The Oxford History of World Cinema (36 page)

The Little Tramp prospecting in the harsh conditions of the Yukon: The Gold Rush ( 1925)

The one-and two-reel films he made at Keystone ( 1914, 35 films), Essanay ( 1915, 14

films) and for distribution by the Mutual Company ( 1916-17, 12 films) show a

continuous progression: many feel that he never surpassed the best of the Mutual films,

which include One A.M., The Pawnshop, Easy Street and The Immigrant. Chaplin

revealed qualities that were then quite new to film comedy -mime that achieved the

highest level of acting art, pathos, and daring commentary on social issues.In 1918 he

built his own studio, where he was to work for the next 33 years in conditions of

unparalleled independence. A brilliant series of short features for distribution by First

National included Shoulder Arms ( 1918), a comedic vision of the First World War, The

Pilgrim ( 1923), which tilts at religious bigotry, and The Kid ( 1921), a unique, rich

sentimental comedy in which more than anywhere else Chaplin exposes the lingering pain

of his own childhood experience of poverty and public charity.With Douglas Fairbanks,

Mary Pickford and D.W.Griffith, Chaplin co-founded United Artists, in 1919, and all his

subsequent American-made features were to be released through this concern. His first

UA picture A Woman of Paris ( 1923), a brilliant and innovative social comedy, was

rejected by the public at large since Chaplin himself did not appear, apart from an

uncredited walkon. In The Gold Rush ( 1925) he made high comedy out of the privations

of the Klondyke prospectors. No less inspired, The Circus ( 1928), a troubled production

that coincided with divorce proceedings by his second wife, also had bitter

undertones.Knowing that speech would mark the end of the Tramp, Chaplin temporized

throughout the 1930s with two more silent films, with music and effects as concessions to

the sound era. City Lights ( 1931) is an unfailingly effective sentimental comedy-

melodrama; Modern Times ( 1936), in which the Tramp made his farewell, is a comic

commentary on the machine age, whose satire still retains its bite.Chaplin felt increasing

responsibility to use his comic gifts for critical commentary on his times. He courted

grave unpopularity in isolationist America with his satire on Hitler and Mussolini, The

Great Dictator ( 1940); and risked even more, in the first days of Cold War paranoia, with

Monsieur Verdoux
( 1946), in which he ironically compared the activities of a Landru-

style mass murderer with the wholesale killing licensed by war.Chaplin's situation in

America was already insecure. His outspoken liberal views, his appeal to leftish thinkers

and his refusal to take American nationality had long made him anathema to the FBI,

which had files on him stretching back to the 1920s. The Bureau pushed an unstable

young woman, Joan Barry, into bringing a series of charges, including a paternity claim,

against Chaplin. The paternity claim was later proved to be false; but the mud stuck, and

the FBI went on to manipulate a smear campaign charging Chaplin with Communist

sympathies. Limelight ( 1952), a dramatic film set in the theatrical London of Chaplin's

childhood, and dealing with the difficulties of making comedy and the fickleness of the

public, seemed at once a reflection on his own impaired reputation and a retreat into

nostalgia.When Chaplin left for Europe for the London premiere of Limelight, the FBI

persuaded the Attorney General to rescind the re-entry permit that, as an alien, he

required. He was to spend the rest of his life in Europe, returning only briefly in 1972 to

accept an honorary Oscar and fulsome eulogies that seemed to be Hollywood's atonement.

His home from 1953 was in Vevey, Switzerland, where he lived with his wife, the former

Oona O'Neill, and a family that eventually numbered eight children.He continued to work

in exile. The uneven A King in New York ( 1957) ridiculed America's McCarthyist

paranoia. Though hurt by the poor press for his last film, A Countess from Hong Kong

( 1967), starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren, Chaplin worked, almost to the end, on

a new project The Freak. In addition he produced two autobiographical volumes, and

composed musical scores for his old silent films. Knighted in 1975, Sir Charles Chaplin

died on Christmas Day 1977.In recent years Chaplin's achievement has sometimes been

underestimated by critics without historical perspective, or perhaps influenced by the

public smears of the 1940s. His popularity contributed much to Hollywood's prosperity

and rise to worldwide pre-eminence in the period of the First World War. The

sophisticated intelligence and skills he brought to slapstick comedy forced intellectuals to

recognise that art could reside in a wholly popular entertainment, and not just in those

selfconsciously 'artistic' products with which the cinema first tried to court respectability.

In the 1910s and 20s Chaplin's Tramp, combating a hostile and unrewarding world with

cheek and gallantry, afforded a talisman and champion to the underprivileged millions

who were the cinema's first mass audience.

DAVID ROBINSON
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
Kid Auto Races at Venice ( 1914);

Tillie's Punctured Romance ( 1914); The Champion ( 1915); The Tramp ( 1915); A

Woman ( 1915); A Night at the Show ( 1915); Police ( 1915); One A.M. ( 1916); The

Pawnshop ( 1916); Behind the Screen ( 1916); Easy Street ( 1917); The Cure ( 1917); The

Immigrant ( 1917); A Dog's Life ( 1918); Shoulder Arms ( 1918); The Kid ( 1921); The

Pilgrim ( 1923); A Woman of Paris ( 1923); The Gold Rush ( 1925); The Circus ( 1928);

City Lights ( 1931); Modern Times ( 1936); The Great Dictator ( 1940); Monsieur

Verdoux ( 1946); Limelight ( 1952); A King in New York ( 1957); A Countess From Hong

Kong ( 1967).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chaplin, Charles ( 1964),
My Autobiography
.

Huff, Theodore ( 1951),
Charlie Chaplin
.

Lyons, Timothy J. ( 1979),
Charles Chaplin, A Guide to References and Resources
.

