Chaplin was famous in a way that no one had been before; arguably, no one has been as famous since. At the peak of his popularity, his screen persona, the Tramp, was the most recognized image in the world. His name came first in discussions of the new medium as popular entertainment, and in defences of it as a distinct art form — a cultural position occupied afterwards only by the Beatles, whose own era-defining popularity never equalled Chaplin’s. He’s the closest thing the 20th century produced to a universal cultural touchstone.
Film histories will invariably assert that Chaplin’s mass popularity was owed to the way in which the Tramp represented a destitute everyman. His films turned hunger, laziness, and the feeling of being unwanted into comedy. He was an ego artist, a performer with an uncanny relationship to the camera who spent the early part of his career refining his screen persona and the latter part of i deconstructing it.
Many a film critic raises the issue of Chaplin’s actual relationship to the cultural moment of the time — and the fact that his popularity survived several periods of sweeping cultural change. His post-silent films — which include his two most enduringly popular features, Modern Times and The Great Dictator — reflect his own attitudes more than the feelings of American audiences at the time. His mature work is deliberately artificial, set in a world pieced together from chunks of European and American past, present, and, in the case of Modern Times, future.
Ignaty Vishnevetsky A century later, why does Chaplin still matters? Internet: <www film avclub com> (adapted)
