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New Double CD: Charlie Chaplin Film Music Anthology


To celebrate the 130th anniversary of Chaplin’s birth, we are excited to announce our collaboration with [PIAS] on a new double CD set of extracts from the film soundtracks in the Chaplin archives, out on April 12th 2019.

The Charlie Chaplin Film Music Anthology, compiled by the Chaplin Office, retraces many of the milestones in Chaplin’s music-composing career, from City Lights (1931), the first film he released with a score of his own creation, to the 1976 re-release of A Woman of Paris with a new score composed by Chaplin at the age of 86, not to mention extracts from Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Limelight, The Kid and more. The release includes a well-documented 20-page booklet that we scrupulously put together, illustrated with archival photographs.

Unfortunately, the record label mixed up the metadata on three of the tracks, and therefore the Pay Day and A Day’s Pleasure tracks on Disc 2 are in a different order than the one listed. The music you hear on track 63 is “Boat Ride” from A Day’s Pleasure, the music you hear on track 64 is “Jazz” from A Day’s Pleasure, and the music you hear on track 65 is “Sweet Adeline Waltz” from Pay Day. The label has corrected this for future editions, and has even suggested that due to the small mix-up, the first run of the CDs could become a collector’s item. Time will tell…

Vinyls and a limited edition box set of soundtracks with a few surprises will follow during the year.

Celebrate 130 Years of Charlie Chaplin


2019 marks the 130th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s birth. For the occasion, several events and activities around the world, licensed by the Chaplin office, will pay tribute to him throughout the course of the year. There will be fantastic events at Chaplin’s World, film screenings with with orchestras performing Chaplin’s scores live to picture, new exhibitions in France, a new ballet in Bratislava, the release of new music albums, and much more!

The full programme of events, which we’ll update throughout the year, is available here.

Snap Galleries Launch


To celebrate the 130th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s birth, each month this year, our licensee Snap Galleries will be releasing a carefully curated collection of images from our archives.

Collectors of fine art photography will be able to purchase authorised museum-quality limited-edition Charlie Chaplin photographs, produced by hand in the darkroom by a master printer on traditional heavyweight silver gelatin paper in a range of sizes.

They launched the first set of photographs from THE KID on 16th January. Visit the Snap Galleries website for details.

Thanksgiving Greetings




“In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.”
-Charlie Chaplin

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Quote of the Day: "I am what I am: an individual, unique and different"




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.”