McCabe, John ( 1978),
Charlie Chaplin
.

Robinson, David ( 1985),
Chaplin, His Life and Art
.

Documentary

CHARLES MUSSER

The term 'documentary' did not come into popular use until the late 1920s and 1930s. It

was initially applied to various kinds of 'creative' non-fiction screen practice in the post-

First World War, classical cinema era. Originating films in the category have typically

included Robert Flah erty 's Nanook of the North ( 1922), various Soviet films of the

1920s such as Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Movie Camera (
Chelovek s

kinoapparatom,
1929), Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a City (
Berlin: die

Sinfonie der Größstadt,
1927), and John Grierson's Drifters ( 1929). Yet 'documentary'

cinema has roots that lie further back in the reworking of a vital and long-established

form that had flourished throughout the second half of the nineteenth centurythe

illustrated lecture. Early documentarians used the magic lantern to create complex and

often sophisticated programmes out of a succession of projected photographic images

accompanied by a live narration, with an occasional use of music and sound effects. By

the turn of the century, films were gradually replacing slides while intertitles usurped the

function of the lecture -- changes that eventually gave rise to the new terminology. The

documentary tradition preceded film and has continued into the era of television and

video, thus being redefined in the light of technological innovations, as well as in the

context of shifting social and cultural forces.

ORIGINS

The use of projected images for documentary purposes can be traced back to the mid-

seventeenth century, when the Jesuit Andreas Tacquet gave an illustrated lecture about a

missionary's trip to China. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the magic lantern

was often used to give audio-visual programmes on science (particularly astronomy),

current affairs, travel, and adventure.

The ability to transfer photographic images on to glass and project them with the lantern

was a crucial leap forward in documentary practice. Lantern slide images not only

achieved a new ontological status but became much smaller and easier to produce.

Frederick and William Langenheim, German-born brothers then residing in Philadelphia,

achieved this result in 1849 and showed examples of their work at the Great Exhibition in

London in 1851. By the mid-1860s the use of these slides in travel lectures had become

popular in eastern cities of the United States, with an evening's programme typically

focusing on a single foreign country. In June 1864, for instance, New York audiences

could see The Army of the Potomac, an illustrated lecture on the Civil War using

photographs taken by Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady. Although the magic lantern

had been used primarily to evoke the mystical or fantastic in the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries, by the late 1860s it was being used predominantly for documentary

purposes and was assigned new names as a result -- the 'stereopticon' in the United States

and the 'optical lantern' in England.

These documentary-like illustrated lectures flourished in western Europe and North

America. In the United States, several exhibitors toured the principal cities, giving a

series of four or five programmes which changed from year to year. In the last three

decades of the nineteenth century, many noteworthy documentary-like programmes were

given by adventurers, archaeologists, and explorers. Programmes on the Arctic were

particularly popular from 1865 onward, and often displayed an ethnographic bent.

Lieutenant Robert Edwin Peary interrupted his efforts to reach the North Pole by

presenting travelogue-style lectures in the early and mid-1890s. Displaying 100 lantern

slides in his 1896 lecture, Peary not only recounted his journey from Newfoundland to the

Polar ice cap in heroic terms but offered an ethnographic study of the Inuit or

'Esquimaux'.

Similar kinds of programme were offered in Europe. Magic lantern activities flourished

particularly in Britain, where the colonial agenda was strong: Egypt was a favourite topic,

and illustrated lectures such as War in Egypt and the Soudan ( 1887) were big money-

makers. Victorian audiences also savoured lantern shows featuring local towns and

countryside unaffected by the industrial revolution, including several series of slides made

by photographer George Washington Wilson ( The Road to the Isles,
c.
1885).

Illustrated lectures about seemingly primitive, impoverished peoples in distant locales had

their counterpart in lantern shows on the urban poor. In Britain programmes such as Slum

Life in our Great Cities (
c.
1890) treated poverty in a picturesque fashion, often

attributing it to alcoholism. In the United States the social issue documentary began with

Jacob Riis, who gave his first programme, How the Other Half Lives and Dies, on 25

January 1888. It focused on recent immigrant groups, particularly Italians and Chinese,

who lived in poverty and germinfested slums.

By the early 1890s highly portable 'detective' cameras allowed amateur and professional

photographers to take candid pictures, often without the knowledge or permission of their

subjects. Alexander Black used pictures he took of his Brooklyn neighbourhood to give

an illustrated lecture he alternatively titled Life through a Detective Camera and

Ourselves as Others See Us.

Most of the basic genres of documentary -- covering travel, ethnography and archaeology,

social issues, science, and war -- were in place before the arrival of cinema. Many were

evening-length single-subject programmes, while others were much shorter, designed to

occupy a twenty-minute slot on a vaudeville bill or as part of a multi-subject, magazine-

style format. Ethical issues about the relationship between documentarians and their

subjects had been encountered, though rarely given much attention. In short, documentary

screen practice had become an important part of middle-class cultural life in Europe and

North America during the second half of the nineteenth century.

FROM SLIDES TO FILM

As film-making spread rapidly through Europe and North America in 1894-7, non-fiction

subjects predominated, for they were easier and generally less expensive to produce than

fiction films using sets and performers. The Lumières sent cameramen such as Alexandre

Promio to countries in Europe, North and Central America, Asia, and Africa, where they

shot groups of films that appropriated subjectmatter and even compositions from earlier

lantern views designed for travel lectures. Cameramen in other countries followed the

Lumières' lead. In England Robert Paul sent cinematographer H. W. Short to Egypt in

March 1897 (producing An Arab Knife Grinder at Work) and took a dozen films himself

in Sweden that July ( A Laplander Feeding his Reindeer). James H. White of the Edison

Manufacturing Company toured through Mexico ( Sunday Morning in Mexico), the