Charlie Chaplin, Director

by Donna Kornhaber

Overview

Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema’s consummate comic performers, yet he has long been criticized as a lackluster film director. In this groundbreaking work—the first to analyze Chaplin’s directorial style—Donna Kornhaber radically recasts his status as a filmmaker. Spanning Chaplin’s career, Kornhaber discovers a sophisticated "Chaplinesque" visual style that draws from early cinema and slapstick and stands markedly apart from later, "classical" stylistic conventions. His is a manner of filmmaking that values space over time and simultaneity over sequence, crafting narrative and meaning through careful arrangement within the frame rather than cuts between frames. Opening up aesthetic possibilities beyond the typical boundaries of the classical Hollywood film, Chaplin’s filmmaking would profoundly influence directors from Fellini to Truffaut. To view Chaplin seriously as a director is to re-understand him as an artist and to reconsider the nature and breadth of his legacy.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810129528
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	03/05/2014
Pages:	374
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Donna Kornhaber is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3

Part I Chaplin in Context

1 Chaplin at Keystone, Griffith at Biograph 25

2 The Slapstick Exemption 55

3 Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and the Classical Style 81

Part II The Silent Era

4 Chaplin's Filmmaking Technique 115

5 Chaplin's Filmmaking Philosophy 145

6 A Masterpiece of Mediation: City Lights 181

Part III The Sound Era

7 Dangerous Voices: Modern Times and The Great Dictator 209

8 Substituting Speech for Style: Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight, and A King in New York 235

9 Return to Form: A Countess from Hong Kong 269

Epilogue: The Chaplin Century 289

Notes 297

Bibliography 325

Index 335

Editorial Reviews

…Chaplin's fame as a performer has swamped efforts to consider him as a director. Kornhaber tries to set that right with this fascinating academic study, which forcefully rejects the oft-repeated claims that Chaplin was, at best, a serviceable craftsman whose mission was to capture his own genius as a performer.

The New York Times Book Review - Andrew O'Hehir

"Fascinating" —Andrew O'Hehir, New York Times Book Review

"Kornhaber ... seeks to rehabilitate Chaplin’s reputation as a director, arguing that his style represented a innovative break with classical moviemaking." —The New Yorker

 

"Ms. Kornhaber does Chaplin a service by laying out a case for his filmmaking art." —Farran Smith Nehme, Wall Street Journal

“Donna Kornhaber has altered my perception of Charlie Chaplin as a director. I was among those who loved Chaplin the performer, enjoyed the evident craftsmanship of his films, yet thought of him as a less inventive director than his great colleague Buster Keaton. No more. Kornhaber makes clear how Chaplin’s carefully crafted style is distinct from Hollywood’s classical form. Because she helps the reader understand and truly see Chaplin’s unique filmmaking artistry, Kornhaber gives new meaning to the word ‘Chaplinesque.'”—Jeffrey Couchman, author of The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film

From the Publisher