{"id":1735,"date":"2016-05-17T19:19:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T19:19:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/?page_id=1735"},"modified":"2016-05-19T08:35:38","modified_gmt":"2016-05-19T08:35:38","slug":"the-promise-of-chaplin","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/the-promise-of-chaplin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Promise of Chaplin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: large;\">The Promise of Chaplin<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p><p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong><span style=\"font-family: helvetica, serif;\"><span style=\"font-size: large;\">PAUL FLAIG<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p><p>&nbsp;<\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\"><span style=\"font-size: x-large;\">T<\/span>he\u00a0fifth and final act of Walter Ruttmann\u2019s <em>Berlin: Symphony of a Great City<\/em> (1927) begins at the close of day, as electric lights stream from apartment windows, film palaces and car headlights. Ruttmann shifts from rain-swept, glistening streets to crowded sidewalks, as people go up and down one of Berlin\u2019s most fashionable thorough-fairs, Tauentzienstrasse, looking for an evening\u2019s entertainment. Such entertainment is represented first and foremost by the cinema, as we see the impressive facades of the Berliner Kino and the Atrium, the latter\u2019s awning advertising in dazzling lights the New Woman-themed romantic comedy, <em>Venus im Frack<\/em> (Land, 1927)<em>. <\/em>Outside a series of smaller, storefront cinemas, so-called <em>Ladenkino<\/em>, a placard for American cowboy Tom Mix and photographs of other movie stars surround a box office busy with customers queuing for tickets or waiting for their film-going companions. For <em>Berlin<\/em>\u2019s own audience, a sense of expectation builds as we wonder what film and which stars these surrogates for ourselves are seeking inside the cinema. Concluding the film-themed introduction to his final act, Ruttmann shows, in a quick glimpse lasting no more than five seconds, the interior of a cramped <em>Ladenkino<\/em> to give an answer: a pair of all too familiar, ragged and over-sized shoes gambol forward, accompanied by equally iconic bamboo cane and baggy trousers.<\/span><\/p><p>&nbsp;<\/p><div style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/j76FNxsJlt8?rel=0&amp;start=3150&amp;end=3230&amp;autoplay=0\" width=\"391\" height=\"314\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div><p>&nbsp;<\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">This synechdochal flash of Charlie Chaplin\u2019s Tramp, as instantly recognizable to viewers in 1927 as in 2016, is a brilliant stroke on Ruttmann\u2019s part. It allows him to stick to his documentary impulse of capturing Berliners at evening play\u2014we see silhouettes of a boisterous, amused and chatty audience\u2014while simultaneously depicting on only an eighth of film screen a figure immediately identifiable even when deprived of torso or face. Yet this balance between the time and space of metropolitan Berlin and that of the American slapstick film\u2014the only moment in Ruttmann\u2019s city-symphony in which film itself is seen\u2014is also meant to tell us something about the singular importance of Chaplin and his Tramp for Berliners in the nineteen-twenties. In contrast to Dziga Vertov\u2019s <em>The Man with the Movie Camera<\/em> (1929), influenced by <em>Berlin <\/em>yet concluding with a public screening of its own preceding imagery, Ruttmann pphasizes the promise of cinema through the promise of Chaplin as star, filmmaker and iconic image for German audiences. While Ruttmann performs this promise largely through a formal strategy of city-symphonic montage, he chooses as a kind of emblem of cinema neither his own images nor those of another German film (say, <em>Venus im Frack<\/em>), but rather the partial-image of Chaplin, by 1927 still the most popular and recognizable film star in the world.