11 Dec City Lights (1931)

Seeing and Being Seen

For me, this film falls not into the category of favourite films (I’m a Marx brothers kind of guy) but earns instead a place on a very short list of most important movies.

That’s because it has two features that I truly appreciate.

It is as pure a vision of its creator as is possible. Nearly all other films are engineered from prior work. Not so with a small list of projects from Welles, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, … and this one project of Chaplin’s. They are wholly original, springing from some nether world.

But the other element is the one that impresses the most. This film is about itself, about the art of visual narrative. Chaplin was intelligent enough to know that what he was doing was new. The issues are centred on what the audience `sees,’ so while he struggles with what and how the audience sees, he builds that into the fabric of the story.

The primary framing is about the blind girl who falls in love with him by ‘seeing’ him in her own way. Then ’sees’ him at the end in a different way. The rich man recognizes the tramp when drunk but does not when he is not. Nearly all the jokes, indeed, every element of the film is about this same dynamic: the elevator which is not seen but then was, the burglars the same, the Tramp on the statue, on the barrel. Even seeing the cigar before the bum does. Even us seeing the soap and the foreman not.

The ‘seeing’ is carried over to ’hearing’ with the politician and whistle jokes. And then even further as Charlie turns his back on the new technology of giving us speech and instead `shows’ us something else: he writes and conducts an amazing score instead. This is truly amazing (and one reason to take Mike Figgis seriously).

No wonder Orson Welles considered this the most important film ever made. But as to the best to watch? Because film is so derivative, my own gold standard for the Tramp is Robert Downey’s (and to some extent Depp’s). Comic timing is something that evolves, and those men make a more effective Tramp for my modern ability to see.

Trivia: Chaplin found the ‘blind’ girl in a group of spectators at a fight and was struck with how her expressions reflected what she saw. She’s pretty as well of course, but certainly not the prettiest Chaplin knew. See how Chaplin separately works in both the fight (a performance) and her reaction to his performance in the film.

Posted in 2002

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB