Who is the real Charlie Chaplin

A new documentary about the beloved movie star reveals undisclosed information about “one of the greatest stories of getting rich ever told.”

When a normal person rises to the top of fame, his sense of identity splits in two. The self-perception he has built all his life so far – the “true” self that can be revealed in intimate moments – struggles with an outward-facing image over which he can exercise disturbingly minimal control. The more cunning celebrities take the reins of their own PR, developing a personality that can come to the fore, caricaturing themselves before anyone else has the opportunity to do so.

Charlie Chaplin, perhaps the first star to face this existential problem of display, goes a step further by inventing a character built on himself. The new documentary “The Real Charlie Chaplin”, which hits theaters this week, presents his alter ego “The Tramp” as a shield and veil. If spectators look at the hat, mustache and rubber cane, they will never see the person wearing them.

“I remember as a child I had the image of Charlie Chaplin in my head,” co-director James Spini told the Guardian. “Like most people, the costume was familiar to me. We watched these films with a lot of prejudice; it’s an emblem of an early, caricatured style of comedy, movies that are projected at the wrong speed. As an adult watching them again, I was struck by how modern they are, how subversive they are, how there is no sense of obsolescence at all.Everyone has an idea of ​​Charlie Chaplin.But the people who knew him best thought it was hard to connect with him, that he didn’t they really know that he always plays. “

The biographical documentary views Chaplin as a joker who appears once a generation, while revealing that this is just one of the many roles he has played in his eventful life: a Dickens child worker, an innovative vaudeville personality, a humanist with a great heart, vengeful lover, captain of the industry in Tinseltown, persecuted by witches communist, lonely Swiss emigrant. In what Spini describes as “one of the greatest wealth stories ever told,” the only connecting thread between the many ups and downs is the tension in Chaplin’s personal and public life. He values ​​his hordes of fans and hates interviews, abstaining from admiration while fighting the anxiety of being known and remaining unknown at the same time.

For Spini and co-director Peter Middleton, the prospect of a new look at those aspects of his personality that Chaplin tried to hide is too intriguing to miss.

“One thing we knew before was that there was no single, stable, resilient version of Charlie Chaplin,” Middleton said. “We don’t try to connect everyone because they are too many and don’t always match. He was a chameleon in the way he reflected back to people what they wanted.”

Their producer Ben Limberg uses the legacy of Chaplin and the British Film Institute as a basic list of materials to which they will be granted access, the most unknown of which attracting the attention of directors. In particular, they stop at a “mysterious” tape containing an unprocessed audio recording of a three-day portrait meeting for Life magazine held by Richard Merriman in 1966 at Chaplin’s house on Lake Geneva at the end of his life.

“We realized that we were in a good historical moment where an archival source like this could be restored,” Middleton said. “We started unraveling it, and although we knew that 700 books had been written about Chaplin, we thought this might be our path to something new.”

Secured after a year of negotiations, the audio recordings are an abbreviated memoir with candid commentary, in which Chaplin recalls his early days of trials and tribulations. As a result of the great debts of his parents, he was sent to work in Lambeth at the age of seven – a fate from which he escaped due to his natural inclination to the stage. From dance troupes and small plays to a breakthrough with vaudeville host Fred Carnot, his undoubted talent as a showman took him out of extreme poverty and transported him across the Atlantic to try out for the nascent film business. There he made his debut with The Tramp, whose moneyless woes reflected his own experiences at a school for the poor in Central London.

“This character of The Tramp, who is so entangled in the psyche of Chaplin himself, who seems to refer to his childhood, his neuroses and the humiliations of his youth – he constantly repeats the traumas he experienced in London,” Spini explains. “This character has made him the highest paid actor on the planet and one of the most famous people in history. In some ways, it’s almost like a fairy tale … Chaplin’s determination to keep traveling inward – a sense of introspection, how he incorporates fiber from his life in his art – is what made our work possible. He never rested on his laurels. “

Spini and Middleton used this biographical lens to process the greatest hits of Chaplin’s filmography as a continuation of his inner turmoil. “The extraordinary canvas of his life is transferred quite accurately to his films,” says Middleton.

The early silent hit “The Kid” allows Chaplin to project the injured child inside himself on a street tramp and give him the home the young Chaplin has always dreamed of. The Gold Rush adventure reveals his boyish imagination, and the old-fashioned romantic film Lights of the City is his resistance to the talking films he hoped were a fad. He responded to the mass devastation of the Holocaust with Hitler’s satire “The Great Dictator.”

“His life has a form that synchronizes exactly with the chronology of his films, and we were lucky to reveal and show it. But at the same time, we didn’t want to commit to it in any way,” Middleton continued.

The second half of the documentary shifts the focus from Chaplin’s work to his tumultuous personal life, in which several crises threaten to hurt his external extra-American activities to the House of Representatives, which portrays Chaplin as a Communist sympathizer and generally a defender of peace. Even more unpleasant are the ugly and scandalous divorces – his separation from his second wife Lita Gray was marked by her accusations in the style of “Me Too” and the scandalous appearance in the media as a gold digger and a liar. Chaplin fans have to choose between the dissonance between the artist preaching goodwill and generosity on screen and his hateful actions behind closed doors.

“There were some awkward elements in Chaplin’s biography that we thought should be brought to the fore in the film,” Middleton said. “We tried to find as many first-hand stories and testimonies as possible, looking for people who could talk directly about it. That’s what led us to the amazing interview with Lita Gray in 1965 about the release of her autobiography. Everything. this was well documented at a time when it was in fact the most expensive and sensational divorce in Hollywood history.The way in which Lita’s story has been bypassed by some of the press has a strong echo in whose stories are believed. She says the audience didn’t believe her because of Charlie’s idolization. This is probably one of the first cases in history when people have had to face this dissonance. “

“His stellar image quickly disintegrated under the pressure of these very plausible allegations of a pattern of abuse,” Spini added. “We were interested in how these two parts corresponded with each other. We believed that the audience was sophisticated enough to consider these two ideas together. “

This disturbing contradiction is one of many that reveals a different Chaplin in the analysis of the film, which concludes only that the closer we look, the more unknowable he looks. What is certain is that the distance between man and his viewers in history is in his own design, and his evasive withdrawal is ultimately his clearest, truest quality. Behind the disguise instinct that permeates much of the comic genius’s work lies anxiety about being seen, exposed, or rejected.

“He seemed to put an insane amount of barriers in front of the people closest to him in his life,” Middleton said. “There is a feeling that, as his daughter Jane says at the end of the film, he has achieved the dream of his life. As a poor worker, he dreamed of wealth and fame and made it come true. But later in life, he admits that he always felt very insecure about his wealth, as if at any moment he could fall back into poverty and lose everything. “

The film “The Real Charlie Chaplin” will be released in theaters in the United States on November 19 and will be broadcast on “Showtime” on December 11, BGNES reports.

Tags:

– .