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Charlie Chaplin: official website

charliechaplin.com

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Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#21

Post by dougSF70 »

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…

They reran Harold Lloyd shorts on kids' TV in the UK perhaps in the 1980s - growing up in the sticks I'd watch anything and found his silent short films a good way of killing time.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#22

Post by bwoodward »

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 Criterion release of The Passion of Joan of Arc has two great scores, too. Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light for the first and Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp) for the second.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#23

Post by anshumankmr »

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

That's probably the best kind of "preachy". And back then, it really was required as anti-semitism was definitely at its peak then.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#24

Post by bink »

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.

"did then die" is understating it. The Great Dictator was filmed in 1939, long before most of the world knew the true horrors that had and would take place. Chaplin wasn't alone in calling out the dangers, but he was in the minority.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#25

Post by yamtaddle »

anshumankmr wrote: post #23
DaveExeter wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's probably the best kind of "preachy". And back then, it really was required as anti-semitism was definitely at its peak then.

Nineteen-fucking-forty release year. About a year earlier (mind, production leads release by quite a bit) we had, infamously, turned away almost a thousand Jews on the St Louis seeking asylum—of whom, about a quarter would ultimately die in the holocaust, after re-settling in countries that Nazi Germany eventually conquered.

It's hard not to see the relevance of Communism to the speech, too, that being the one of a couple things that loomed (much) larger in the average German mind than the "Jewish question", in the rise of Nazism. No accident that Chaplin would find himself on the wrong side of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), I guess.

It's maybe the great pre-war (from the American perspective, of course—'39 was the start for Europe, and earlier still for China and other places like Ethiopia) WWII movie.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#26

Post by johncoltrane »

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 Passion of Joan of Arc (just... damn. This is a perfect movie.)

We need a new class of superlatives, that can't have their meaning diluted, for that class of masterpieces.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#27

Post by yamtaddle »

johncoltrane wrote: post #26
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 Passion of Joan of Arc (just... damn. This is a perfect movie.) We need a new class of superlatives, that can't have their meaning diluted, for that class of masterpieces.

Yeah. For anyone who appreciates really, really good cinema and hasn't seen Passion—I dunno, drop everything and go watch it, I guess. It's one of a handful of silent films that truly, today, "historical importance" entirely put aside, stands with the rest of the greats—and might even shoulder past more than a few of them.

Sunrise is great and important—sure, yes, it's good, even, kinda. Metropolis looms large—yeah, true, and I enjoyed it, but it's clunky as hell, if we're being honest. A dozen other greats—yes, they're good, but I can name a hundred ways they could have been better. A bunch of others are more-or-less flawless but are also weird and niche. Passion? No notes. Perfect movie.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#28

Post by DubiousPusher »

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…

Metropolis, though overlong and a bit hammy, pulled me through with the music and the visuals. Even when the effects aren't believable the design is stunning.

In fact, it's pronably not until the 80s with skmething like Blade Runner or Brazil that you get a film so thuroughly designed and detailed from a visual perspective.

Edit: Though Tati's Playtime just came to mind.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#29

Post by yamtaddle »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #28
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…

Metropolis, though overlong and a bit hammy, pulled me through with the music and the visuals. Even when the effects aren't believable the design is stunning. In fact, it's pronably not until the 80s with skmething like Blade Runner or Brazil that you get a film so thuroughly designed and detailed from a visual perspective. Edit: Though Tati's Playtime just came to mind.

Metropolis is a front-runner for most-influential-movie-ever (assuredly not at the top, but—it's a contender), and it's largely the visual design that does it. It is, indeed, captivating throughout, carrying one through the film's... less-endearing qualities. Blade Runner is absolutely one of the most important films to owe it a huge debt, and it's no accident that Blade Runner went on, itself, to influence the visuals of so many later films. It's (Metropolis) the kind of film "visionary" ought to be reserved for. There are a few very-famous bits that even people who've not seen it might know about, but the whole movie's full of that kind of thing.

Re: Charlie Chaplin: official website

#30

Post by jt2190 »

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…

> M (… this is maybe the most modern-feeling of this whole bunch)

Because it has sound?

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