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">One of the great pleasures in reading <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em> comes from noticing recurring leitmotifs spanning its pages, finding in the movement across periods, technologies and concepts symptomatic desires and tensions circulating between screen, spectator and reader. Following such a transversal reading, Charlie Chaplin appears as one of the volume\u2019s most visibly recurrent figures. This circulation cannot help but recall the Tramp\u2019s anarchic movement in and out of the movie projector-like assembly line in <em>Modern Times<\/em> (1936) or, for that matter, the animated shoes and cane given cameo in Ruttmann\u2019s <em>Berlin: Symphony of a Great City<\/em>. Indeed, the latter\u2019s disjointed, broken animation exceed, by virtue of both Chaplin\u2019s performance and Ruttmann\u2019s framing, control of mind or body to become wish-images evocative in their own right, much like the shoes, cane, baggy trousers, right vest, mustache dot and bowler which made up the Tramp assemblage.<\/span><\/p><div id=\"attachment_1737\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter center\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1737\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-1737\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/wmse.png?resize=300%2C191\" alt=\"&quot;How to recognize them!&quot;\" width=\"300\" height=\"191\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-1737\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>&#8220;How to recognize them!&#8221;<\/em><\/p><\/div><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">I\u2019d like to briefly track such images and evocations as they circulate within <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em>. This interest comes in part from my own research, specifically a forthcoming monograph entitled <em>Weimar Slapstick: American Eccentrics, German Grotesques and Hollywood Comedy Re-Functioned<\/em>, which examines appropriations of American slapstick cinema within visual, political and intellectual cultures of the Weimar Republic. I am also the co-editor with Katherine Groo of the recent collection, <em>New Silent Cinema<\/em>, which examines returns to silent and early cinemas in contemporary digital culture. In the spirit of both projects, I will discuss how cinema\u2019s various promises and possibilities were negotiated through Chaplin\u2019s films as they were understood by diverse German critics, artists and filmmakers. I want to examine Chaplin as a figure of promise itself, as a reminder for both Weimar critics and contemporary readers of <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em> of how the anarchic, anachronistic Tramp could reveal alternative possibilities for the cinema beyond traditions from the past, definitions of the present, or sureties about the future.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Approaching Chaplin as this figure of promise, Siegfried Kracauer, in \u201cChaplin in Old Films,\u201d examines a 1930 revival of Tramp comedies from the teens, arguing that \u201cthe little cane, the tattered boots, and the whole vagabond costume with the baggy pants\u201d are crucial contributions to these films\u2019 utopian if anachronistic \u201cfairy tale atmosphere\u201d (400). For Kracauer, such wish-images offer a redemptive vision of the lumpenproletarian outcast as angelic prince. These now \u201cold films\u201d also redeem cinema itself, offering viewers haunting images of the forking paths not subsequently taken in film history, \u201cthe other possibilities that would not necessarily lead to later reality.\u201d<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Read with the Tramp\u2019s cameo in <em>Berlin<\/em>, Kracauer\u2019s retroactive, redeeming appeal to the promise of Chaplin offers readers of <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em> a useful method for understanding how and why these two promises so often correspond across the latter\u2019s treasure trove of texts. Tracking Chaplin\u2019s circulation and citation throughout the collection, one finds not one promise but many, a wide-range of reflections on both what cinema is or will be, but also what it was and might otherwise have been. This is as true in Kracauer\u2019s appeal to the early Chaplin, his status as \u201cold\u201d consolidated only by the presence of new genres as much as new media (synchronized sound, radio, color, television etc.), as it is for Ruttmann, where the film in question seems to come from an unidentified short from the teens rather than the contemporary <em>The Gold Rush<\/em> (1926). \u201cPromise\u201d thus implies the virtual as much as the actual, the potential as much as the empirical, the future as much as the past. The particular promise of Chaplin offers intense, varied and often contradictory claims on both then contemporary practices of filmmaking or film-going as well as the utopian or dystopian possibilities embedded in the Tramp\u2019s partial-objects and wish-images. In <em>Berlin: Symphony of a Great City<\/em>, for instance, Ruttmann balances documentation of Chaplin\u2019s popularity with his own appeal to Chaplin\u2019s synecdochal feet and cane as synecdoches of cinema. This avant-garde engagement with slapstick, mingling wish-images with a range of artistic practices, is comparable to Kracauer\u2019s call for his readers to re-watch Chaplin\u2019s \u201cold films\u201d not as bygone relics of a vanished age, but as suggesting alternative paths for the cinema, \u201cother possibilities\u201d to be actualized against the political and aesthetic dogmas of present and progress.