ritas kleine welt

one year ago, by complete coincidence, stephen weissman left a comment on one of my entries. that's how we came into contact. since then we have been mailing each other sporadically and i had offered my help to translate some of the german reviews for him.

some three weeks ago, the german translation of steve's chaplin: a life was released for the german readership. (in german: Chaplin: Eine Biographie). ilja richter wrote a somewhat unusual review for Die Berliner Morgenpost as he was very much taken in by the book. 

five days away from christmas, in christian parley on the fourth sunday in advent, i thought i should finally get into the spirit of the season and make a day of it. so in the order of appearance, here's what i did today.

alley proposed, so who am i to dispose? three guesses who it will be this time. santa? naw! the tooth fairy? nope. (but he's got teeth alright!) the tramp? you're halfway there.

gray from over at livejournal started it. and i am the willing copy-cat. naturally this post is about chaplin and, most definitely, it's anything but dial-up friendly.

when i came to my office today, i stopped by my pigeon hole really quickly just to see whether some of the house mail had been delivered and if some form had to be returned. there really was a form that needed signing, but on top of it all, there was also a small paper envelope.

let me just say, little gestures like that are the best picker-uppers in the world. a little bit of validation of what i do here at the university with teaching literature and cultural studies sure helps LOADS. because, frankly, i most often get the impression that my seminars are one thing above all: pointless. but every once and a while there's something like this...

yesterday a rather heavy envelope lay on the shoeshelf by the door when i came home. i picked it up -- and nearly dropped it again. inside was the book by maurice bessy i had ordered from amazon a few days ago. it's not only a HUGE book, it's also freaking heavy. since i don't have a kitchen scale, i can only guess that it might weigh somewhere between 3 and 4kg. honestly! i swear!!! anywho... now it's mine, mine, MINE!!!

this morning for something different, but not so unexpected. here are my three chaplin moments during the last week. the first one was meeting little chuckles on leicester square where some nearly 30 years ago they unveiled a sculplure of the little fellow -- which looks nothing like his real-life counterpart, except for the mustache. the second chaplin-moment was finding a poster advert for victoria chaplin and her husband's invisible circus. and the third moment was paying a little visit to the duke of york's theatre in the west end (just around the corner from the wyndham's). here ickle chuckles played billy the page boy in the gillette adaptation of sherlock holmes. -- my three comrades, mary, ellie and alex bore these moments of spontaneous public fangirling like brave soldiers.

about two weeks back, i had placed a bid on three chaplin books that were on auction on ebay. and lucky me won. actually, i still can't quite grasp it -- because two of the three books were first issues from the late 1920s. i had expected to see a stiff competition and fierce bidding for at least one of them, but nothing happened. except that insead of paying the initial price of € 1.- for book #1, it cost a bit more because there appeared this one odd raise of price (miracle, oh, miracle!) a few hours just before the auction was about to end. (insert sneaking suspicion of the auctioneer telling a friend to raise the bid by a few euros so as not to land entirely in the dumps)

but still. considering the total amount of money i paid, considering the status of first issues and considering the actual rarity of two of the three books, it was more than a decent deal. to be honest, i don't think the auctioneer had any idea what treasures he was throwing out!

apparently the song 'smile' is currently experiencing a comeback. the tune was composed by chaplin in 1936 for his last silent film, modern times. it was a silent film in the sense of missing dialogue. as in theprevious feature, city lights, however, chaplin had included  sound on the filmstrips themselves. so in the end, technically speaking, the film was far from silent. there were a few words, such as human dialogue filtered through machines (telescreens, radio and a grammophone) and chaplin's tramp sung nonsensical lyrics to the smash-hit 'titine'. (the original lyrics were just as silly, though!) in 1936 'smile' was not yet the song, though, that now everybody has become wild about in the past three or four days, simply for the reason that it still lacked words. the lyrics were added somewhat later and ever since then, people have been messing up the line, 'light up your face with gladness / hide every trace of sadness'.

under contract with mutual, chaplin produced in the years 1916/17 the twelve films that have gone down as 'the golden dozen'. the mutual film company gave him a studio and, at the time, the highest sallary in film history to produce to his heart's content. although chaplin started running behind schedule fairly early on, he still managed to release a 2-reeler on almost a bi-monthly basis. the twelve films were his testing ground for new stories, new locations and a new tramp.

today: modern times.
original release: 1936
medium: film
remakes: cartoon.

in 1917, whilst under the contract with mutual, chaplin shot a seires of 12 two-reelers within roughly a year. he used to call this period of work the happiest time fullfilling a contract. mutual made him the best-paid employee worldwide and he enjoyed the benefits of trying out new techniques in telling a story on film. add that his relationship with edna purviance was still going strong at the time. sometime chplin fell back to his keystone year. but for most of the time, with the mutuals you have a set of films that are part innovative and part pure experiment. and the immigrant is well both!

what is most astonishing is chaplin's own immigrant background to the US. but! he did not suffer discriminating officers in ellis island. nor did he have to worry about not being able to pay a bill in a restaurant. however, having grown up in terrible pverty, he was very conscious about class differences. and because he was the shyest of shy people, he was most intimidated by the waiters in new york. both these impressions, poverty and intimidation, have been worked into this marvelous and incredibly charming two-reeler.