Fatty Arbuckle,
the fat comedian who worked with Buster Keaton, is an example.
Who had already begun to establish comic personae,
something like the persona that Chaplin and Keaton created.
So they were not the first to do this.
So there was a subtler and already somewhat more
character-oriented comedy beginning
to emerge before Chaplin appears.
But Chaplin's entry into American movies
is also a turning point, a fundamental turning point,
as many scholars have recognized.
And it's a turning point primarily
because what Chaplin introduces-- I mean
introduces many, many things to comedy.
But he introduces one thing especially-- well,
two things especially.
The first thing that he introduces
is what we might call the principal of the slow down.
Instead of frenzied motion all the time in Chaplin comedies,
there are moments of quiet.
And in these moments of quiet-- and this
is why they're important-- what begins to happen
is an attention is thrown away from violent, frenzied physical
action toward character.
What Chaplin introduces into movies
is a somewhat more systematic and serious interesting
character than had ever occurred before.
And what follows from that introduction,
from slowing down the action, creating
moments of human interaction in which the interest is
essentially psychological and individual,
rather than an interest simply in frenzied motion and jokes,
or frenzied motion and suspense, which
is what you would get from a Griffith melodrama, what you're
getting is-- so this introduces several things.
First of all, it introduces a tonal variation.
It means that in the middle of comedies,
there could be quiet, serious moments.
And, in fact, it becomes the hallmark of Chaplin's comedy
that it really is often not funny
or at least that it's based on unfunny materials.
And that there are poignant and moving moments.
It's as if Chaplin combines comic and melodramatic
elements, especially in his best work.
I don't mean that when he came into the films
he began to do this.
In fact, he discovered how to do this
in the course of his career, about which I
will speak in a moment.
So Chaplin brings a new interest in character
and in psychological nuance.
And, because of that introduces tonal variation,
a complexity of tone.
We think of the Tramp figure as indelible
and unchanging in a certain way.
His costume always the same, his face always the same,
the kinds of problems he gets into always similar.
And that's partly true.
But the Tramp was not born fully dressed in Chaplin's brain.
He evolved the Champ over a series
of short films in the period from 1911
through about 1913 or '14.
And one way I can dramatize this for you
is to show you how Charlie looked in the very first film
he appeared in.
He was not a director in this film.
He was just an actor.
And he was a walk-on actor.
He was not the star.
The camera had an immediate affinity for him.
And after people saw this film-- this
is the first film he appeared in.
This is a still from a film called
Kid Auto Races at Venice.
It's a kind of documentary about soapbox racing.
And the Chaplain character had just been hired by Mack Sennett
to join the Keystone Studios.
And he made an appearance in the film.
He really didn't have anything to do.
But his appearance in the film caused all kinds of interest
in the audience.
The audience wanted to know who that character was,
why he was so interesting, and what was interesting about him.
You can see the beginnings of the Tramp costume there,
but not the complete Tramp.
Here's another early version of Chaplin, wearing a long coat
and not looking very nice.
Charlie is supposed to be drunk in this picture.
That's one reason he looks nasty.
It's in a film called Mabel's Married Life.
And he's actually in conversation
with a dummy in this sequence.
But you can see here that the long coat violates
our idea of who the Tramp was.
So it took awhile before the Chaplain persona completely
emerged.
And it was partly a matter of trial and error,
although very quick trial and error.
I want to say a word about Chaplin's career,
to give you a fuller sense of how swiftly he became an icon
and how significant his example is
for our understanding of the power of movies.
Chaplain's dates are 1889 to 1977.
He was born in England.
And his early childhood is actually
the stuff of Dickensian melodrama,
both terms I choose with some intentionality
because there are parallels between Charlie Chaplin's
early life and the victimization that Dickens
dramatizes so powerfully in many of his famous novels.
And there are parallels between Dickens' own childhood
and Chaplain's childhood.
Dickens, the great 19th century novelist,
who, like Chaplin, was interested in victims,
laid emphasis on the problems of vulnerable people,
of women, of children, who wrote variations
on what we might call the mortgage melodrama all
his career.
His greatest works could be said to be forms of melodrama.
I'm talking about Charles Dickens, the great 19th century
English novelist.
And Chaplin grew up in an environment that was steeped,
not only in Dickens, but in the traditions of stage
and novelistic melodrama that permeated
European culture and especially English culture of this time.