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">This mingling of the citational and the performative, the actual and virtual, can be found among so many references to Chaplin in <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em>: Albrecht Viktor Blum\u2019s appeal to Chaplin\u2019s idea-driven \u201c\u2018fairy-tales of reality\u2019\u201d (\u201cDocumentary and Artistic Film,\u201d 103-104); Robert Musil\u2019s locating the Tramp within a broader comic tradition giving rise to the cinema and its uniquely embodied, synaesthetic spectatorship (\u201cImpressions of a Na\u00eff,\u201d 323-324); Kurt Pinthus celebrating the universal quality of Chaplin\u2019s films, which unburdens spectators through comedy and in doing so lets them recognize underlying tragedies (\u201cThe Ethical Potential of Film,\u201d 389); G.W. Pabst\u2019s predictive claim that Chaplin is the only contemporary filmmaker who will \u201cleave behind his \u2018collected works\u2019\u201d (\u201cFilm and Conviction,\u201d 376). Other references to Chaplin in <em>The Promise of Cinema <\/em>focus on topics ranging from movie star gossip to the technology of sound film to cinema\u2019s ambivalent status as art to the perceived deficiencies of German film comedy as illuminated by slapstick.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">In the case of <em>Berlin<\/em>, it is not surprising that Ruttmann would identify the promise of cinema through, on the one hand, his own formal practice of musical, metropolitan montage and, on the other, the citational image of Chaplin\u2019s feet and cane. For many, the Tramp was the very emblem of cinematic montage. This montage was performed or suggested on several levels: in the various and disjunctive parts that formed his costume and mask; in a jerky, neurasthenic body; in the unruly effects this body unleashed across often urban settings. Ruttmann\u2019s citation was as much a documentation of Chaplin\u2019s German popularity as a projection of his own desire for cinema\u2019s promise, innervating his audiences by drawing on the energies of the Tramp, who thereby becomes a figure of kinship and correspondence between Hollywood and Berlin, urban masses and the avant-garde, city-symphony and slapstick comedy. After all, it is difficult to tell what is animating the audience more, the Tramp caterwauling on screen or the presence of Ruttmann\u2019s camera filming from behind.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Walter Benjamin, like Ruttman, found in the Tramp\u2019s \u201csuccession of staccato bits of movement\u201d and gestural confusions the very principle of cinematic montage, a continuous sequence of discontinuous, broken images revealing a shared materialist logic between cinema and the assembly line. Anticipating Benjamin, many German critics would argue for this crucial link between cinematic form, industrial technology and the Tramp. Axel Eggebrecht, for instance, argues that Chaplin, unburdened by theatrical traditions, could approach cinema for what it is, at once \u201cpurely visual\u201d and a \u201crepresentational form of the industrial machine age\u201d (\u201cThe Twilight of Film,\u201d 302).<\/span><\/p><div style=\"width: 308px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/sites.davidson.edu\/littlemagazines\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/08\/chaplinnov1921_large_500.jpg?resize=298%2C350\" width=\"298\" height=\"350\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Fernand L\u00e9ger\u2019s illustration for Yvan Goll\u2019s <em>Die Chaplinade: Eine Kinodichtung (1920)<\/em><\/p><\/div><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Chaplin\u2019s own explicit turn to the assembly line in <em>Modern Times<\/em> reads to the contemporary critic like a too literal interpretation of Benjamin\u2019s claims about the Tramp as much as it might have evoked to the 1936 cinephile Ren\u00e9 Clair\u2019s <em>\u00c0\u00a0Nous la