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THE ACTUAL
In any other medium but the film his genius would be negligible. There is nothing in a Chaplin film which has not been put there for a purpose and the effect of which has not been calculated. He preconceives the psychological effect on an audience of every small strip of film. For this reason his work is never littered with lavish display. It is his faculty for discovering expressive detail, as distinct from his individual personality, which renders Chaplin the supreme artist. The Circus alone showed how, by his unique inventiveness of mind, he transmuted the traditional methods of fun into real uproarious humour under the eyes of the traditionalists themselves. This was in the rehearsal episode the William Tell act and the Barber's Shop business. Chaplin has never excelled the brilliance of this scene.
Chaplin has reduced misfortune, trepidation, disillusion, and suffering to emotions of laughter. His adventures are against the hard-hearted, the oppressors and the selfish, for he knows the smug complacency, the hypocrisy, and the injustice of this world. He is continually fleeing from the angry arm of the law, which wants him for some misunderstood or unconscious offence. Blows, insults, and abuse are heaped upon him, and yet the audience roars at his discomfort. Deprived of all that he holds dear, companionship," food, happiness, Chaplin remains a figure of fun to the masses. To others, perhaps more sensitive, he is pathetic, for in some way he is themselves, their lives and their emotions. The Circus was one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the film and yet it was magnificently funny. With his alert, sensitive, illimitable resourcefulness, his well-meaning, misunderstood kindliness, Chaplin stands alone in the cinema. It is the resolution of the man which secures the affections of the public to him. There is no comparable effect to the feelings roused by the closing sequence of a Chaplin film; that final defiant gesture of every picture when, buoyed up with eternal faith and hope, Chaplin fades into the distance, into, as it were, the opening of his next film. There is a definite link between all of the Chaplin comedies. When he is seen afresh, after a lapse of time, he appears to have just come round the corner from his last film, to mingle with another crowd of idlers. Although his productions are now separated by years, there is still that link, a continuity of idea between one film and the next. Despite this, Chaplin is not a type; he is not an actor; he is an individual searching for a satisfaction
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