Two cornerstones of Chaplin’s filmography, A Dog’s Life and Shoulder Arms, are featured in the festival programme. Both films hold a special place in cinema history as the first projects Chaplin shot at his newly built Hollywood studios. For decades, audiences have known them primarily through the anthology version assembled by Chaplin in 1959 for The Chaplin Revue (which also included The Pilgrim). At Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, they are presented in a stunning restoration and in their original 1918 versions, before Chaplin himself altered their editing and added a specially composed orchestral score.

This reconstruction of the original version was restored in 4K in 2026 by the MoMA in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna, under the auspices of Association Chaplin and Roy Export S.A.S., at the Metropolis Post laboratory, using a 35mm print as its source material.
The films will be accompanied by a live performance by Orchestra Senzaspine. Timothy Brock‘s new restorations and adaptations of Chaplin’s scores, commissioned by Roy Export S.A.S. and tailored to fit the original 1918 versions, receive their world premiere at these screenings at Il Cinema Ritrovato.

Research on the four different camera negatives and the various releases, versions, and prints of Shoulder Arms was conducted as part of the collaborative project Mapping Archival Holdings of Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (MASh), an initiative by Adrian Gerber and Lichtspiel / Kinemathek Bern (https://lichtspiel.ch/en/mash/)