【Editor's note】

On October 11, during the 7th Pingyao International Film Festival, "Dialogue: About Chaplin + the movie "The Gold Rush"" was held at the Pingyao Film Palace·Small Town Spring Hall.

Before the official screening, Marco Müller, chief consultant of the Pingyao International Film Festival, Sha Dan, program planner of the China Film Archive, Cheng Bo, executive director of the Shanghai Vancouver Film Academy, Wei Xiaojun, executive director of the Shanxi Film Academy of Shanxi University of Communication, and actor Qiao Shan Talk about Chaplin’s multifaceted life and film aesthetics.

Muller wrote a special article "Charlie Chaplin, Radical Tramp", which was read by a translator at the end of the dialogue session.

Chaplin film retrospective poster

Charlie Chaplin, Radical Tramp

Text/Marco Muller

(Compiled by The Paper reporter Wang Zheng based on on-site translation)

In September 1952, Charlie Chaplin looked back at New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth - on his way to Europe to introduce his latest film, Monsieur Verdoux - to the continent. On board, Chaplin learned that only Only after he underwent immigration and naturalization review of his moral and political character would the U.S. government allow him to return to the United States, where he had lived for 30 years...

"Goodbye," Chaplin said on the deck of the ship. He refused to be tested. He did not return to the United States until 1972, when the American Film Institute awarded him an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Why did the U.S. government exile Chaplin? Like the tramp in Modern Times trapped in the cogs of modern industry. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Charlie Chaplin found himself entangled in the machine of McCarthyism. The FBI, the country's political police, began investigating Chaplin in 1922 for his alleged ties to the American Communist Party.

"Modern Times" stills

Beginning in 1920, Chaplin was at the peak of his success. He was a radical filmmaker, thinker, and organizer who, along with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. The company uses a factory system, allowing four actors and directors to take charge of their work.

In 1921, Chaplin began making "The Kid," also known as "The Kid," which is one of his best films. It was almost certainly based on his childhood memories and refined Chaplin's Tramp character. Chaplin's most important silent film is based on the image of the Tramp - the iconic poor man in modern capitalist society. Chaplin said that he was like a person who was always troubled by a spirit, the spirit of poverty, the spirit of having nothing - this is exactly what people saw in his later films, from 1915's "The Wanderer" Han Dynasty" to 1936's "Modern Times", nothing else.

Stills from "Looking for a Child and Encountering an Immortal"

Chaplin said in 1925 about the image of the Tramp that no matter how depressed he was, no matter how successful the jackals were in tearing him apart, he was still a dignified man. The working class, the working poor, to Chaplin were people of resourcefulness and dignity. Unbeaten or ridiculed, his sympathy for the working class defined all of his most famous silent films.

An odd-looking little man with a derby hat, ill-fitting clothing, baggy trousers, a tight cropped coat, oversized shoes and a toothbrush mustache walks in with a stick, in the film "Children's Races in Venice" (1914) Chaplin first occupied the movie screen as a tramp. From then on, the image of the tramp became synonymous with Chaplin. Chaplin was familiar with the tramp character from his history of encounters with tramp comedians in the British music industry, as well as the tramps he encountered during his childhood.

Chaplin has been a mime artist in vaudeville theaters since he was 14 years old. This experience made acting come naturally to Chaplin. He brought various theatrical forms to the emerging film medium, thereby developing the film form. A new aesthetic sensibility. The paradox of Chaplin's cinematic genius made him one of cinema's most enduring comedians and allowed him to be taken seriously as an artist, thanks to his portrayal of the picaresque.

We see that it was through the figure of the Tramp that Chaplin initiated a fundamental shift in filmmaking, turning subjectivity inward by establishing a direct connection with camera and audience. Chaplin created the subject of the film, made himself the protagonist of the camera, formed a specific relationship between his body gestures and the camera, and then transformed the medium of film from the outside as well as from the inside. With his ability to bring the camera to life and capture the audience's direct attention, the picaresque trope became central to Chaplin's film projects. Through this character who could transform from an unknown to an ordinary person, Chaplin blurred the line between actor and audience. limit.