But his life was a very difficult one in some ways
as well.
His father died when he was eight.
His mother was in and out of the institutions all of her life.
There were periods in Chaplin's life, when he was just
a little child, when he was literally completely abandoned.
And he and his older brother spent time living in doorways
on the streets of London.
He was literally a homeless urchin as a child.
He began to act on the stage from the age of seven
and almost immediately was recognized
as having astonishing gifts.
He worked from 1906 through 1913 for a theatrical company
in England called the Karno Company, K-A-R-N-O.
And it was a company that put on a certain kind of theatrical
anthology, in which there would be skits,
comic skits and serious skits acted out.
Sometimes when the skits were over,
there would be song and dance numbers, sometimes just
straight singing.
A kind of British variety show, influenced especially
by the traditions of the British musical.
And the Karno Company was a traveling company.
And first, Chaplain worked with the company
all around the British Isles.
And then, in I think 1909 or 1910,
the Karno Company made a triumphant tour
of the United States.
By this time, Chaplin was one of the leading actors in this.
One of the great features of the Karno Company performances
were pantomime performances.
And Chaplin was a particularly brilliant pantomimist.
So he had a very significant career.
He was already a successful performer
on the stage in the Karno Company
and drew on traditions of performance.
Chaplin's father was a popular singer.
His songs were published and he sang in the musicals
for a certain period.
And Chaplin's mother had visions or fantasies
of being a performer herself and used to perform privately
to Charlie.
So Charlie was steeped in performance,
steeped in theater.
And as a young boy, from the age of seven
on, was already sort of acting on stage.
Almost continuously after the age of eight or nine,
made his living as an actor.
So as a relatively young man, he made a trip
to the United States with the Karno Company.
The Karno Company toured various cities in the United States,
was a great success.
A second tour almost immediately followed,
I think within six months.
And on that second tour, Mack Sennett
saw Chaplain perform and hired him away
from the Karno Company.
Saw that Chaplin had certain gifts as a performer that
would work in the infant medium of the movies
and hired him away.
And it was an inspired decision.
When Chaplain first joined the Keystone Studios in '19--
I think it's 1911.
The date is in Cook.
So be careful.
My date may be a year or two off.
But around 1911, he joins the Karno Company.
His first few films, his first three or four films,
he's just a performer in.
But he has an immediate affinity for the camera as well.
And within half a dozen films, he's
already beginning to direct as well as to act.
And within a relatively short time,
he gets to be in control of every aspect
of the making of his films.
We can get some sense of how richly
and symbiotically the audience reacted
to the character of the Tramp that Chaplin created
by talking in monetary terms about the development
of his career, about the progress of his career.
He officially joined the Keystone Company in 1914.
He was hired in 1911 and 1912, came over to the United States.
And from 1914 and 1915, just that
one year, he worked for the Keystone Company
and made 35 films in that one-year period.
He received what was then a princely salary of $150 a week.
The final films of those 35, the last 15 or 20 or so of them,
featured the Tramp figure, who had now
been fully elaborated in various adventures that
became characteristic of Chaplin's vision of the Tramp.
And they were unbelievably popular,
by far the most popular shorts that
had ever been sent out of any movie production company.
And they made Chaplain a household name,
first in the United States, and then fairly
quickly all over the world.
So successful were those early films that in 1915 he was hired
away by another company, the Essanay Company, E-S-S-A-N-A-Y.
And for another year 1915, 1916, he worked just for the Essanay
Company.
But his salary went up from $150 a week to $1,250
a week in one year.
And that's a gigantic-- more than a thousand dollars
a week in 1915 is an unbelievable fortune,
of course.
He makes only 14 films in that period.
So he goes from making 35 films in a year
to making only 14 films.
And those 14 films are more highly finished.
He spends more time with them.
We can see in this period, we can see Chaplain learning.
We can see Chaplin enacting in small the Fred Ott principle.
We could see Chaplin enacting in small the principal
I talked about last week, in which we
see him learning to develop performance styles that
are appropriate to the camera, appropriate to cinematic
experience, developing techniques as a director
to emphasize certain aspects of the Tramp's character,
experimenting with tonal variation in his films,
experimenting with various kinds of comic devices, some of which
he imports from his performances with the Karno Company
and many of which he refines and changes
because he's working in the movies.
