My Favorite Trick of Cinema

Ahh .. The Castro Theatre. (Heart!) I like your movie palace style. I had an absolutely wonderful time with you when you showed a series of Charlie Chaplin films over the past few weeks. Let's do PFA at the Castro again soon. Love, Jesse.

Seeing Chaplin's films I'm always struck by the way he moves. It's telling that Edmund Wilson wrote a ballet for Chaplin (Chaplin declined, stating he only performed his own material), for few scenes in cinema history are more balletic than a bowler hatted Tramp skating backwards figure 8s inches away from a deadly fall off a precipice, but completely unaware of the danger, because he is blindfolded. Then, once the blindfold comes off and the Tramp sees the danger he is in, he becomes comically unable to skate, but Chaplin's inability to skate also looks like a kind of ballet. That scene comes from Modern Times, but a similar effect can be seen in Gold Rush, where the Tramp dances with forks stuck in potatoes to mimic feet. The Tramp could be an icon of pure performance. Though it is a little strange to call it art when Chaplin smiles and bats his eyes like an ingenue, such is cinema.

Physical comedy isn't wholly absent from modern cinema, but it is now typically linked to dialogue. The most direct examples I can think of are Steve Martin in The Jerk and John Belushi in Blues Brothers. Both dress funny and move funny, but while also talking funny. Chaplin did make dialogue films, mostly political satires that are never as consistently lyrical as the best of his silents, though many of them are important. In particular, The Great Dictator with its sometimes funny, sometimes deeply disturbing mélange of slapstick and fascism, is a white knight, a gesture against fascism and demagoguery that still affected the audience I saw it with.

Chaplin wasn't solely a kinesthetic genius (though plotting was never his strong point). He had a remarkable ability to delay a punch-line just long enough. Tragedy sometimes infused his work, allowing a glimpse into the underpinnings of his comedy. In Gold Rush, there's a memorable shot of the Tramp, forgotten by romance, outside in the cold snow, looking in at a New Years Party, literally and metaphorically an outsider. Chaplin could also be crass, like in Modern Times when the Tramp snorts cocaine, or, anticipating the work of Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, when the Tramp and a preacher's wife sit in a waiting room, both farting, in distress, and pretending not to notice anything amiss. Contrastingly, the Tramp was also a character who sought grace and elegance in an ugly world. In the short film Payday, the Tramp, late for work, hands his brutish forman a beautiful lily, as if that is all the explanation or justification his tardiness needs.

But the greatest thing Chaplin ever did was to allow artifice to push past itself. (This is my favorite trick of cinema.) That what's left mirrors our best desires doesn't diminish anything. In The Kid, the Tramp and the kid look out at the audience, their expressions wide-eyed and identical. In City Lights, virtue and kindness earn affection. The two wandering souls in Modern Times live by their wits, one step ahead of The Man, and, in the end, they have only each other.