Libert\u00e9<\/em>. Clair would himself claim to have been inspired by Chaplin well before his film inspired <em>Modern Times<\/em> and his Dadaist compatriots in both France and Germany would likewise identify the Tramp as a cipher of industrial montage, perhaps most famously in the animated opening of Fernand L\u00e9ger\u2019s <em>Ballet M\u00e9canique <\/em>(1924). Beyond the French Dadaist and Surrealist celebrations of the slapstick star, we find this montage version of the Tramp depicted most often in various German avant-gardes. Indeed, L\u00e9ger\u2019s first, fractured images of the Tramp would accompany Yvan Goll\u2019s 1920 poem, <em>Die Chaplinade: Eine Kinodichtung<\/em> while his film would have its premiere at the 1924 <em>Internationale Ausstellung f\u00fcr Theatertechnik<\/em> in Vienna. This event was organized by the designer Friedrich Kiesler, who would himself bring this German slapstick fandom to the United States, the inaugural screening at his Bauhaus-inspired cinema, the Guild Theater in New York, including Chaplin\u2019s 1916 short, <em>1 A.M.<\/em> Members of the Bauhaus would also appeal to Chaplin\u2019s eccentric: Oskar Schlemmer\u2019s Triadic Ballet was partially inspired by Chaplin\u2019s marionette-like motion while L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy used the filmmaker as a role model for communicating directly to mass audiences rather than constructing ideal versions thereof. Among Berlin Dadaists, Chaplin would be oft cited in montages and paintings and oft celebrated in manifestoes and journals.<\/span><\/p><div id=\"attachment_1740\" style=\"width: 385px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1740\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-1740\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/image008.png?resize=375%2C236\" alt=\"\u201cThe int. Dada-Company, Berlin sends sympathetic greetings to CHARLIE CHAPLIN, the greatest artist in the world and a good Dadaist. We protest the exclusion of Chaplin films in Germany.\u201d Der Dada No. 3 (April, 1920)\" width=\"375\" height=\"236\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-1740\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">\u201cThe int. Dada-Company, Berlin sends sympathetic greetings to CHARLIE CHAPLIN, the greatest artist in the world and a good Dadaist. We protest the exclusion of Chaplin films in Germany.\u201d <em>Der Dada<\/em> No. 3 (April, 1920)<\/p><\/div><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">George Grosz would identify with Chaplin in self-portraits and dedications; Otto Schmalhausen converted Beethoven\u2019s death mask into a portrait of the Tramp for the 1920 International Dada Fair; Johannes Baader painted an \u201cHonorary Portrait of Charlie Chaplin\u201d which doubled as a \u201ctribute\u201d to Gutenberg\u2019s invention of printed type and thus claimed for film and its greatest representative an equally revolutionary power; Gerhard Preiss, the \u201cMusic Dada\u201d exhibited a series of photographs of himself in bowler hat and black clothing dancing the \u201cDada-Trott,\u201d a dance that cannot help but recall the Tramp\u2019s own derby-bedecked displays; Erwin Blumenfeld dubbed himself \u201cPresident-Dada-Chaplinist\u201d and produced a montage of the slapstick comedian simultaneously lying on and becoming the Christian cross, surrounded by various religious and art icons, including the Star of David and Swastika.<\/span><\/p><div id=\"attachment_1741\" style=\"width: 250px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1741\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-1741\" src=\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.international-dada.appspot.com\/dadaman\/objets\/EBlumenfeldDadacollage1921.jpg?resize=240%2C339\" alt=\"Dada Collage (Charlie Chaplin), Erwin Blumenfeld (1921)\" width=\"240\" height=\"339\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-1741\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Dada Collage (Charlie Chaplin)<\/em>, Erwin Blumenfeld (1921)<\/p><\/div><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">One of the most astute critics of Berlin Dada, Adolf Behne, in \u201cThe Public\u2019s Attitude toward Modern German Literature\u201d (392-394), would echo these works, hailing Edison as \u201cthe new Gutenberg\u201d and Chaplin as the greatest practitioner of \u201cfilm as an art of the masses.