chaplin
 
Photo Essays
1. Exile’s Return
2. Chaplin’s Parents
3. Hannah Chaplin’s Femmes Fatales
4. Playing Dress-Up  In The Land of Make Believe
5. Teenage Girls and Fear of Aging
6. Chaplin’s Three Teenage Wives
7. Mildred Harris
8. Lita Grey
9. Oona O’Neill
10. Chaplin’s Father
11. A Royal Lion
12. Vesta Tilley as Bertie
13. Ella Shields as Bertie
14. Making A Living
15. The Lion Comique’s Son: Dressed Like A Bum
16. Monsieur Verdoux as a Lion Comique
17. Calvero as a Lion Comique
18. The Lion Comique’s Son in the Limelight
19. Charlie as a Child
20. The Kid’s Lucky Break
21. Syd Chaplin
22. A Family Album of Theatrical Drunks
23. Chaplin’s Family Romance
24. Edna Purviance
25. Purviance’s Influence on Chaplin’s Character
26. Essanay
27. Chaplinitis
28. Chaplin’s Predecessors
29. Eye Contact: Audience-Performer Intimacy
30. Chaplin the Auteur
31. Chaplin’s Two Autobiographies
32. Going It Alone
33. The Circus
34. Autobiographical Starvation Scenes From The Gold Rush
35. Autobiographical Madness Scenes in Modern Times
36. Two British Music Hall Traditions and Topical Comedy
37. The Great Dictator
38. Fatal Attraction: Joan Barry
39. Monsieur Verdoux: Guillotine or Hatchet Job?
40. Limelight
 
Chaplin: A Life In Film
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 The Circus
 

CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S COMIC CHILDHOOD

OPENING SHOTS:BEDDING DOWN FOR THE NIGHT
EASY STREET
A DOG’S LIFE

© Roy Export

CITY LIGHTS


© Roy Export
 
CLOSING SHOTS:GOING IT ALONE
THE TRAMP
THE CIRCUS

© Roy Export

Homelessness and loneliness   were traumatic childhood experiences that Chaplin relived in his alter-ego screen character to great creative advantage. “Those days were the longest and saddest of my life,” he recalled. “One Saturday, after school, I came home to find no one there…the room looked grim…and its emptiness frightened me. I also began to get hungry…but no food was  there. I could stand the gaping emptiness no longer, so in desolation I went out…when I returned, it was night…all I wanted was to get to bed…As I crept up the darkened stairs, hoping to get to bed unnoticed, Louise [his alcoholic stepmother] staggered out onto the landing. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ she said. ‘This is not your home…you’re not sleeping here tonight…Get out!’…[on another occasion] Louise received a visit from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and she was most indignant about it. They came because the police had reported finding Sydney and me asleep a three o’clock in the morning by a watchman’s fire. It was a night that Louise had shut us both out, and the police had made her open the door and let us in.”

Chaplin’s films (photos above) relived some of his boyhood  experiences of homelessness and loneliness. Many  of the film sets he built were faithful visual replicas of places where he had lived as a child. In modern Hollywood    terms, Chaplin used special effects to create a virtual reality that allowed him to jog his memory.  In literary terms, Chaplin’s   film sets operated  like a Proustian tea biscuit. In psychoanalytic terms, Charlie  screened his  screen memories. But any way you look at it, it worked. Somehow Chaplin  managed to gain mastery over personal tragedy  by transforming it into universal comedy with a message of hope, over and  over again.


MODERN TIMES: THE LITTLE TRAMP FINALLY FINDS A SIDEKICK AND BOON COMPANION PAULETTE GODDARD TO BRAVELY FACE AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE (CHAPLIN MADE THIS FILM DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION)
 
 
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All images from Chaplin films made from 1918 onwards, Copyright © Roy
Export Company Establishment._Charles Chaplin and the Little Tramp are trademarks and/or
service marks of Bubbles Inc. S.A. and/or Roy Export Company
Establishment, used with permission.

 
 
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