DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
The AFI opens up a Charlie Chaplin retrospective this weekend, and while the program is certainly heavy on all the accepted must-sees of Chaplin’s career — City Lights, The Great Dictator, Modern Times — it’s nice to see them kicking things off with a movie that really ought to be mentioned in the same breath as all of those, but for some reason gets relegated to a second tier. Of course, even if this was second-tier Chaplin, it would still rank as an unadulterated masterpiece for most other directors, so maybe we’re splitting hairs.
The Circus is Chaplin’s last truly silent work — subsequent films might have lacked spoken dialogue, but still employed sound cues, as the director made his difficult and gradual transition to the sound era. Like much of his work, it buries its darker, sharper edges beneath slapstick. And in the case of The Circus, some of the best-choreographed and funniest slapstick Chaplin ever put on film, starting with the chase sequence that opens the film, in which his Little Tramp character is chased under the big top by police who think he’s a thief. When the audience find him far funnier than the circus’ actual clowns, the ringmaster hires him, only to find out he can’t be funny on command. Put him on a high-wire, pantsless, with a bunch of monkeys, however, and you’ve got comedy gold. But despite all the (metaphorically) noisy action, the Tramp starts and ends this film alone — left behind by the circus that tried to give him a home, but in which he never quite fit in.
There’s a powerful sense of loneliness that pervades the film. As writer, director, producer, and star, Chaplin’s films rose or fell on his back and his alone. As he faced the challenge of maintaining his creative edge in an industry that was rapidly leaving his chosen medium behind (a challenge he rose to, and then some), he must have feared that Hollywood would leave him behind, just as the circus does the Tramp, making this one of the most personal and poignant moments in Chaplin’s career.
View the first few minutes of the movie.
Opens tomorrow and plays through next week at the AFI. Screens with the short, The Idle Class.
—
Fragments of Conversations with Jean-Luc Godard
The Centre Pompidou, the modern arts complex in Paris, recently had an exhibition dedicated to the work of iconic New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Artist, photographer, and occasional filmmaker Alain Fleischer, who has also previously produced a film about director Atom Egoyan, took the opportunity of Godard’s appearances at the exhibition to produce a film composed of, as the title indicates, bits and pieces of the talks and exchanges engaged in by Godard over the course of the event. This includes the director talking about art, artists, and cinema, as well as having discussions with other filmmakers such as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Fleischer claims that the enigmatic figure has “never exposed himself as he does here.”
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art. Free.