One famous example of this migration from stage to screen
is a bit that Chaplain was especially famous for when he
worked for the Karno Company.
He did a bit them, a pantomime, called
the Inebriate Swell, the inebriated--
the drunk aristocrat.
That's what a swell is, a rich aristocrat,
a man about town, the inebriated-- the drunken
aristocrat.
And it was one of the most popular pieces
that he performed on stage for the Karno Company.
He remade a version of it, a very famous film.
It's one of the very few short Chaplins where Chaplin doesn't
play the Tramp, where he's dressed up in a tuxedo
and he plays the inebriated swell.
And it's a film called One A.M.
And in the entire film, Chaplin plays a man who is drunk
and who keeps encountering objects that misunderstands.
So as an example, he comes across a clothes tree
in his house.
And instead of hanging his clothes on it,
he embraces it as if it's his wife, that sort of thing.
And almost the entire length of One A.M.
has only one performer in it, Chaplain himself.
And he kind of recreates and modifies
what he had done on stage in that performance.
It is in many ways a very brilliant performance
and shows how imaginatively the Chaplain character can interact
with objects, a theme to which I'll return tonight
when I talk more systematically about Modern Times
and about certain of Chaplin's favorite strategies
for establishing character.
So he works for the Essanay Company.
He makes 14 films, including in 1915 a film
called The Tramp, fragments of which
I'm going to show you in a few minutes.
Then he's so successful again.
And the 14 films he makes starring the Tramp become
international-- I don't know what
to call them-- international phenomena, best sellers.
And the Tramp becomes the most sought after
and the most memorable character in the movies.
So he's hired away again by the Mutual Company, one year later.
And from 1916 to 1917, he works for the Mutual Company,
in which he makes this time $1 million for that year.
And he makes only eight films in that year.
So he goes from $150 a week, to $1,250 a week, to $1 million
a year within three years.
And each move gives him greater creative freedom,
gives him more autonomy.
He begins to sort of really refine his art.
And we can see the process happening in these shorts.
In the films you're going to see tonight,
both of the short films, Easy Street, 1917,
and The Immigrant, also made in 1917,
come from this Mutual period.
And I mention this to you because they're already
in some sense sophisticated films,
even though they're not feature-length films.
And you can see that Chaplain is bringing all the resources
of his narrative skills, of his skills in creating character
to bear on those films.
They're already in some sense sophisticated works
of narrative.
And there is an apprentice period
that occurs earlier, which I have just described to you.
Finally, in his career, he moves, in 1918,
to a company called First National, for which-- those
are the people who pay him a million dollars.
I'm sorry.
I made a mistake.
His Mutual salary was a mere $670,000.
He gets $1 million when he goes to work
for First National in 1918, when he makes, among other films,
one of my favorite Chaplin shorts, a film in which we
see the Tramp character playing a GI in the first World War.
It's called Shoulder Arms.
And it's a characteristic Chaplain short,
except that now what Charlie is doing
is contending with the Kaiser's army.
He's fighting World War I.
In earlier films, we'd seen him fighting ice storms.
We'd seen him fighting against hunger.
We'd see him literally fighting in the boxing ring
in a film called The Champion.
We'd seen him working as an assistant to a pawn
broker in a film called The Pawn Broker--
a whole series of jobs.
And by the time we get to 1918, it's
almost as if the Tramp has held virtually every job you
could imagine.
He can't hold a job for long because he's a bum.
He's a tramp.
He's footloose.
Again, a theme to which I'll return
when we talk about Modern Times this evening.
And then finally, in 1919, Chaplain
has become such a gigantic figure,
such a international icon, that he
joins with certain other icons, D.W. Griffith, the greatest,
most famous director of the silent era;
and Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, the two most
famous actors after Chaplin in the silent era.
The four of them get together and they form United Artists.
And they formed it in part to create their own company
so that they would be able to control their artistic output.
And Chaplain, working for United Artists, beginning in 1919,
Chaplain goes to work on his feature films.
And he makes the great film, the great silent features,
that are at the heart of his achievement.
He makes The Gold Rush in 1925; a film called The Circus
in 1928, a more imperfect and broken-back film in some way,
but full of some of his most imaginative comic performances;
one of his great films in 1931, called City Lights.
And then finally, in 1936, the film you're
going to see tonight, already deeply
into the sound era, a film that remains
in some fundamental way a silent film, Modern Times.