\u201d In these and other essays (\u201cFilm as a Work of Art,\u201d 457-458) Behne distances cinema from traditional aesthetic forms and judgments, suggesting that in place of \u201cthe individual artwork\u201d Chaplin\u2019s cinema offers a political, democratic and didactic mode fit for elevating the masses rather than subjecting them to the hierarchies of taste or the folderol of kitsch. Anticipating Benjamin\u2019s later and by now oft cited claim about the affinities between slapstick and the avant-garde in \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,\u201d Behne sketches a range of ideas all too familiar to readers of that famous essay: the politicization of aesthetics through a kind of \u201cdidactic literature\u201d (394); the dissolution of the traditional artwork; the construction of a shared, democratic sensorium; continuities between avant-garde shock and mass popular gag.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">A more direct anticipation of \u201cThe Work of Art\u201d essay comes in Theodor Adorno\u2019s \u201cKierkegaard Prophesies Chaplin\u201d (401-402). Indeed, it is more than likely that this short piece for the <em>Frankfurter Zeitung<\/em> would influence the former text\u2019s reflections on cinema (a mutual friend and Chaplin fan, Kracauer, had arranged for this essay to be published and sections of Adorno\u2019s <em>Habilitation<\/em> on Kierkegaard would be cited in Benjamin\u2019s <em>Passagen-Werk<\/em>). Described, following Kierkegaard, as \u201cThe one who comes walking,\u201d Chaplin is here understood in terms of mimetic faculty, not only \u201cable to walk,\u201d but to cite walking as a kind of Brechtian <em>Gestus<\/em>, presenting the most basic of physical motions as animated prop, identifiable (and comical) in much the same manner as the partial objects comprising the Tramp\u2019s costume.<\/span><\/p><p>&nbsp;<\/p><div style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/144071846\" width=\"391\" height=\"314\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div><p>&nbsp;<\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">This emphasis on mimesis, prop and gesture through the example of walking recurs in the well-known section on the \u201coptical unconscious\u201d in \u201cThe Work of Art\u201d: \u201c\u2026we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step.\u201d Because of the \u201cjerky\u201d montage that was the Tramp\u2019s walk, comically fractured between the imitation of an ostentatious leisure class, on the one hand, and rude antics and material deprivations of the lumpenproletarian on the other, this moment of taking a step or coming walking, is made simultaneously visible, laughable and thinkable. As Ruttmann intimates with his own citation of Tramp and spectator, this walk is also cinematic, identifying gestures by breaking them down into their constitutive parts, asking actors and audiences to look at themselves through the estranging, testing gaze of the camera. While this \u201csplit second\u201d has usually been related to the precedents of Marey or Muybridge, the simple motion of taking a step was a common example in Weimar reflections on slapstick. Benjamin\u2019s colleague in Hans Richter\u2019s <em>G<\/em> group, the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann praised both Chaplin and Keaton and would emphasize, in both articles and his own dance performances, that to see, feel or think the gesture of \u201cwalking\u201d one must have a cinematic \u201cconsciousness of lightning-quick rapidity [blitzartiger Schnelle].\u201d The distant, almost scientific view afforded by slapstick\u2019s gestics would likewise earn the praise of another colleague, Bertolt Brecht, who claimed that Chaplin\u2019s films \u201cdepict the human being as an object and could have an audience entirely made up of reflexologists.\u201d Yet this objection would also provoke suspicions of sadism, at the other end of the political spectrum, in the writings of Ernst J\u00fcnger. In a passage from <em>Der Arbeiter<\/em> included in <em>The Promise of Cinema <\/em>(408-412), J\u00fcnger views slapstick as an aggressive assault of the type over the individual, at once a modern sign of technology\u2019s victory over a human reduced to \u201cplaything\u201d and civilization\u2019s regression to primitive, tribal warfare.