Yale Journal of Criticism 9:2 (Fall 1996), 309-314

Walter Benjamin and Rudolf Arnheim on Charlie

Translator's introduction
The two short articles which follow both appeared in 1929 and respond in differing ways, though
with similar enthusiasm, to the films of Charlie Chaplin. The Benjamin text is a combined review
of Chaplin's The Circus and of an article on Chaplin by the poet Philippe Soupault, who later
(1931) expanded the article into his book Charlot. In both the quotes from Soupault and in his
own comments Benjamin here pursues some of his well-known themes: modern art as a product
of detached, peripatetic observation of urban mass existence; the relation between artistic
innovation, technical innovation, and capital; the dependence of art upon locality; and the
revolutionary potential of art. Arnheim's review is largely concerned with defending Chaplin's
rather subdued directorial style, and in particular his avoidance of montage; readers familiar with
Arnheim's Film as Art will recognize his concern with balancing the expressive capacities of the
camera and of mise-en-scene with a respect for the integrity of objects within "real" space and
time. Both men observe and applaud a certain introspective conservatism characteristic of the
Chaplin style, though it may be surmised that Benjamin and Arnheim would have justified this
value differently: Benjamin by pointing to Chaplin's resistance to the blandishments [End Page
309] of technology, Arnheim by his neo-Kantian ideal of a revelatory but patient camera-eye.
Unless otherwise indicated, all notes are by the translator.
I. Walter Benjamin: "A Look at Chaplin" 1
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The Circus is the first of the later works of cinematic art. Charlie has grown older since his last
film and, here, he acts like it too. The most stirring thing about this new film is the feeling that
Chaplin is now looking over the spectrum of his artistic powers, determined to bring his work to
completion with these powers alone. The variants on his great themes emerge everywhere and in
full glory. The chase scene is moved to a labyrinth; Charlie's unexpected appearance is staged in
a way that would amaze a magician; a mask of indifference turns him into a sideshow marionette
....
The teachings and exhortations that peer out of this great work have given Philippe Soupault the
impetus to make a first attempt at conjuring up the image of Chaplin as a historical phenomenon.
The outstanding Parisian revue "Europe" published by Rieder in Paris (and which we will discuss
in more detail in an upcoming issue) in November published an essay by the poet; in this essay
he develops a series of ideas around which, one day, a definitive conception of this great artist
will be able to crystallize.
He begins by strongly emphasizing that Chaplin's relationship to film is fundamentally not that of
the actor-protagonist at all, let alone that of a star. Following Soupault's conception one can
almost say that Chaplin, seen in his totality, is as little a performer as the actor William
Shakespeare was. Soupault says rightly that "The undeniable superiority of Chaplin's films . . .
lies in the fact that in them a poetry reigns which everyone encounters in their lives--admittedly
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without always knowing it." This does not mean, of course, that Chaplin is a "poet" of filmscripts.
More precisely, he is the poet of his films, that is, as director. Soupault has seen that Chaplin was
the first (followed in this by the Russians) to orient film toward theme, variation--toward
composition, in short--and that all of this stands in total contradiction to the conventional notions
of exciting portrayal of action. For this reason Soupault, unlike virtually all previous
commentators, sees the peak of Chaplin's work in L'Opinion Publique, a film in which, as is well
known, Chaplin himself did not appear at all and which played in Germany under the stupid title
4 5
The Nights of a Beautiful Woman. (The "Kamera" should show this film every six months--it is
a foundation charter of cinematic art.)
When we discover that making this 3000-meter long film involved shooting 125,000 meters, we
get an idea of the immense and devoted labor concealed behind Chaplin's masterpieces. It also
gives us a sense of the kind of financial [End Page 310] capital needed by this man, as much as
by a Nansen or Amundsen, in order to fit out his voyages of discovery to the poles of cinematic
art. One has to share Soupault's anxiety that the dangerous financial pressures placed on
Chaplin by his second wife, together with the competitive war waged against him by American
trusts, are paralyzing his productivity. Chaplin is supposed to be planning films about Napoleon
and Christ. Should we not worry that such projects are but giant screens behind which the great
artist is hiding his weariness?
It is both good and useful that Soupault is recalling Chaplin's youth and his art's territorial origin at
the moment when age is showing itself for the first time in Chaplin's lineaments. This territory is of
course the capital, London.
On his endless walks through the streets of London with their black and red houses, Chaplin
learned to observe. He has himself told how the idea of bringing this character with the jerky gait,
the small cropped moustache and the bamboo cane into the world first came to him when he saw
office workers coming from the Strand. To him, this specific demeanor and this clothing
expressed the ethos of a man lingering over something. But the characters which surround him in
the films also come from London: the young, shy, winsome girl; the burly, uncouth fellow always
on the verge of striking with his fists (or taking to his heels, when he sees that the other party isn't
afraid of him); the presumptuous gentleman recognizable by his top hat.
On the basis of this personal testimony Soupault draws a parallel between Chaplin and Dickens
that could be sorted through and pursued further.
With his art Chaplin confirms the old notion that only an expressive world [Ausdruckswelt] strictly
conditioned by specific social, national and territorial factors elicits a great, continual and yet
highly differentiated response from one nation to the next. The people wept in Russia when they
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saw The Pilgrim; the theoretical side of his comedies stimulate interest in Germany; in England
they love his humor. It is no wonder that these differences astonish and fascinate Chaplin himself.
Nothing so unmistakably indicates the immense significance that the art of film will have than the
fact that no one had or could have had the idea of giving any higher authority precedence over
the public. Chaplin has directed himself toward both the most international and most revolutionary
affect of the masses--laughter. "Certainly," says Soupault, "Chaplin only makes us laugh. But
apart from the fact that this is the most difficult thing to achieve, it is also the most important in a
social sense."