And this is possible precisely because the Tramp is not outside the audience, but one of it. His rapid entry into familiar yet alienating territory represents an individual caught up in the new mechanical wonders of the modern world. Chaplin's body is simultaneously a symbolic fusion of man and machine, and Chaplin's creativity is regarded by many filmmakers and critics as the embodiment of modernity itself. For example, in the film I've already cited, Chaplin plays the role of a traditional clown, affirming the needs of the body and opposing social conventions, his physical nature transcending his human identity and becoming a mechanical identity. In his film narrative, Chaplin seemed to give the Tramp image multiple aspects: he was a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a loner, a hopeful romantic and an adventurer.

However, what is also striking about Tramp is that his films themselves ignore all the necessity of spoken language and convey the tragic rhythms of farce and comedy through picaresque metaphors. Gestures and facial expressions seem to effectively transcend the social boundaries of outsiders and critique the system itself from within. Humor is the core element of the Tramp, becoming Chaplin's tool to reconcile reason with traditional definitions of insanity. The Tramp walks with his legs and knees spread, a look that makes the audience laugh as soon as he appears. His weird gait was full of meaning, and the scene where he hid a stolen egg in his pants and then smashed it in his pants made the audience laugh.

Also in Modern Times, factory workers are depicted as cogs in a machine. He is driven mad by the repetitive, dehumanizing tasks carried out on the conveyor belt, and the masters who control production, and the movement of the human body, also become the masters of the homeless body. The Tramp's body twists and turns, tightening the bolts of the conveyor belt, his rhythmic, machine-like body - Chaplin explores the space of the screen, and in the process revolutionizes the film form itself - most of his predecessors Rely on plot to drive events and keep the audience interested. But Chaplin, who directed and acted himself, always found a way to try. He used his body as an extension of himself and became an unparalleled clown.

The physicality that Chaplin carried as the clown triumphed over sentimentality. His extremely tense body makes exaggerated movements. Even though it is a silent film, it is so wonderful to see and hear. For example, in "Modern Times", when he uses his body voice, we hear the bubbling sound of digestion in his stomach. This unique combination of nature and machinery, which places Chaplin within the tradition of modernism, has multiple meanings and invites the audience to make their own interpretations: Chaplin became famous solely because of his physical gifts in acting , or are there more reasons?

The fascinating genius of Chaplin also lies in the characters he chose to present his ideas in the world. The different metaphors of tramp popular literature and comics, sociology, and psychology reveal that Chaplin once became a figure in the modern film imagination. One of the most iconic figures. Tramp characteristics. The tramp is specifically designed to replicate the modern era he lives in in terms of body, psychology and culture. In an exaggerated and mechanical pattern of things, he is dislocated, twisted, aimless, without focus and has no life. world, escaping any real emotion and attachment.

Through the image of the Tramp, Chaplin shows that the displaced people are ordinary people in the audience, depicting the struggle of ordinary people as they struggle to understand the new world order that threatens their lives with rapid industrialization - — With the understanding that ordinary people have now become outsiders in society, dazzling with speed and movement on screen, imitating the ever-changing reality of contemporary life, technological development and increasing commoditization, a person in society People on the margins but able to see clearly the center of society were shaped by Chaplin into protagonists and heroes. Modernism as a historical period and aesthetic movement witnessed the birth of radical and new themes, and ordinary individuals were able to reflect on the complexity of modernity in the smallest elements. The body language and techniques Chaplin presents in The Tramp are silence and humor - film as a medium, and Chaplin's films in particular, brought critical and modernist sensibilities to ordinary people - the technology of the time Innovation drove the development of film as an interesting new way to deliver radical content to the masses through images.

Charlie Chaplin not only created radical new themes, but also created a radical new world, with his own unique way of seeing and existing.