First of all the ending: the Tramp is filmed from behind on a country road where the vanishing point is off center. He walks away in defeat: his shoulders hunched, his gait slow and unsteady, his walking stick bending under his weight, his few belongings packed in a bundle. All of a sudden he stops, his body looks like it has received a jolt of electricity; his walk changes, and with his battery charged melancholy is instantly swept away with a happy, light ending with the certainty of a new destination ahead, another time (“the street leads to a lost time”, said Benjamin of his flâneur). As the camera irises-in, the archetype is complete. The Tramp marks a significant evolution in Chaplin’s poetic vision and characterization of the character. For the first time (and for the first time in a comedy) he introduces an element of pathos, credibly expressing a whole range of nuances. The character seems to have a new dimension, “He refuses, he fights, he lives”, writes Jean Mitry, “he is sensitive to the world that surrounds him, he is aware of his inferiority, he suffers because of it and tries to fight against it or at least not be dominated by the circumstances. He reacts and enters into conflict with the world. Not only with objects, but with men as well. In this first ‘pastoral’ love is no longer a caricature; it truly exists and takes over the Tramp entirely”. The scene where he milks a cow by the tail is memorable.

For a very long time, the mass of literature on Charles Chaplin has concentrated on the character he created in 1914, “the lit­tle fellow” or “the Tramp.”

Whether philosophical, psychological, or otherwise, the results were brilliant, and have informed criticism regarding his later films as well. André Bazin’s views on Monsieur Verdoux have less to do with his reflections on Orson Welles, plan-séquence, or Italian neo-realism, than with a reading of that film in regard to the “Charlot” persona. On the other hand, many Chaplin collaborators have stressed, either that he was not interested in directing or that his directing style remained, until his last works, that which he had developed in 1914. Robert Florey, his associate director on Monsieur Ver­doux, was especially – and bitterly – eloquent in this regard. One might first remark that creating an emotion, be it intellectual or emotional, comic or tragic, is the very purpose and end of mise en scène, overruling by far matters of “the modern grammar of filmmaking”. The impact of Chaplin’s films remains as strong today as it was then, and films that were not acknowledged in their time, like Monsieur Verdoux or A King in New York, have been amply vindicated. A second point is that Chap­lin’s direction is in fact extremely subtle and consistent throughout his long activity as a total filmmaker. His mastery of space and time is obvious from the first films he directed and remains unequalled until his last features. A third remark has to do with Chaplin’s influence on other filmmakers. We know how instrumental A Woman of Paris – a film in which he does not act – has been for Lubitsch and for Soviet directors, to name only those. Some careers (or callings) have been decided on seeing this film. But my interest goes to Chaplin in relation with more recent orientations in cinema. Taking the post-WWII era as a starting point, Georges Rouquier, director of the famous Farrebique, was to my knowledge the first to claim Chaplin the filmmaker, not the actor, as a major influence. Nearer to us, it might be curious to see what happened to the filmmaker when he was rewritten – or was he? – by authors as diverse as Robert Bres­son, Straub-Huillet or Jim Jarmusch.

Bernard Eisenschitz