Au-Cinema Films

The Role Of The Film Medium In Chaplins Realist Film Art

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Although Chaplin's films look artless in the sense that they do not call attention to the film medium, the film medium does in fact play a large role in the success of Chaplin's comic art. Chaplin, Bazin observes, was a clown of great genius, as evident from his fame as a music-hall performer, but he needed the medium of the cinema to "free comedy completely from the limits of space and time imposed by the stage or the circus arena."20

In order to appreciate the role of the cinematic medium in the success of Chaplin's films we need only consider why Chaplin's filmed performances would not work equally well if performed on the stage. First and most obviously, the film medium permits Chaplin's performances to be seen from the perfect angle and in a much more vivid, intimate way than if we were to see him acting in the theater. The medium shots and medium-close shots which Chaplin frequently employs allow us to see subtle facial expressions that even people in the first row at a theater might miss. The cinematic medium also allowed Chaplin to exercise his talents for comic improvisation in a vastly larger arena than the stage could offer. Because the camera can go anywhere, all the world became his stage. Thus in the first sequence of The Adventurer, in which Charlie is hunted by prison guards, Chaplin exploits the seaside caves and cliffs as spectacular "settings" for chase sequences. Charlie avoids capture by running up and down steep cliffs, kicking prison guards over the edges of cliffs, and disappearing into seaside caves. Even the ocean is enlisted for a laugh when a giant wave helps him escape by engulfing the boat of his pursuers.

Although the appeal of Chaplin's films derives from the appeal of Chaplin's persona and the brilliant comic performances of his supporting cast, the gags and comic sequences are all the more amusing because they occur within a narrative context which heightens their comic effects. Chaplin's films gain immeasurably from the use of techniques Griffith pioneered to heighten the dramatic effects of stories told on film. In The Adventurer, Chaplin makes excellent use of crosscutting to create comic angst when he cuts between a scene which portrays Charlie's first meeting with the girl's father (Henry Bergman), who, a title tells us, is Judge Brown (most likely the man who sent Charlie to prison), and a scene in which the girl's jealous suitor has found a newspaper with the convict's picture on the front page under a "Wanted" headline. Through the technique of crosscutting the audience becomes painfully aware, before Charlie does, that he is on the cusp of being discovered, even as he is passing himself off to the judge as Commodore Slick, who heard the cries of the judge's distressed family from his yacht.

Also borrowing from Griffith's narrative techniques, Chaplin varies his shot types for dramatic emphasis and edits them together smoothly so that the audience remains unaware of the cutting. Most of his shots are long, full, or medium long shots, but occasionally he uses close-ups to create a joke. In The Adventurer, for example, when Charlie wakes up in bed in the girl's house, the camera frames him in a tight medium shot. First he notices he is wearing striped pajamas and then he notices the bars at the back of his bed (an unfortunate detail of the headboard). We know from his expression that he thinks for a moment he is back in

Figure 20. The gag in this shot (that Charlie thinks he is back in prison) only works thanks to the tight framing of the shot. (The Adventurer, 1917, Film Preservation Associates.)

jail. (See figure 20.) If this shot were less tightly framed, it would be too obvious that Charlie was in a bedroom, not a prison, and the sight gag would not work.

Perhaps the most important function of the editing in The Adventurer is to give a quick comic pace to the action. Every shot lasts just long enough for the spectator to get the point, and not an instant more. The cutting, that is, functions to eliminate all dead time, or any action that is neither vital to the plot nor funny. A particularly good example of this occurs soon after Charlie has escaped from the prison guards by swimming out to sea. Having found a safe haven on the shore, he hears a cry for help and immediately jumps back into the water. This shot is followed by a shot of the drowning mother. Immediately, Charlie swims into the shot. The time it took him to swim out to the mother after he jumped into the water is eliminated through editing. On the stage, such elimination of dead time is impossible because the action, by necessity, takes place in real time and space.

While the editing pace of The Adventurer is not as fast and furious as the editing pace of The Battleship Potemkin, it does accelerate substan tially at the end of the film, in a final chase scene in which the convict desperately tries to evade capture by the police. Here, the pace of the action is also quickened by the use of accelerated or fast-motion photography (achieved by photographing the action at a lower number of frames per second than the projection speed), another effect specific to the cinema.

Finally, the editing in The Adventurer creates surreal effects impossible to achieve on the stage. The objects of Chaplin's comic universe are often like objects in a dream, in that they magically seem to materialize when needed. Thus a boat that does not appear on the beach in previous shots suddenly appears when the prison guards need to pursue the convict, who has escaped into the ocean. Similarly, the newspaper picture of the convict materializes out of nowhere. The table on which it appears had only a fruit bowl on it in the previous shots. Just as unexpectedly, a pen becomes available for Charlie to alter his "Wanted" picture to make it resemble his rival. These sudden and surprising appearances of objects also resemble Warner Brothers cartoons in which the dynamite, the bomb, or box of matches is always conveniently at hand, even in the most remote settings. Such effects are possible only in the film medium and would be impossible to achieve on the stage. The dream logic of Chaplin's films lowers the threshold of our willing suspension of belief, making us more receptive to the anarchic humor of Chaplin's absurd comic world.

While Chaplin for the most part created his comedy without camera tricks, he does rely on them in a few additional places in The Adventurer. In the opening sequence of the film, he combines accelerated motion with reverse action when Charlie miraculously escapes the prison guards by sliding up a hill. This was accomplished by shooting him sliding down the hill but then printing the action in reverse. Other of his camera tricks are more subtle. A gag in which ice cream goes down his pants, for example, would have been impossible to achieve without the help of a stop-motion camera trick. First we see Charlie awkwardly balancing a big scoop of ice cream on his spoon (so he can drink the melted ice cream remaining in his bowl) and then the ice cream falls down his pants. Since it is not easy to guide a scoop of ice cream into one's pants, that is, to make the ice cream land in exactly the right place and still make it look like an accident, the camera was turned off just as the ice cream was about to fall from the spoon. The ice cream was then placed at the right place on Charlie's pants, and the camera was turned back on. When the action is projected on the screen it looks as if the ice cream has plopped from his spoon into his pants.

As the above discussion demonstrates, a good deal of film art went into the making of The Adventurer. Chaplin's films are by no means artless— they just look that way. Only by looking very closely does one become aware of the cinematic techniques that heighten the comic effects. The realist style which Bazin preferred (and which he created a theoretical system to justify) does not call for a renunciation of the use of film techniques; Bazin just preferred that the film techniques that are used do not call attention to themselves. The artfulness of films like The Battleship Potemkin and The Last Laugh cry out for our admiration and attention. Bazin called for a self-effacing style that downplays the use of film techniques and foregrounds the profilmic event, celebrating rather than denigrating film as a medium of mechanical reproduction.

While some filmmakers have veered off toward a stark aesthetic realism (Nagisa Oshima, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jim Jarmusch in Stranger than Paradise [1984] come immediately to mind), whereas others (Oliver Stone in JFK [1991] and Natural Born Killers [1994], Francis Coppola in Apocalypse Now [1979], and, more recently, Darren Aronofsky in Requiem for a Dream [2000]) use the film medium in a highly expressionist way, the two aesthetics are blended in most contemporary films. The expressionist and realist theories of what constitutes film art offer two compelling ways of looking at the potentials of the film medium. Fortunately, the use of one approach does not exclude the other, so we need not make a choice between them.