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Charlie Chaplin: official website

charliechaplin.com

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Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#11

Post by ecliptik »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7
yamtaddle wrote: post #3

Anyone looking to get into silent film, I'd strongly recommend comedies (including, and perhaps especially, Chaplin and Keaton) as a good starting point. I've gotten to the point that I can truly enjoy a lot of silent dramas, but IMO the comedies are far more approachable for a modern audience. Good gateway drug. Just off the more famous films ( The Great Dictator and Modern Times and maybe City Lights for Chaplin, o…

I agree with your choices (I've been working through "1001 Films to See Before you Die" and your choices are also represented in the list). Nice that most (all?) of these are free on YouTube. I confess though that films got a lot more interesting to me around 1932. Gotta love that when sound came along they went deep-dive into musicals, ha ha. (I was actually surprised at how many of the 30's films were entertaining…

Archive.org had a large selection of silent films as well.

https://archive.org/details/silent_films?tab=collection

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#12

Post by mc32 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #3

Anyone looking to get into silent film, I'd strongly recommend comedies (including, and perhaps especially, Chaplin and Keaton) as a good starting point. I've gotten to the point that I can truly enjoy a lot of silent dramas, but IMO the comedies are far more approachable for a modern audience. Good gateway drug. Just off the more famous films ( The Great Dictator and Modern Times and maybe City Lights for Chaplin, o…

Not a big fan of silents, but I think Lloyd probably is approachable to a wider audience --maybe I'm just partial due to more exposure.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#13

Post by msla »

yamtaddle wrote: post #3

Anyone looking to get into silent film, I'd strongly recommend comedies (including, and perhaps especially, Chaplin and Keaton) as a good starting point. I've gotten to the point that I can truly enjoy a lot of silent dramas, but IMO the comedies are far more approachable for a modern audience. Good gateway drug. Just off the more famous films ( The Great Dictator and Modern Times and maybe City Lights for Chaplin, o…

The Internet Archive has a section devoted to silent films:

https://archive.org/details/silent_films

And a Silent Hall Of Fame:

https://archive.org/details/silenthalloffame

And a Georges Méliès collection:

https://archive.org/details/georgesmelies

Specific films:

Battleship Potemkin:

https://archive.org/details/BattleshipPotemkin

The General starring Buster Keaton:

https://archive.org/details/TheGeneral_201312

Le Voyage dans la Lune

https://archive.org/details/LeVoyageDansLaLun

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#14

Post by yamtaddle »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #7
yamtaddle wrote: post #3

Anyone looking to get into silent film, I'd strongly recommend comedies (including, and perhaps especially, Chaplin and Keaton) as a good starting point. I've gotten to the point that I can truly enjoy a lot of silent dramas, but IMO the comedies are far more approachable for a modern audience. Good gateway drug. Just off the more famous films ( The Great Dictator and Modern Times and maybe City Lights for Chaplin, o…

I agree with your choices (I've been working through "1001 Films to See Before you Die" and your choices are also represented in the list). Nice that most (all?) of these are free on YouTube. I confess though that films got a lot more interesting to me around 1932. Gotta love that when sound came along they went deep-dive into musicals, ha ha. (I was actually surprised at how many of the 30's films were entertaining…

I've been picking from a different list (the huge meta-list project from They Shoot Pictures Don't They, which I think does factor in the 1001-films book as one of a whole bunch of things they feed to their Algorithm) but yeah, a lot of the pre-1930 films were a real slog, at least in part. I only bounced off a very few but I was pretty damn bored for long stretches of some others, I think justifiably so.

Big misses for me were anything horror (Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—hell, maybe I just don't like German Expressionism?).

Surprise hits were some of the more arthouse films. A Propos de Nice and Man with a Movie Camera were two I loved and are both definitely not conventionally-entertaining. They don't even feature narratives, in any normal sense (but they kinda do?). I also dug some of the Big Damn Movies like Intolerance and Gance's Napoléon—but that wasn't universal, because I found Birth of a Nation unwatchable (I gave it like 90 minutes then bounced—I'd enjoyed none of it, and not just because of the terrible message). Nanook of the North was another surprise hit for me—OK, it's kinda faked or whatever, but they fucking hunted a walrus, for-real, using traditional methods. That they were doing it when they did might have been "fake" because they didn't really do it anymore, but they did it, for-actual-real, which was just nuts to watch, among other things that were "fake" but more-real than a lot of what you might be able to see today.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#15

Post by rendaw »

yamtaddle wrote: post #3

Anyone looking to get into silent film, I'd strongly recommend comedies (including, and perhaps especially, Chaplin and Keaton) as a good starting point. I've gotten to the point that I can truly enjoy a lot of silent dramas, but IMO the comedies are far more approachable for a modern audience. Good gateway drug. Just off the more famous films ( The Great Dictator and Modern Times and maybe City Lights for Chaplin, o…

I was interested and started watching Keaton but was turned off by the casual racism. Is Chaplin different?

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#16

Post by yamtaddle »

rendaw wrote: post #15
yamtaddle wrote: post #3

Anyone looking to get into silent film, I'd strongly recommend comedies (including, and perhaps especially, Chaplin and Keaton) as a good starting point. I've gotten to the point that I can truly enjoy a lot of silent dramas, but IMO the comedies are far more approachable for a modern audience. Good gateway drug. Just off the more famous films ( The Great Dictator and Modern Times and maybe City Lights for Chaplin, o…

I was interested and started watching Keaton but was turned off by the casual racism. Is Chaplin different?

Both will read that way sometimes to a modern audience, though Chaplin's definitely better in that department. However, a large set of Keaton's oeuvre treats of that not at all. Avoid The General and stuff with names like "The Pale Face" (gee, I wonder if that will be problematic?) and you'll mostly be fine.

On the other hand, Chaplin was apparently terrible to women off-screen, so... there's that.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#18

Post by justinator »

DaveExeter wrote: post #6
anshumankmr wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Great Dictator wasn’t silent but it’s still amazing

Charlie gets a little preachy at the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20

Well 60,000,000 people did then die, so it seems a reasonable level of preachiness.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#19

Post by yamtaddle »

justinator wrote: post #18
DaveExeter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charlie gets a little preachy at the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20

Well 60,000,000 people did then die, so it seems a reasonable level of preachiness.

I took the comment as ironic. A-fucking-men to Chaplin's sentiment, anyway.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#20

Post by AlbertCory »

In my movie Meetup, we were having DVD night, and once after the main feature, I showed The General. Everyone loved it.

Speaking of The Battleship Potemkin: I really, really tried to get hold of the musical score for it, with the idea of having the Google Orchestra (yes, there was such a thing) play along with the movie when we showed it. No luck.

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