Chaplin then goes on, after the sound era is over,
to make a series of movies in the sound era.
And they all have some modest interest for us
because they're Chaplain films.
Some images from them that remain very famous to this day.
In fact, one of them was in the New York Times today.
Did any of you notice it?
There was an article about a scholar of globes,
who had found evidence for the idea
that a particular globe in a German museum,
which was said to have been Hitler's globe,
was not Hitler's globe.
But in the middle of the story, what
they-- any time a person of a certain age
hears the word "globe" and "Hitler,"
they think of Charlie's film, The Great Dictator.
You're smiling.
Why?
Do you know the image?
Have you seen The Great Dictator?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
DAVID THORBURN: What is the image they're talking about?
AUDIENCE: Playing with a globe.
DAVID THORBURN: Yes.
There's a moment in the film-- it's
a moment of great-- it's not really a very good film.
And Chaplain's sound films are mostly of historical interest,
despite what some Chaplain buffs would say.
His great work is-- he's a silent artist.
And the sound film caused problems for him
that he couldn't fully adjustable to.
But every one of his sound films has interest
and has brilliant moments.
And the one you're remembering is
one of the most remarkable and astonishing symbolic moments
in Chaplin's work.
Yeah.
It's an incredibly ambitious film.
It tells us how ambitious a figure Chaplin
was because he makes a satire of Hitler and Mussolini
in an era when Hitler and Mussolini are not yet
recognized for the egregious, monstrous, evil figures
that we know them to have been.
They were taken seriously.
They had been voted into office.
Millions and millions of people thought
they were admirable leaders.
So when Chaplain made The Great Dictator
in '19-- what- '40 or '41, he was doing
something incredibly daring.
And he was actually showing that he
thought the movies were an art form capable of taking
on the largest political subjects.
So even though there are problems in the film,
and it's not an absolutely great film,
not memorable artistically in its own way,
there are moments in it that are remarkable.
And it's also a significant document
because it reminds us of Chaplin's ambitions
as an artist.
Chaplin was one of the very first filmmakers,
along with D.W. Griffith I suppose,
to realize that the movies had an aesthetic possibility,
latent aesthetic energies and powers that if they were
tapped, would make the movies the equivalent
of traditional art forms, like theater and the novel.
And, of course, he was right about that.
And he even made some films that achieved that level
of seriousness and resonance.
The moment that you're remembering,
what happens in it?
AUDIENCE: He's like dancing with a globe.
DAVID THORBURN: Yes.
It's a moment of sort of manic glee, in which the Hitler
character, played by Charlie Chaplin, takes a globe out
and it's like a balloon.
And he pops it up and down.
And we see him throwing it up and kicking it with his hat,
like that.
And it's a kind of fantasy of world domination.
And it's supposed to show what a ridiculous and infantile figure
this mock Hitler is.
And it is the most memorable image from that film.
So in this article, that really had nothing
to do with Chaplain, there was a picture
of Charlie playing Hitler, kicking the balloon
up and down.
And one reason that I think it's significant,
that it's a mark of Chaplin's greatness as an artist,
that even in his imperfect texts,
even in the films that really do not belong to the category,
to the most important category of his most
lasting and valuable art, images from those works
are still part of our common cultural inheritance.
He's a very great artist, the first great artist
of the movies.
And a figure who's imaginative creations
remain vital and alive today in a way
that very few artists from that era remain,
similarly accessible and important to people.
And it's a mark of the reach of Chaplin's imagination
that this is so, of his importance as a figure.
Well, there's much more one could
say about the development of his career.
But I want to cut this short because I
want to show you the moment-- I don't mean that there's only
a single moment.
But I want to show you fragments from the film in which we can
see Chaplin really discovering certain aspects of what
he wants to do and also where we can see Chaplin screwing up.
We can see Chaplin at a stage before he becomes
the self-confident, totally autonomous artist
he becomes relatively soon.
Can we put up fragments from The Champ-- from the Tramp?
This is a film appropriately called The Tramp.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And it's a fairly characteristic Chaplin film.
But I think it's the film in which, among other things,
Chaplin discovers that he can marry melodrama and comedy.
It's the film in which he discovers
that he can do effects that are pathetic, and poignant,
and sentimental and mix them with comedy in ways
that are interesting.
So here's a scene where Charlie is rescuing a damsel.
