Thursday 25 May – Thursday 15 June 2006
Paul Merton shares his passion for silent film in this four-part series on the work of the great comic performers of the era: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, Harrold Lloyd.
Please see:BBC4
A documentary from silent film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. Featuring never before seen out-takes from Chaplin’s films, and other rare footage, Unknown Chaplin gives a valuable insight into the creation of Chaplin’s films. Also included are interviews with people who knew and worked with Chaplin. The documentary is in three parts: My Happiest Years; Hidden Treasures; and The Great Director. Accompanied by excellent music by Carl Davis, some adapted from Chaplin’s own music.
Distributed by Network in UK and it has also been released in the US
An exhibition drawing on new family material
Currently in Mexico at the Salón Juárez del Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco
All the informations here
The exhibition includes original photographs, film posters, production notes, press cuttings, extracts from Chaplin’s films, contemporary newsreel footage, makings-of, rushes, and other archival material relating to the exhibition. In addition, we have access, via the family archives, to hitherto unpublished negatives, often 8×10, whose quality will allow for new, large format prints.
The recent cinema and DVD success of restored versions of The Great Dictator and Modern Times raises the issue of the contemporary relevance of the work of Charles Chaplin, who was born in London in 1889 and died in Switzerland in 1977, aged 88. True, the sheer staying-power of the Chaplin shorts as TV fare has ensured continuity between successive generations of viewers; and the Little Tramp image remains in constant use the world over, from America to Japan, as a symbol of the clash between man and machine, the confrontation with dictatorship and all the anachronistic grace of pantomime. This exhibition, however, seeks to go beyond the conventional portrait by drawing on the Chaplin family archives and their wealth of largely unknown documentation.
There exists a mass of subsidiary material relating to Chaplin’s films and life, and by tying this in with extracts on video we can actually show the artist at work. Where did the Little Tramp character come from? What kind of parts did he mostly play? What comedy situations recur from film to film? Beginning with the birth of the Little Tramp, the exhibition moves on to the elaboration of a gag via footage showing the enormous amount of work that could go into a sequence lasting only a few seconds. Comparisons with the Little Tramp’s successors “Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, for example” offer real insight into the Chaplin comic style and its legacy.
While the Little Tramp is without doubt the 20th century’s best-loved single character, it should not be forgotten that he was also an emblematic figure for the 1920s avant-garde. The press coverage of the time points up this dual success, as does the work of artists as different as Moholy-Nagy, Erwin Blumenfeld and Robert Doisneau. Born into the poverty of working-class London, Chaplin conquered America as it was becoming the most powerful nation in the world: how to explain this daydream come true? The exhibition closes with the end of the artistic growing-up period, the moment when the Little Tramp becomes an adult: confronted with Hitler, Chaplin set out to replace the dictator with a Jewish barber; but then looked his viewers right in the eye, as if to address the whole of human kind.
The exhibition is presented in Spain and Portugal at:
- In Madrid
At Caixa Forum MadridKulturhuset
From July 2 to October 19 2008
Paseo del Prado, 36. 28014 Madrid
- In Lisbon
At Palacio da Quintanilh
From September 4 to October 4 2008
In the Lisbon Village Festival
Rua Tierno Galvan – Torre 3, Sala 405
1070-274 LISBOA | PORTUGAL
Tel +351 21 0190922 | Tlm +351 917 580 956
Email: lisbon@villagefestival.net
All photographs from Chaplin films made from 1918 onwards © Roy Export S.A.S. All rights reserved. 