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Stumbling at this dense intersection of epic theater, messianic Marxism, conservative critique, Dadaism, <em>Neue Sachlichkeit<\/em>, psychoanalysis, National Socialism, psychophysics, and film industries, Chaplin provokes fervent and often antinomial interpretations and appropriations across <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em>. Written in the wake of debates running throughout the collection, the famous case of \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility\u201d offers such antinomies on a page by page basis, with Benjamin following Brecht\u2019s behaviorist appeal to slapstick while, in a footnote, critiquing Chaplin\u2019s heir apparent, Mickey Mouse, for the \u201ccozy acceptance of bestiality and violence as inevitable concomitants of existence,\u201d an acceptance Benjamin saw as reviving the carnivalesque iconography of medieval pogroms. This reservation about slapstick, situated somewhere between J\u00fcnger\u2019s critique and Adorno\u2019s description of Chaplin\u2019s \u201cbestial quality\u201d and \u201ccruelty\u201d (in a later addendum to \u201cKierkegaard Prophesies Chaplin,\u201d written after the critical theorist\u2019s comic encounter with the filmmaker in Malibu) follows larger discussions of cinema, slapstick and Chaplin within the Republic\u2019s media-sphere, with suspicions arising among the members of both Nazi and Communist parties, celebrations among conservatives, liberals and leftists, imitations as well as resistances on the part of various filmmakers, performers and audiences. This is not to mention the fraught ethnic politics surrounding Chaplin\u2019s perceived Jewishness (never mind that of the Tramp or indeed Mickey Mouse), which one finds in the anti-fascist caricatures of Karl Arnold, the censorship policies of Josef Goebbels and in Hannah Arendt\u2019s theory of the refugee. Or, at the seeming other end of the spectrum, the Tramp\u2019s evocation, for both Kurt Tucholsky and Benjamin, of the petit-bourgeois mannerisms and \u201cdiminished masculinity\u201d of Hitler, with whom this character shared, for both, far more than a mustache. Like his descent down the assembly line, Chaplin\u2019s double portrayal of both Jewish victim and petty tyrant in <em>The Great Dictator<\/em> (1941) would seem to implement these prior, Weimar-era interpretations of the Tramp. In the case of this film as well as <em>Monsieur Verdoux<\/em> (1946), Chaplin was in point of fact directly influenced by Weimar figures who had once been so taken with his Tramp, absorbing the caustic wit of Salka Viertel, Hanns Eisler and Brecht among others.<\/span><\/p><div id=\"attachment_1742\" style=\"width: 280px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1742\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-1742\" src=\"https:\/\/i1.wp.com\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/image012.png?resize=270%2C240\" alt=\"\u201cIn the political fight: \u2018Just a Jew!\u2019\u201d (Simplicissimus, 1931)\" width=\"270\" height=\"240\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-1742\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">\u201cIn the political fight: \u2018Just a Jew!\u2019\u201d (<em>Simplicissimus<\/em>, 1931)<\/p><\/div><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">To conclude this reflection on the promise of Chaplin, I\u2019d like to turn to another text by the antinomial Benjamin, one largely forgotten among scholars but happily included in <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em>. Like Kracauer\u2019s appeal to early Chaplin films\u2019 \u201cother possibilities\u201d or Adorno\u2019s description of the Tramp appearing as a \u201cghostly photograph in a live-action film,\u201d Benjamin would, in \u201cChaplin in Retrospect\u201d [R\u00fcckblick auf Chaplin] (398-400), emphasize the spectral, anachronistic quality of Chaplin and his cinema in <em>The Circus<\/em> (1928), made on the cusp of Hollywood\u2019s conversion to synchronized sound. Approaching this film as itself a kind of retrospective overview of the filmmaker\u2019s \u201cgreatest themes,\u201d Benjamin also offers an unwitting <em>R\u00fcckblick<\/em> on the many discussions of Chaplin circulating throughout <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em>: Chaplin\u2019s films as idea-driven, the filmmaker\u2019s technical sophistication, speculations about future films like the recently announced <em>Napoleon<\/em> (basis for <em>The Great Dictator<\/em>), biographical tidbits, a valorization of laughter, political interpretations of the Tramp, an emphasis on the Tramp\u2019s popularity among diverse global audiences etc. Yet it is the beginning of this <em>R\u00fcckblick <\/em>that is perhaps most intriguing, especially in light of the no less retrospective, redemptive gaze occasioned by <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em>.