University of Cape Town – FAM2004F

First Precis: Chaplin avec Gunning

‘The Spectacle of Industrialized Pathos’:

Or, why Charlie Chaplin was a working contradiction, according to Tom Gunning

Formal Précis:

In his famed essay, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde” (1990), Tom Gunning methodically and convincingly re-envisions (pun intended) the ‘hegemonic’ narrative of the origins of Cinema; replacing the teleological tale of the intensification of filmic “diegesis” (self-contained storytelling) with a full explication of the juxtaposed & still inextricable development of what he labels “The Cinema of Attractions”: “a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power.”

He conveys this case by returning to the ‘pleasure-giving’ content and sensationalist strategies of ‘pre-1906’ Cinema, before evoking the manifold reactions that coloured and accompanied the new medium’s formative adolescence: how, for example, the presently unassailable convention of ‘the fourth wall’ did not effectively exist in early short films (characters looked straight back at the audience, ‘inviting them in’ to the show); that Cinema stemmed from the ‘exhibitionist’ culture of vaudeville showmanship (and then developed in tandem with “the emergence of the great amusement parks”, in America at least); how the narrative continuity of distributed films was never enforced or even emphasised (instead “units of impression”, like close-ups and extreme long-shots, existed just for audience affect); and, finally, that the Modernist Avant-Garde specifically celebrated what they saw as the “unique power” of “the new art”: its relative freedom from the bourgeois constraints of ‘narrativisation’ (The image, in this philosophy, was, you could say, truly everything). I suspect Gunning makes this revisionist argument in order so as to reclaim Cinema (and its history) from its increasing domestification as little but ‘the highest form of visual storytelling’; instead we can clearly notice, through even slight research, that a strain of creativity beginning as mere commercial spectacle in the earliest films survived and metamorphosed into a continuing lineage of cinematic artistry- “the tradition of contemplative subjectivity”- that primarily values what Hitchcock would have casually labeled “pure cinema”: the enjoyment of the strikingly visual for the sake of its own existence, the act of looking as its own end.

I’m of the opinion that Gunning is targeting his argument at both the educated cinephile (the audience-member who prioritizes the ‘absorption’ of movies over just their semi-regular consumption)- as they would need no convincing, just his clear articulation of their fetish- and the presently indoctrinated film student and lecturer, who would have previously only been exposed to the aforementioned ‘hegemonic’ history of contemporary cinema’s origin: his writing style itself is rigorously academic- though, thankfully, never unduly abstruse- and the clear-sightedness of his argument chimes perfectly with an audience already possessing a respectable background knowledge of Cinema History, and, thus, his article functions as an earnest addition to the ever-ongoing debate on the essential identity and potential future of the movies.

Application to the Tramp and The Kid:

Where we can discover Gunning’s points reflected in the respective spectacles of Charlie Chaplin and his first (recognized) feature-film, The Kid (1921), is in their status of having acquired unprecedented popular acclaim at the very hinge connecting ‘attraction’- and ‘narrative’- cinema that the author outlines. There is, almost too obviously, a very clear and simple narrative framework enclosing and securing what could otherwise be presented as a well-strung collection of antics and shenanigans on the part of Chaplin’s alter ego, the Little Tramp: Charlie discovers an abandoned child (Act 1), he raises him and protects him better than most real fathers would (Act 2), the police – in their innocent ignorance- deem it fit to split the pair and eventually do, for which Charlie is inconsolable (Act 3), the child’s original mother sets everything to rights and invites him to stay on with her son in an undisclosed capacity (Happy Ending and quick denouement). But, in this phase of his career, just like the other Silent Clowns of the 20’s1, Chaplin is a clear disciple of the Melies statement2 quoted

1. Not to mention the Marx Brothers in the 30’s or the Monty Python troupe in the 70’s, just keeping to comedy.
2. Easily paralleled with Hitchcock’s ubiquitous conception of the MacGuffin as the indispensable plot device.

by Gunning: that the “scenario” of a film is nothing but a “pretext” for the ingenious creation of what the audience really wants to see and how they really want to feel. InThe Kid’s case, Chaplin holds minimal pretensions: he overtly promises his audience “A picture with a smile- and perhaps, a tear”. This, in itself, is an escalation in Chaplin’s artistry, from the pure-comedy of his preceding shorts, which points in the direction of what would become the (almost literally) patented pathos of his increasingly self-conscious oeuvre. However, back in 1921, audiences undoubtedly came for the spectacle of Chaplin himself. Like Buster Keaton, he came from a lower- class vaudevillian upbringing, so he immanently knew how to sell himself so as to seduce a crowd. He was the first performer-mogul of Hollywood because he even knew how to sell the abstraction of his character and his gags3. And, in The Kid, he consecrated his personal ‘Attraction’ by adding a few more reels of slapstick to his presentation (held together for the first time by a capital-‘S’ Story) and complementing the Little Tramp’s lovability with the pint-sized spectacle of an irredeemably cute & competent co-star. Avant-Gardism it was not4, but the underlying dialectics of The Kid constitute Charlie Chaplin’s artistic reckoning of Gunning’s incestuous divide between spectacle and narrative: namely Comedy with Story, jokes with their victims, smiles interchangeable with tears.

Reference:
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Elsaesser, Thomas, Ed. London: BFI Publishing, 1990.

3. In fact he was the first filmmaker, ever, to realize the power of merchandising, fully endorsing (and collecting the profits on) the reproducibility of the Little Tramp image on every form of recreational commodity through the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s; an insight for which he potentially deserved his average career salary in excess of a million dollars a week…

4. Though a further (perhaps psycho-analytic) inquiry into the ‘Dreamland‘ segment might reveal several expressions, on Chaplin’s part, on Christian morality, the purpose of fantasies and the use of blatant cinematic artifice, among others.