And he does it in a kind of comic way.
He's a kind of bum himself.
But he's always a kind of chivalric figure.
Can you jump ahead?
Let's just show the next one, Greg.
I'm just going to show you a bad moment here.
He rescues this girl.
She turns out to be the daughter of a farmer.
He's then hired by the farmer in gratitude.
And then we get this bit.
And I'm showing you this bit partly because I
want you see that it isn't really all that funny
or that it's just kind of easy slapstick.
I don't mean that it's without interest.
It obviously has some interest.
But this incompetence is inconsistent in some respects
with the coherent character that he's going to begin to create.
It's never that the Tramp becomes
this fully competent character.
But this kind of joke here, look at this.
That's his foolish joke.
That trivializes him in a way.
Can you think of examples of that in Keaton?
Remember in Cops, where, for example, when he's riding along
in his car, he devises that mechanism that
ends up punching the cop.
That would be an example of a kind of-- it's a joke.
But it sort of violates the spirit of the movie.
It seems a piece of debris that is forced into the film, that
may have a comic moment, but makes the film less coherent.
That kind of thing is characteristic of the Tramp.
A bit later in The Tramp-- I don't have time
to show you this passage-- a bit later in The Tramp,
we see Charlie confronting the woman that he had rescued
and discovering for the first time--
is it a long sequence, Greg?
GREG: No.
It's only a half minute.
DAVID THORBURN: Well, put it up while I'm
talking, if you can find it.
You can see in this sequence, which
I'll let run behind me, while you pay attention to my words--
--and while the camera looks at it and then comes back to me.
What you can see happening in this sequence
is Chaplin discovering how he can be, not just comical,
but sentimental.
How he can elicit sympathy from his audience,
create sentimental effects.
In other words, what Charlie has just done here in this image is
he's meeting the girl's boyfriend.
He didn't know the girl had a boyfriend.
He was falling in love with her.
Watch his expression here.
You see, he's very upset by what he's learned.
In other words, this is not a funny moment.
And this is the moment, I think, in Chaplin's career, where
he realizes the films he's going to make should not be thought
of as simply comedies at all, but as something more
complicated than that, as comedies with heart,
as comedies devoted to character,
as comedies that are interested in human interactions.
And that discovery tremendously enlarged movie comedy,
tremendously enlarged the movies more generally.
And then we can see Charlie saying-- Charlie says goodbye.
And he writes this little sad message and he leaves her.
So it's the moment when pathos, sentiment,
enters Chaplin's work.
And in the films you'll see tonight,
you'll understand why, after he made this discovery,
he began to meld these two elements more and more
fully together.
So this is a way of reinforcing what I called last week,
the multiplicity principal.
What we can see is that in those jokes with the pitchfork,
there was no multiplicity.
They were just funny because Charlie didn't
know how to use the pitchfork.
But later moments in this film, and in many later films,
we see Chaplain beginning to create effects which
have more than one consequence, more than one significance
for the audience.
One of the most remarkable things about the chase scenes
that Charlie Chaplin develops and begins
to perform in his films-- and you'll
see wonderful examples of them tonight--
is that the chase scenes themselves
are tremendously moving.
They're tremendously comical.
They're full of comic bits that are just
as imaginative as any comic sequence one could ask for.
But they do something else, in addition to amuse us.
They declare for Charlie's character.
When Charlie runs away from someone,
what we can see him doing is using his intelligence,
using his improvisatory capacity to figure out how to get away.
So that even when he's running, he
is also expressing his nature.
And when the audience sees the imaginative, or clever,
or daring way in which he makes his escape
in a particular chase sequence, they're not just
being amused by a joke.
They are also understanding his character in a deep way.
He's defining his character, even as he's also amusing us.
So we can feel the multiplicity of that, the density,
the texture of that, always a mark of superior entertainment,
always a mark, I would say, of art itself.
Well, one way to clarify some of this,
and especially to clarify Chaplin's
remarkable popularity, is to talk about the Tramp as a myth,
as a mythic figure.
And if you think about his costume,
you'll understand partly what I mean.
He wears a coat and vest that are too tight
and pants and shoes that are too big.
So the principle of mismatch or of ambiguity
is built into his costume.
And then he carries this cane and this hat.
Now, he shows a kind of elegance.
But it's a kind of shabby, down-market elegance.
But the question is, is Charlie downwardly mobile?