<\/span><\/p><div id=\"attachment_1743\" style=\"width: 255px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1743\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-1743\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/image014.png?resize=245%2C339\" alt=\"Napoleon (Simplicissimus, 1926)\" width=\"245\" height=\"339\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-1743\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Napoleon<\/em> (<em>Simplicissimus<\/em>, 1926)<\/p><\/div><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Appropriately placed by the collection\u2019s editors to precede Kracauer\u2019s \u201cChaplin in Old Films,\u201d the essay begins, \u201c<em>The Circus<\/em> is the first product of the art of film that is also the product of old age. Char\u00adlie has grown older since his last film. But he also acts old. And the most moving thing about this new film is the feeling that Chaplin now has a clear overview of his possibili\u00adties and is resolved to work exclusively within these limits to attain his goal.\u201d Like Kracauer, Benjamin insists on a specular relationship between a retrospection of Chaplin\u2019s film history and an \u201coverview\u201d of cinematic \u201cpossibilities\u201d [Wirkungsm\u00f6glichkeiten]. And just as Kracauer\u2019s emphasis in \u201cChaplin in Old Films\u201d anticipates his other writings on historical redemption, so too does Benjamin here prefigure the historical excavations and citations that would come to dominate his intellectual labor in the thirties. <em>The Circus<\/em> is a key work for Benjamin because it registers film\u2019s historicity, demonstrating a fracture between the now of the present and a visibly ancient if remembered past, a threshold across which Chaplin repeatedly trips throughout <em>The Circus<\/em>. Indeed, Chaplin is the filmmaker best equipped for this historical traversal precisely because of his simultaneous modernity and his spectral anachronism. The Tramp simultaneously evokes the engines and energies of industrial technology while resisting such progress through the deliberate anachronisms embedded in the Tramp\u2019s attitudes and visual composition, which recall the faded fashions and leisurely gestures of the mid-nineteenth century metropolis. For Adorno, this ghostliness evokes both the former new medium of still photography as much as it does Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201ccityscape of 1840.\u201d Similarly for Benjamin it is both Chaplin\u2019s no less photographic observations of comic behavior during his London childhood and the still older model and vision of Dickens\u2019 literature that explain the filmmaker\u2019s parallax of centuries, technologies and cultures.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Stumbling between past and present much in the way he stumbled between competing discourses and desires amidst his various audiences, Chaplin, in <em>The Circus<\/em>, reveals the possibilities of a past lost but capable of fleeting re-capture. Indeed, the formulation that begins Benjamin\u2019s essay, <em>The Circus<\/em> being at once \u201cfirst product\u201d and \u201cproduct of old age\u201d (the original is more direct: \u201cDer \u2018Zirkus\u2019 ist das erste Alterswerk der Filmkunst.\u201d), captures something of this non-chronological parallax, Chaplin\u2019s importance being new only by virtue of being distinctly and recognizably old. This suddenly apparent distance, however, is not a cause for mourning, but rather offers both Chaplin and <em>The Circus<\/em>\u2019s viewer an opportunity for both <em>R\u00fcckblick<\/em> and <em>\u00dcberblick<\/em>, measuring the present\u2019s actualities in light of the possibilities inaugurated in the past, when cinema was once full of promise.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Beyond so many claims on Chaplin\u2019s cinematic promise, Benjamin, Adorno and Kracauer emphasize first and foremost the Tramp as the figure of promise itself. Confusing tense and temporality, he reminds viewers not only what cinema was, but also what it might have been or, as importantly, what it still could be or become against history\u2019s seeming necessities. If Chaplin was, for Kracauer, a fairytale prince fit for modern times, for Benjamin he would be in his comic stumbles \u201cthe only angel of peace for whom the earth has room\u201d [Er ist der einzige Friedensengel, der auf die Erde pa\u00dft]. Drawn from one of his <em>Denkbilder<\/em>, this image simultaneously recalls a dream sequence of the Tramp as fallen gutter angel in <em>The Kid<\/em> (1921) and anticipates reference to Klee\u2019s <em>Angelus Novus<\/em> in \u201cOn the Concept of History.