Stay Home and Listen to Chaplin Music
Every day, we’re publishing a new track or two from the Charlie Chaplin Film Music Anthology on Youtube. Subscribe to our Youtube channel here
Every day, we’re publishing a new track or two from the Charlie Chaplin Film Music Anthology on Youtube. Subscribe to our Youtube channel here
We’ve just uploaded a new video to our Youtube channel - Chaplin scholar, Lisa Stein Haven, talks about “A Comedian Sees the World”.
• Find Haven’s annotated edition of “A Comedian Sees the World” on Amazon
• Find “A Comedian Sees the World” on the Chaplin Archives website
On the anniversary of the day on which Chaplin won his honorary Oscar in 1972, and six days before his 130th birthday, Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and the Chaplin office are delighted to announce the launch of the brand new version of the online Charlie Chaplin Archive site, developed by Keepthinking.
See the full announcement here.
Sir Charles Chaplin KBE
16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977
Chaplin’s original soundtrack for A Woman of Paris is now on our Youtube channel, so you can listen from anywhere!
You can also get the full soundtrack on:
- iTunes
- Spotify
- Deezer
- Amazon
“In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.”
-Charlie Chaplin
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
In “A Writer’s Notebook”, Somerset Maugham attributes Chaplin’s profound melancholy and loneliness to his impoverished days back in London and comments that Chaplin is nostalgic to those days: “Charlie Chaplin… his fun is simple and sweet and spontaneous. And yet all the time you have a feeling that at the back of all is a profound melancholy. He is a creature of moods and it does not require his facetious assertion ‘Gee, I had such a fit of the blues last night I didn’t hardly know what to do with myself’ to warn you that his humour is lined with sadness. He does not give you the impression of a happy man. I have a notion that he suffers from a nostalgia of the slums. The celebrity he enjoys, his wealth, imprison him in a way of life in which he finds only constraint. I think he looks back to the freedom of his struggling youth, with its poverty and bitter privation, with a longing which knows it can never be satisfied. To him the streets of southern London are the scene of frolic, gaiety and extravagant adventure…I can imagine him going into his own house and wondering what on earth he is doing in this strange man’s dwelling. I suspect that the only home he can ever look upon as such is a second-floor back in the Kennington Road. One night I walked with him in Los Angeles and presently our steps took us to the poorest quarter of the city. There were sordid tenement houses and the shabby gaudy shops in which are sold the various goods that the poor buy from day to day. His face lit up and a buoyant tone came into his voice as he exclaimed, ‘Say, this is the real life, isn’t it? All the rest is just sham.’”
In “My Autobiography”, Chaplin, annoyed by Maugham’s “attitude of wanting to make poverty attractive”, retorts that he does not know any poor man who has nostalgia for poverty. He concludes: “In spite of Maugham’s assumptions, like everyone else I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, all of which I am the sum total.”