Is he an aristocrat who's fallen on hard times?
Or is he a poor person, who has put on airs and aspires
to the world of tuxedos and fancy clothes?
This question is never answered.
And that ambiguity in his character
may be part of why the audience is able to identify with him.
There's an uncertainty about where
he belongs, a kind of mismatch or an ambiguity
inherent in his costume.
His body itself is a source of his mythological status.
It's small, dexterous, energetic, incredibly graceful.
He's one of the great acrobats and physical dancers,
physical performers, that you'll ever see.
And in the films you'll see tonight,
you'll see many examples of this, including examples
of Chaplain on skates, of Chaplain doing
the equivalent of dances, and of his dexterousness
in situations involving running or escape, just as powerfully
as anyone.
We'll see dramatizations of this,
just as powerful as anyone could ever imagine, ever hope for.
And then his face.
So his costume, his body, and then his face
are part of the myth as well.
He has an unbelievably expressive face.
His face is a theater in itself.
And it was Chaplain, more than any other early director,
who explored the implications of the closeup.
And I'll show you some examples tonight
of the way in which Chaplin manages
to use the closeup in silent film for incredibly-- to do so.
And to be, at the same time, what
we might call deeply, incredibly eloquent,
a silence that is eloquent because of the qualities
in his face.
And the moral qualities of the Tramp
are also appropriately ambiguous.
He has chivalric qualities.
He wants to defend children and vulnerable women.
He's always a kind of defender of the weak.
But at the same time, he's an opportunist and also
a survivor.
And these qualities don't fit perfectly together.
And we see both elements in the Tramp character,
again and again.
Again, tonight, in The Immigrant especially,
you'll see both sides of the Chaplain character,
both his opportunistic side and also his chivalric side.
So these qualities created a kind
of mythic aura, a mythic authority for Chaplin.
And there's one other thing that contributed to the myth.
It was that there's a historical reality to the hobo figure.
Long before Charlie Chaplin began
to perform as a kind of tramp figure in the movies,
they were real tramps in the society.
And the existence of a genuine population of homeless people--
they often rode the rails, and they
were present actors in most large and small cities
in the country.
The fact was there was a population of homeless people
that the Tramp figure alluded to and reminded the audience of.
And that also helped to strengthen his mystic power
because it was as if the audience was recognizing
that in some sense Charlie was a kind of embodiment
or a symbol of this social actuality.
So he had a kind of mythic power that communicated itself
to his audience.
And it meant that every repetition of a Tramp film,
which might very well go through the same motions,
but put the Tramp in a slightly different environment
or a slightly different job, would
be pleasing to the audience, some principle of repetition
and variation.
Well, finally, the paradox of Chaplin's work.
And the paradox I want you to think about tonight--
and we'll end with this point-- is that Chaplin's world
is full of comedy.
It's a comedian's world, although it's more than
just comic, as I've suggested.
But the irony of Chaplin's world is
that the comedy is so fundamentally based on things
that are so deeply unfunny.
Chaplin's the most deeply social and in some ways even political
of directors.
And I'll discuss this aspect of his work
tonight, when we talk about Modern Times and some
of his other films.
But the crucial point here is that Chaplain's world
is a world of elemental themes.
Virtually every single Chaplin movie
is about hunger, aggression, victimization, confinement.
I mean the subject matter of Chaplin's comedy
is the furthest from comedy.
And part of his genius, part of what
makes him such a remarkable and important artist,
is that this immensely unpromising material,
this disturbing and in many ways frightening material,
dramatized sometimes with full frightening effect-- Chaplin
often, because of his diminutiveness,
puts himself up against large figures, giant figures,
to emphasize his vulnerability and smallness.
Again and again, the substance of Chaplin's comedy
is the substance of victimization, aggression,
misery, inequality, inequity.
In other words, the subject matter of Chaplin's work
is the furthest from comedy.
And yet he makes enduring comedy, enduring melodrama, out
of those unpromising materials.
That paradox about Chaplin's world
is at the heart of his work.
And it's at the heart of why, of all silent directors,
his very best films remain interesting today
intrinsically, not just because they're wonderfully interesting
artifacts.
But intrinsically because they remain serious, valuable films.
All of the Chaplain films you're going
to see tonight, the two shorts and Modern Times,
fit that description, as I hope you will agree.
See you this evening.