Substituting Speech for Style: Technique and Discourse in Monsieur Verdoux , Limelight, and A King in New York
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10509208.2012.664061
ISSN1543-5326
Autores Tópico(s)Theatre and Performance Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1Benjamin De Casseres, “The Hamlet-Like Nature of Charlie Chaplin,” New York Times Book Review and Magazine, December 12, 1920.2Thomas Burke, City of Encounters: A London Divertissement (London: Little, Brown, and Company, 1932), 143.3Charles Chaplin, “A Comedian Sees the World,” Women's Home Companion 60 (December 1933): 23.4Chaplin, “A Comedian Sees the World,” 17.5Chaplin, “A Comedian Sees the World,” 17, 102.6David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 455.7Robert Nichols, “Future of the Cinema: Mr. Charles Chaplin,” Times, September 3, 1925.8Ted Le Berton, “Absolutely, Mr. Chaplin! Positively, Mr. Freud!: Psychoanalysis Comes to the Movies,” Motion Picture Classic, August 17, 1923.9Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 417.10James Bacon, Hollywood is a Four Letter Town (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1976), 29.11Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 108.12Even in the silent era such models existed. For all the brilliance of its imagery Fritz Lang's Metropolis, for instance, is essentially a film-a-these that could easily accommodate a lengthy speech or two on its central conceit of the head, hands, and heart as the metaphoric anatomy points of modern society.13Walter Kerr, “The Lineage of Limelight,” in Focus On Chaplin, ed. Donald W. McCaffrey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), 146, 145. Originally published in Theatre Arts 36 (November 1952).14Kerr, 146, 148.15Kerr, 147.16Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin (London: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 18.17Kerr, 146.18Kracauer, 108.19André Bazin, “The Grandeur of Limelight,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 2., ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 132.20Chaplin made one additional film after these three—A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), which he directed but in which he did not appear. The film was a critical disaster when it was released and is rarely considered today. Based on a screenplay Chaplin completed in the 1930s, it operates in a distinctly different mode than his previous three talking films and is much closer to a standard bedroom farce or screwball comedy than it is to the ruminating, philosophical efforts he produced in the 1940s and 1950s.21Kerr, 144.22Chaplin, My Autobiography, 151.23Timothy J. Lyons, “Interview with Roland H. Totheroh,” Film Culture (Spring 1972): 285.24Lyons, 285.25Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Wolfgang Schirmacher (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2005), 46.26Freud himself considered Chaplin a prime contemporary example of his artistic theories at work, writing to a friend that the creator of the Tramp was “an exceptionally simple and transparent case [of] the idea that the achievements of artists are intimately bound up with their childhood memories, impressions, repressions and disappointments.” In a way, Chaplin uses Limelight to acknowledge this connection. See Kenneth S. Lynn, Charlie Chaplin and His Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 349.27Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (1848; London: Verso, 1998), 38, 39.28To list only a few of the transformations that Kamin identifies: one object can be used like another (a wooden spoon is treated like a ukulele in The Pawnshop [1916]), a human body can be turned into an inanimate object (Chaplin disguises himself as a tree in Shoulder Arms [1918] and disappears into a forest), or an inanimate object can be turned into an animate one (Chaplin kissing an upturned mop like a girlfriend in The Bank [1915]). For a detailed accounting of all eight categories see Dan Kamin, The Comedy of Charlie Chaplin (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008), 56–72.29In this final speech, the film actually becomes a kind of perverse literalization of Kenneth Burke's claim that “tragedy deals sympathetically with crime. Even though the criminal is finally sentenced to be punished, we are made to feel that his offense is our offense.” See Kenneth Burke, Terms for Order, ed. Stanley Edgar Hyman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964), 84. Emphasis in original.30André Bazin, “The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 2., ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 112−3.31Jonathan Rosenbaum, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 88.32Parker Tyler, “Movie Letter: Charlie Verdoux,” The Kenyon Review 9.3 (Summer 1947), 459.33Kenneth Tynan, “Looking Back in Anger,” Observer, September 1957, clipping, Chaplin file, 1950−59, MoMA.34Though Chaplin lived in fear of being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee like many of his Hollywood peers, he never was.35Tynan, “Looking Back in Anger.”36Bazin, “The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux,” 105.37Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 122.38Andrew Sarris, “You Ain't Heard Nothin’ Yet”: The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 151.39Bazin, “The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux,” 109.40Bazin, “The Myth of Monsieur Verdoux,” 105–106.41See Parker Tyler, Chaplin, Last of the Clowns (New York: Vanguard Press, 1948).42Kamin, 35.43“The Last Silent Film,” Greely Daily Tribune, March 14, 1936. Qtd. in William M. Drew, The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2010), 108.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDonna KornhaberDonna Kornhaber is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University (2009) and an MFA in Dramatic Writing (2001) and BFA in Film and Television (1999) from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Her work has appeared in a number of edited collections, and she has served as a contributor to the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times.
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