II. Rudolf Arnheim: "Chaplin's Early Films" 7
The spectator staggers out of the pub, eyes rolling as though he had been pummeled by 20
police clubs. In the whole history of the world, no one who has received a truncheon-blow to the
head has ever then staggered along the [End Page 311] street like a drunken duck, and with
rolling eyes besides. In all Chaplin films, however, this is the conventional reaction to truncheons,
and everyone recognizes and understands it because this is the pantomimic ideal form of a
swoon. If, in real life, swoons occur without all the desired vividness, it is nonetheless precisely
the business of art to make the unsightly worth seeing. When the philosopher Plato in his
Republic tells the famous story of the people who sit in a dark cave seeing in front of them only
the shadows of real things, it is obvious that he is speaking of the cinema; but Plato would never
have dreamed that technological progress would allow the shadowy representations on the wall
to take on a more real appearance than life itself. In a Chaplin film no face, no motion of the hand
is true to nature, and it is indeed a shameful thing for the apostles of "Objectivity", who always
preach that the mission of cinema is unvarnished realism, that the first blossoming of the young
art of film presented itself as so made-up, and in such unnatural colors.
The world of Chaplin's films is peopled by the immense bodies of bearded men with eyebrows
bent upwards in an Mephistophelean arc, and with balls of varnish rolling in their eye sockets like
Chinese demons. Dilapidated old men are present, with ridiculous fringes of moss around the
chin, married to Megaera-like gargoyles. All these mythical creatures indulge in mysterious
occupations; more careful inspection shows them to be the occupations of everyday life, changed
by some strange stroke of fate into ghosts and madness. The little man, in a role all of us have
played at some time, receives his bill from the bartender as though being presented with a death
sentence; or a seasick man, stumbling over the ship's railing, aims his muzzle precisely at
Chaplin's clothes. If someone mournfully sets his elbows on the dining table, they are bound to
land in a plate full of food. And table manners lead to all manner of comic manipulation when one
makes exclusive use of forbidden ones. Here someone can stir coffee with a knife, wipe the knife
on some bread, and the bread will taste like coffee. It also proves difficult to carry a ladder without
bowling over passersby. People want to work, eat or pray--the little man must be always fearful
and amazed. He is not simply poor, he not only lacks a collar and tie; he does not fit into this
world at all, not even into that of the poor. The shoes he brought into the world are too big for him;
he turned out to be two sizes too small from head to foot, and is always out of sorts in the midst of
the muscular diligence of policemen, bartenders, shopkeepers and crooks.
All this reflects the worldview of a man who, in the middle of the Hollywood film industry, where
every day in the studio costs thousands and art is produced with a stopwatch, sometimes
disappears suddenly and for days paces in solitude with his plans, and whose imminent divorce
became known after the public discovered that he wouldn't put up with his wife bringing a troop of
noisy guests into the house one evening. The fact that this romantic with the nerves of a sarcastic
eccentric has succeeded in conquering a world [End Page 312] buzzing with radio waves and
Morse code with his extremely un-American worldview should give the apostles of "Objectivity"
reason to reconsider.
These films are fifteen years old, and nothing in them has aged except the heroine's hairdo. They
have their style, which in the history of film will one day be called the "early style" because it is
shaped by a very primitive idea of the possibilities of film. The camera serves simply to play back
a situation which, disregarding the fantastic figures and events, could be played out in exactly the
same way in reality or on a stage. The scene remains constant through whole episodes; shooting
is rarely broken up by close-ups; there is never a fancy or complicated take, no characterization
through carefully selected details. There is never a perfectly mastered movement from situation to
situation--because the idea that the camera is free from the unity of place, to which objects are in
reality subservient, was a revolution by which Chaplin remains to this day unmoved.
Sometimes, if need be, the particular perspective conditioned by the camera's line of vision is
employed for a humorous effect, which technique not only stems from the photographic treatment
itself but is also sub specie a specifically filmic attitude and conception of take [Einstellung]. This
happens when Chaplin, hanging over a ship's railing, wiggles his hind quarters to the audience;
everyone thinks he's fallen to his death because of seasickness, when suddenly he turns around,
having caught a fish. This is a first step toward the emancipation of the filmstrip from the real
spatial conditions of the represented object.
It is therefore still more important that these films have not aged and cannot age. The majority of
good films even a couple of years old seem childishly primitive today; one laughs at the poverty of
the lighting and special effects, at the clumsy war paint and the still more thickly laid-on facial
expressions of the actors. These all amount to imperfect attempts to reach a goal to which we are
closer than we were five years ago. However, American slapstick [Groteskfilm], of which Chaplin
is the master, works only with devices that it fully controls. The artlessness of the lighting does
not disturb because here the film depends not on lighting but on the meaning of the events.
Makeup and beards do not interfere, for this is a consciously bombastic art of masks; the
refinements of montage cannot be missed where they were not from the outset incorporated into
the conception of the film. From this it follows, in accord with a pattern known from the other arts,
that with the American slapstick comedy, technical progress for the first time does not entail the
devaluation of previous works of film art. Just as the frescoes of a Masaccio have not lost their
value because one understands better today how to draw a squatting figure, the most vehement
development of cinema won't destroy what Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle
and Harold Lloyd have achieved. [End Page 313]
In 70 years time there will be a film museum, and film lovers will sometimes go into a cool
projection room, where the best years are stored, and where they can see an old master verified
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as authentic by a report from privy counselor Coogan, and valued at 100,000 marks in the art
market. There they will wriggle in their seats for an hour, and then, with eyes rolling, stagger into
the street like drunken ducks. Into bulging ears they'll whisper to one another, in husky, perfectly
synchronized voices: "No wonder! It's a real Chaplin!"