ritas kleine welt

youtube is a great thing. it's a treasure trove for rare interviews, such as lita grey talking about her life and her marriage to charles chaplin. their relationship always fascinated me. they were such a completely different pair that their marriage always appeared as doomed from the start. especially, since she was twenty years younger and just short of 16 years old when she got pregnant for the first time. a shotgun wedding and two children later, the pair were throwing muck at each other and the world was left to wonder whatever they had seen in each other. whatever it was, there must have been love, too.

birgit and i went for a walk through berlin on friday afternoon in order to secure some tickets for the world premiere of the restored metropolis. (we were short of ten people in front of us when the box office closed. dang!) on our way to the friedrichstadtpalast, we crossed one of the many bridges across the river spree. this is what we saw...

buster keaton: not your stereotypical kind of classically handsome man. but, damn!, there was an aura about him that just makes you weep into your morning coffee. certainly not handsome -- but beautiful!!!

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. 

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.

this afternoon, i watched my first ever d.w. griffith film, broken blossoms from 1919. i can see the appeal of this film, but, boy!, have i been spoilt by chaplin and keaton so far! the setting was fab. the story was kinda sweet-ish. lillian gish ripped my heart into pieces, but sadly, sadly, ... the film dragged on and on and on.

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.

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!!!

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.

in retrospect, chaplin called fulfilling the mutual contract the 'most consistently happy period' of his life. he was working his little tush off to adhere to the set time frame of roughly a year as much as possible, but despite all the stress and at time creative exhaustion (nearly every film ended in a wild keystone-like chase), he went as far as his contract possibly allowed it. he was not yet the owner of a studio, nor did he own the material he delivered. but that did not hinder him from streching his creative energies to the max and use these films as his personal testing lab. the result is a set of twelve films that burst with sheer energy and wild spirit. some things in particular stand out against the rest of his entire body of work. for instance:

in order to celebrate chaplin's 120th birthday accordingly, i was able to hog the beamer from the intitute for the evening and show some willing students two films. we kicked off the evening with payday and then went on to the main feature, city lights. of course they laughed and enjoyed the films very much. admittedly, i had a cunning plan when i chose to present them the latter film: to catch them with the heart wrenching ending and maybe have them crave for more. tearing my eyes from the screen for a nano second (and also to sort of control that lump in my throat), i looked into the assembled audience of 10 girls and a guy. i swear, all of them were fighting to keep the tears at bay. in other words: mission accomplished.

i won't be able to continue the experiment called, 'silent films have to be watched on a big screen', until autumn due to matters of late sunsets and three glass walls in the projection room. (the architect must have been smoking something really strong the day when he came up with that silly idea.) but maybe we will have another film seminar in our department again and i might be able to sneak chaplin into the syllabus once again.

the third banana is a blog where the author, aaron neathery, is mainly concerned with the history of comedians on stage, film and tv. the past week, he has begun putting up comic strips that appeared in the newspapers from 1915 onwards following the time that charles chaplin had changed film studios from keystone to essenay. those strips were a clever way to advertise the films that were churned out on an almost fortnightly schedule and some of the manic speed of those early chaplin-shorts is nicely caught in the pannels. but have a look yourself.