\u201d Yet in contrast to the latter, Chaplin\u2019s angel finds peace rather than catastrophe on earth, doing so precisely as a figure of the past\u2019s promises rather than their impossible resuscitation.<\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Such promise, however, is only visible if the views and reflections it occasions are collected, archived and shared. Chaplin\u2019s own look back at his career in <em>The Circus<\/em> or Kracauer\u2019s return to the filmmaker\u2019s \u201cold\u201d comedies have as their pre-condition the preservation not only of films, but also of how these films were understood and appropriated by writers, critics and scholars. This is one reason why the publication of <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em> is so important. Aside from offering a bounty of essential documents from a vital period in film history, <em>Promise<\/em> also presents a whole series of speculative, imaginary possibilities for the cinema that can and should not be relegated to the safe distance of a historical past preceding the now of our present. Rather, they should act on this present, exposing its historical contingency as well as uncanny commonalities or unseen differences between and across seemingly distinct periods in film history. Among the many political, artistic or philosophical promises Chaplin offered, perhaps most important was the promise of promise itself, one only visible because of the Tramp\u2019s stumbles and looks in and out of time. It is not surprising that these would attract further retrospection on the part of so many German writers and critics (not to mention filmmakers like Ruttmann), but I would suggest that such redemption is no less at work in the montage that forms <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em>. Approaching the \u201cother possibilities,\u201d \u201cghostly\u201d images and seeming anachronisms spanning its pages, the contemporary reader has untold opportunities for summoning the promises dispersed across its pages. Chaplin is of course only one such specter. Others await their s\u00e9ance.<\/span><\/p><p>&nbsp;<\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/The-Promise-of-Chaplin-\u2013-The-Promise-of-Cinema.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Download<\/a> this article as a PDF.<\/span><\/p><p>&nbsp;<\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\"><strong>Paul Flaig<\/strong> <span style=\"color: #181818;\">is a Lecturer in Film &amp; Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen. He is co-editor of the recent collection <em>New Silent Cinema<\/em> (Routledge\/AFI Film Reader, 2015) and has published essays in <em>Cinema Journal, Screen, animation: an interdisciplinary journal<\/em> and several other journals and collections. He is currently completing a monograph entitled <em>Weimar Slapstick: American Eccentrics, German <\/em>Grotesques<em> and Hollywood Comedy Re-Functioned<\/em>.<\/span><\/span><\/p><p><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Please cite this article as:<\/span><\/p><p style=\"text-align: left;\"><span style=\"font-family: 'helvetica', serif; font-weight: normal;\">Flaig, Paul. &#8220;The Promise of Chaplin.&#8221; <em>The Promise of Cinema<\/em>. 18-05-2015. http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/the-promise-of-chaplin\/.<\/span><\/p><hr \/>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Promise of ChaplinPAUL FLAIG&nbsp;The\u00a0fifth and final act of Walter Ruttmann\u2019s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) begins at the close of day, as electric lights stream from apartment windows, film palaces and car headlights. Ruttmann shifts from rain-swept, glistening streets to crowded sidewalks, as people go up and down one of Berlin\u2019s most<div class=\"theme-button\"><a class=\"transparent-btn\" href=\"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/the-promise-of-chaplin\/\" >READ MORE<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"spay_email":""},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P6B84P-rZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1735"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1735"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1787,"href":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1735\/revisions\/1787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thepromiseofcinema.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}