“I never thought of the Tramp in terms of appeal. He was myself, a comic spirit, something within me that said I must express this. I felt so free. The adventure of it. The madness. I can do any mad, crazy thing I like. And then?—did it come off, this insane idea I had, did it come off? That was the thrill.”
Charles Chaplin
April 16, 1889 — December 25, 1977
What is Bresson’s genre? He doesn’t have one. Bresson is Bresson. He is a genre in himself. Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Dovzhenko, Vigo, Mizoguchi, Buñuel—each is identified with himself. The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin—comedy? No: he is Chaplin, pure and simple; a unique phenomenon, never to be repeated. He is unadulterated hyperbole; but above all he stuns us at every moment of his screen existence with the truth of his hero’s behavior. In the most absurd situation Chaplin is completely natural; and that is why he is funny. His hero seems not to notice the hyperbolized world around him, nor its weird logic. Chaplin is such a classic, so complete in himself, that he might have died three hundred years ago.
What could be more ridiculous or less probable than someone starting inadvertently to eat, along with his spaghetti, paper streamers hanging down from the ceiling? Yet with Chaplin the action is live, naturalistic. We know the whole thing is made up and exaggerated, but in his performance the hyperbole is utterly naturalistic and probable, and therefore convincing—and superbly funny. He doesn’t play. He lives those idiotic situations, is an organic part of them.
— Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
February 5, 1919 — Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith join forces to create United Artists.
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
Charles Chaplin (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s ten favorite films:
- Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson)
- Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman)
- Nazarín (Luis Buñuel)
- Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman)
- City Lights (Charles Chaplin)
- Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi)
- Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
- Persona (Ingmar Bergman)
- Mouchette (Robert Bresson)
- Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara)
November 10, 1964: Ingmar Bergman and Charlie Chaplin enjoy a long conversation about movies and other subjects in Chaplin’s room at the Stockholm Grand Hotel. Chaplin was in the Swedish capital in connection with the publication of his autobiography in Scandinavia.
Ingmar Bergman’s account of their meeting from The Magic Lantern:
“During the 1960s, Charlie Chaplin was on a visit to Stockholm to publicize his recent autobiography. Lasse Bergström, his publisher, asked me if I would like to meet the great man at the Grand Hotel, and indeed I would. One morning at ten o’clock, we knocked on the door, and it was immediately opened by Chaplin himself, impeccably dressed in a dark well-tailored suit, the Legion of Honour’s little button in his lapel. That hoarse multi-toned voice politely welcomed us, and his wife, Oona, and two young daughters, as lovely as gazelles, came out of the inner room.
We at once started talking about his book. I asked him when he had found out for the first time that he caused laughter, that people laughed at him in particular. He nodded eagerly and willingly told me.
He had been employed by Keystone in a group of artists who went under the name of the Keystone Kops. They did hazardous numbers before a static camera, like a variety show on a stage. One day they were told to chase a huge bearded villain who was made-up white. It was, you might say, a routine assignment. After a great deal of running and falling about, by the afternoon that had managed to catch the villain and he was seated on the ground surrounded by policemen hitting him on the head with their truncheons. Chaplin had the idea of not banging repeatedly with his truncheon as he had been told. Instead he made sure he was in a visible place in the circle. There he spent a long time carefully aiming his truncheon. He started on the penultimate blow several times, but always stopped at the last moment. When, gradually and after careful preparation, he let the blow fall, he missed and fell over. The film was shown at a Nickelodeon. He went to see the results.
The movie audience, seeing the blow miss its target, laughed for the first time at Charlie Chaplin.”
