Analysis: Memory of the Ramshackle Man
When Charles Chaplin was once asked about his conception of beauty, he replied that he believed "that it was an omnipresence of death and seduction,
a smiling sadness
that we discern in nature."
And he was still attentive to the lyric of his words: "An expression of her can be as much a garbage can on which a ray of light falls as a rose in the stream."
The re-release 100 years after
'The boy'
recovers intact the first and perhaps the best definition of genius and r
reality, now and forever, with its pathos so close to the simply ridiculous, and it once again makes clear the permanent relevance of a strange masterpiece as crude, evident and even revolutionary as it is smug and unapologetic.
Perfect in each of her doubts, devastating because she is enlightened.
Bella for deeply cruel.
Sad and smiling at the same time, we are facing one of the many revolutions in the author's filmography.
Perhaps the most important.
Since landing at Mack Sennett's studios in 1914, Charles Spencer Chaplin had gone from flaunting his vaudeville skills as an actor with easy slapping to reenacting his adventures himself.
And so on until
'Making a living
'.
There Charlot was born and there it is already possible to sense the funny loneliness of a ramshackle subject;
of a fractured individual who even today is the best possible incarnation of the tragic and unstructured dimension of modernity.
It was the first time that he dressed in the contradiction of his character.
"He would like to pretend to be a wise man, a musician, a duke, a polo player. However, the most he does is pick up cigarette butts or take his candy from a baby ...", says Chaplin himself of that founding moment in his autobiography When in 1919 he considers making a six-reel film (over an hour) for First National, it is not the first time that he challenges the simple structure of the short film.
I had already rolled '
Weapons on the shoulder
' Y
'Dog life
'(both in 1918), but this time I wanted more.
On the one hand, the dramatic structure dares to incorporate the modes of the serial (a woman abandoning her son) with the rude and iconoclastic ways of her teacher Sennett without giving up drawing something similar to an autobiography (the filmmaker himself acknowledged that a good part scenes trace the hell of his childhood in the company of his brother Sydney).
Hand in hand with the kid
Jackie coogan
, comedy converges with melodrama without subtleties, without justifications, without excuses.
Perhaps Chaplin wants the fracture that defines the interior of the new times to be seen in all its rawness.
That or simply risk composing something never seen before: the deep pathos of laughter, the sadness smiling again. The most obvious chronicle I could not help but notice the fact that when the project started, Chaplin had lost a son to three days to be born.
And the most poetic chronicle attributes healing powers to the meeting with Jackie Coogan.
Although perhaps the latter is an exaggeration.
Not in vain do they say that the director did not notice the creature until it reached his ears that his colleague as well as his rival
Roscoe arbuckle
he intended to hire Coogan as well.
Then it would be known that the competitor's interest was directed at the father and variety actor and not the son.
Later the filmmaker would write about what could eventually pass as one of the best castings in history: "All children in one way or another have genius; the trick is to bring it up. With Jackie it was easy ... I could apply emotion to action and action to emotion, and I could repeat it over and over again without losing spontaneity. "
Jacki was actually the same Charlot, but concentrated rather than just miniaturized.
And maybe a tear
Each scene in the film lives in a rare balance between the greatest of abysses and the most obvious of ridiculous.
"A movie with a smile ... and maybe a tear"
, read a publicity as bad as it was disconcerted.
A woman abandons her son.
On his way to a suitably wealthy family he will cross paths
The Tramp
and nothing, as you might imagine, will be the same.
Again, fate as in
'City lights'
that everything changes.
The crudest description of poverty stumbles upon an extravagant and brilliant poetics of disaster.
Each of the scenes in which everyday objects are re-signified are memorable: the kettle is now the bottle;
a hammock acts as a crib and a potty can be anything;
delirious the surreal conversion of the city's underworld into a paradise of feathers and white sheets, and for the memory, the all-encompassing power of a father and son reunion in which cinema acquires the iconic dimension of what was seen for the first time.
And forever. In the restoring of the 70s, Chaplin himself eliminated the most obvious and quirky parts of the mother episode.
Actually, the entire tape is intended for imbalance, for doubt.
It seems impossible to laugh without feeling guilty.
Like in '
Mr. Verdoux '
, the most bitter of his films that would come later, good and evil, reality and dreams, cruelty and tenderness, live so close that one would say they are the same thing.
Chaplin remembered an episode in his memoirs that wanted to be the beginning of everything.
With the century just beginning, and after spending a season plagued by his father's drunkenness, the boy Charlie and his brother Sydney were returning home to their mother, the shooting star of vaudeville known as Lily Harley. "At the end there was a slaughterhouse and the sheep passed in front of the house on the way to the sacrifice. "
One day one of the animals ran away.
"Some tried to get hold of him, stumbling between them. I laughed, delighted at his panic and his agile jumps," he writes amused.
Until, through tears, the child Chaplin came up with the true meaning of it all: "When they took the sheep and took it to the slaughterhouse I realized the reality of the tragedy ... I wonder if that episode did not put the foundations of my future films: the combination of the tragic and the comic ".
And perhaps in that fortuitous event is the key to everything that followed: between the absurd and the tragedy;
between desolation and laughter.
"To really laugh," he later wrote,
"you have to be able to catch the pain and play with it"
.
The sadness that smiles.
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