How to save the summer movie using only Charlie Chaplin
Chaplin in The Circus Janus Films
10:03 am Jul. 12, 20104
I hate The Dark Knight, last decade's most popular blockbuster, with a passion.
And now I've got an easier way to explain my hatred than launching into a tirade about how it represents the final nail in the coffin of audience attention span and visual-aural sensitivity (while riding in on the Trojan horse of a convoluted plot that some mistake for narrative complexity). For now, I will just refer people to movies like Charlie Chaplin's The Circus.
If The Dark Knight has helped kill the summer movie, then films as soulful and thrilling as The Circus, if shown at a big multiplex instead of an arthouse like Film Forum (where it opens this week in a new 35mm print along with Chaplin's sublime short, The Idle Class), could resuscitate a movie tradition currently lost in greed and folly.
We're not talking about box office here, which is generally strong, due to the studios' trillion-dollar promotional efforts and an audience split between the desperate (returning to the multiplex on the lottery odds that they'll experience something like Star Wars just one last time) and the benumbed (reflexively buying movie tickets the way the zombies in Dawn of the Dead flocked to the mall). Nobody loves The Dark Knight or District 9, or Wanted, no more than a starving man loves canned mackerel. In a soup kitchen, you eat what's on the tray.
The Circus (1928), of course, is one of Charlie Chaplin's loveliest, loopiest masterpieces. It finds his Tramp character on the run from the law, stumbling into a circus act in progress and ending up the star attraction. Along the way to the big showstopper and the requisite bittersweet Chaplin ending (one of the greatest in cinema history), lions, tigers, doves, geese, a crazy donkey, an army of clowns, monkeys, a narcissistic tightrope walker, and the sweetest lady aerialist you ever saw are put through their paces. The Tramp falls in love, has his heart broken, stands up to The Man, experiences success, failure, rapture, love... It all moves at lightning speed, without the help of any of today's shortcuts to velocity.
How does he do it? Well, I'll let Steven Spielberg explain: "Part of the speed is the story. If you build a fast engine, you don't need fast cutting, because the story's being told fluidly, and the pages are just turning very quickly. You first of all need a script that's written in the express lane, and if it's not, there's nothing you can do in the editing room to make it move faster. You need room for character, you need room for relationships, you need room for comedy, but that all has to happen on a moving sidewalk." Spielberg was talking about his approach to directing the Indiana Jones movies (in a February, 2008Vanity Fair article), not The Circus. But there is no better encapsulation of Chaplin's storytelling genius at work on The Circus. The film is one big series of tumbles and chases that leaves plenty of room for character and relationships.
We need this in our lives. Iron Man 2 and Clash of the Titans are not giving us what we deserve. As Chaplin himself said (albeit in a slightly different context) in The Great Dictator, "We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost."
It's not just the flawed grace and nobility of The Tramp that we've been doing without; it's also the flawless grace and sensitivity 
with which Chaplin's camera (piloted by his ace, Rollie Totheroh) reveals plot developments. In recent times, Ho'wood has been killing off this kind of storytelling, which was once a mark of basic competence in response to even the shoddiest of screenplays. Even when screen stories do indeed provide that "moving sidewalk," filmmakers are so anxious to juice them for yet more unnatural speed that they wantonly destroy continuity of action and cumulative tension (opting for shock over suspense), with cuts that keep the eye busy while leaving the brain and heart to fend for themselves.
I part company with many of my colleagues in insisting that this is not just a perennial nuisance. It's not merely a passing fad; it's the future of mainstream commercial cinema, one which 15 years of steadily diminishing patience for what Andrei Tarkovsky called "the life of the object in the frame" has prepared us to embrace, in the way that a dope fiend embraces his dealer.
So I propose that some crazy mogul do something truly bold: Save the summer movie by bringing pop masterpieces like The Circus to the multiplex. Strike sparkling new prints of such crowd-pleasers as Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (which tore the roof off the New Victory Theater when I saw it in 2001). Just as a seasoned coach can save a flailing sports team, the example of these films playing on the main stage could shame and instruct the current hapless regime of power players in the art of seducing an audience. So let's have our Turner Classic Movies option at Magic Johnson and AMC, not just the Loews Jersey City, Film Forum, the IFC Center and The Sunshine. Those of us who frequent such places waggle our heads in pity at the rabble across the street lined up for the latest 3-D diversion. We behave as if they are getting what they asked for.
Nobody asked for The Sorceror's Apprentice. Please give us something as good as The Circus, or at least try. Is that too much to ask?
johnnieutah, trying to keep my patience here. "The Chaplin film was made when cinema was new": Usually the birth of cinema is dated in 1896, 32 years before The Circus was released. A lot happened in those 32 years. You say you like Chaplin and Tarkovsky, but allow me to wonder how much. "The Chaplins of today will emerge as always, possibly faster and more numerous now..." I struggle to see how that sentence could have been written by someone who has the slightest appreciation of what Chaplin did and what it takes to make a great film. Question: who are "the Chaplins of today"? You make it sound like we should be bumping into them about one every block or so. I'll make it easy, name one of them. For extra credit, name five Tarkovskys of today (but that's easier).
You kids quit fighting on my lawn! :)
jonnieutah, in no other art form but the cinema do folks feel so comfortable describing masterpieces from the past as quaint relics.
Art breaks out everywhere, always, yes, but my larger argument is that the kind of art we're becoming increasingly resigned to in the exponential era is turning us into, well, assholes. The emphasis on production, power, rapid consumption and disposal, along with a kind of manic-depressive pendulum swing between fake euphoria and fake terror, is producing an audience of mean, ugly, narcissistic people like never before. Don't look at me like that. :) The wreck that cultural commentators and philosophers feared American society was becoming as early as the start of the Industrial Age never really took its full, unsightly shape until we got non-linear editing, broadband Internet and DVD.
These tools are great, indispensable, but they have fallen into the hands of business people who had been waiting impatiently all last century for a way to make media more efficient and lucrative. Not better, mind you, just faster at turning a dollar. (They could only do so much with analog cable TV and VCR's, as they are partly tethered to real time.) It's those assholes who now set the clock not only of production but consumption.
Remember that Chaplin churned out a lot of classics at Mutual and Essanay but his masterpieces tended to be the ones he indulged a lot of time and care upon. That's the whole reason he joined Griffith, Fairbanks and Pickford to form United Artists, to be as free as possible from the banker's clock, which is indifferent to the human experience. And the movies are about the human experience.
I don't want to go back, I want to go forward: The other day I told my movie-loving nephew that I was writing about Chaplin, and he said, "Charlie who?" When I sent him some YouTube clips of The Circus, he was blown away. "This is better than anything out now. And I never even heard of this dude."
It's hard to find good movies nowadays, older movies had less effects so the story line was more thought after since that's the only thing that kept the attention of viewers. Now it's all about the CGI which just makes most movies unnatural. Posted via my Amazon Kindle Fire
I really like watching charlie chaplin movie,even though it's black n' white,but i still enjoying watching it :)