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DAVID THORBURN: This lecture tonight is our last chance

to pay attention to this process I've been calling the Fred Ott

principal.

And forgive me for appearing slightly repetitious

about this.

But to me, it's an essential aspect

of our appreciation of these early weeks,

to recognize that films like The General, or Modern Times,

or the film we're going to see next week, The Last Laugh,

Murnau's remarkable silent film from Germany,

to recognize that these astonishing, complex narratives

grew out of something so primitive

and grew out of something so primitive in such a

relatively short time, is part of what

makes these early films so interesting.

And the viewing you're going to see tonight

is your last opportunity to, in a concrete way,

experience something of that process,

something of that evolution for yourself.

Because the two Chaplain shorts that you're

going to see, while they are, as I indicated this afternoon, not

from the earliest stages of Chaplin's work,

they're three or four years advanced beyond that.

He's already mastered his medium in certain ways.

And these shorts are, in themselves,

very coherent and interesting works.

And I hope you'll look at them for their own intrinsic value.

But I also want you to recognize,

as you think about those short films, remarkable as they are,

how much richer, how much more complex,

how much more demanding and rewarding in many ways

Modern Times is.

And I think the same thing could be said about all

of Chaplin's features.

There's an astonishing distance between even the best

shorts or between most of the best shorts and the features.

Some of the very best shorts have

a kind of elegance and purity, as well as

a level of comic inventiveness that

makes them in their own way almost

the equal of the features.

But, of course, even the best of them

don't have quite the reach or the resonance

of a film like Modern Times or The Gold Rush.

One way we can perhaps clarify some of what I've been saying,

and maybe also do a bit more justice

to poor Buster Keaton, who I think in many ways is

an equally remarkable artist and in a technical sense

an even more interesting director than Chaplain himself,

is to begin with a comparison of the two.

Not so much because the comparison will really

illuminate weaknesses in one or the other,

but the contrast between them I think

will help to clarify what are some

of the essential qualities in each of these director's

work in films.

And I hope that you'll sort of think back

to the Keaton material you saw last week as I'm

making these comparisons.

One way to think about the differences between Chaplin

and Keaton, and also to think about what

is essential about both of them, is

to talk about the way they deal with objects and the role

that objects have in their films.

In Keaton's case, we might say that the basic objects

of interest are usually massive and gigantic things,

whole houses, locomotives, as in The General,

an ocean liner as in The Navigator.

And Keaton was interested in intricate systems

and in the intricacy with which these systems operated.

And he liked to pose his Buster character

against these massive systems, to see whether Buster could

survive them and to show us certain aspects,

both of Buster's resourcefulness and power

to muddle through, but also his comic inadequacy

and comic failings as well.

And a number of the most dramatic and famous bits

from The General could be said to crystallize this principle.

Think of that magnificent joke.

It's more than a joke.

That cosmic joke, that vision of experience,

that existential mockery, but also

affectionate mockery of human nature, that's

embedded in the cannon sequence at the very beginning

of Keaton's most important film.

You remember how that works.

It's very funny at every level.

But as Keaton first fails to fire the cannon,

then the second time reloads the cannon

with 10 times as much powder, then

gets stuck in front of the cannon

and it looks as if he's going to be shot.

But every move in that sequence is

full of amusing comic business.

But think of how as the joke builds,

as it keeps topping itself, something else

begins to happen.

What begins to emerge, as I suggested last time,

is almost a kind of vision of life, a vision of life

in which human agency matters.

You do have to struggle and do what

you can to try to save yourself or accomplish your ends.

But then when your ends are accomplished,

even when things work out almost exactly as you had planned,

remember what happen.

The cannon does fire.

It doesn't shot at poor Buster, who runs away from it and hides

in the cowcatcher of the engine to avoid it.

But why doesn't it go?

Because at a certain moment, the train

just happens to go around the bend and geography and physics

collaborate with the Keaton character

in order to create a shot that actually does almost

hit the engine he's pursuing.

And it certainly persuades the people

he's pursuing that they are being

chased by more than one man.

And, in fact, remember when the cannon fires

and we see that the outcome that results is pretty

much the outcome that the Buster character intended,

there's a double comedy there, isn't there?

And it's a metaphysical or an existential comedy.

Because what that joke is saying is, of course, what

the whole film also says and what

many other individual crescendo jokes, we might call them,

also say in the film.

Which is that we get through in life by muddling through,

by working hard, by engaging in all kinds of sometimes almost

obsessive labor in order to accomplish our ends.

But in the end, when we do accomplish our ends,

it's not entirely because of us.

It's because of accident.

And when we don't accomplish our ends,

it's also because of accident often, as well as

because of our human frailty.

So there really is a kind of complex understanding

of the world implicit in the kinds of jokes

that Keaton manages to tell us, as if there's

a sort of understanding or interpretation

of life embedded in the best moments of The General.

And this kind of vision of experience

wouldn't really be possible if Keaton

was as interested in individual encounters with small objects

as Chaplain is.

Because the distinction between Keaton and Chaplain

in terms of the way they use objects

is that Chaplain is in love not with large, gigantic

structures, but with tiny ones.

He wants to see how Charlie manipulates his cane.

He wants to watch Charlie interact with a hamburger

or with a shoe that he is pretending is a turkey dinner,

in a fragment from a late film of his

that I'm going to show you I hope in a few moments.

So if objects in Keaton are massive and systemic

in a certain way, the objects that

are most characteristic of Chaplin's world

are small and manageable.

And the interactions between the Chaplain character

and these objects are often an occasion for the exploration

of character.

When the Tramp character encounters a particular object,

one of the things he is characteristically tempted

to do is to transform its use, is to make it useful

some other purpose.

As if in the contest between Charlie and the world,

Charlie has some transcendent power

to allow his optimism to transform

a recalcitrant reality, to make the reality kind of bend

to him.

And it becomes especially poignant,

as you'll see in the passage from The Gold Rush I'm going

to show you in a little while.

It becomes especially poignant when

we understand how minimal are the constellations that Charlie

finds.

When he transforms this shoe into a turkey dinner,

he's actually starving.

And although it may psychologically help him out,

we can see his resilience facing hunger and making

the shoe do for a meal.

So what is expressed there is something of the character's

imaginativeness, but also something

of his resilience and optimism.

Because when he encounters the world, his relation to it

is one of a magician or a transformer.

He's always trying to impose his imagination on the world.

And if you watch Chaplin's films--

this is true of his shorts as well as his longer films--

if you watch Chaplin's interactions with objects

closely, you will see a continual drama

in which the imaginative world of the Tramp

is in some sense in a kind of conflict,

or a kind of collision, or at least

a kind of angry conversation with the world in which

the objects of the world are, although they may resist,

are constantly under the pressure

of the transformative power of Charlie's optimism,

resilience, and imagination.

So it's small objects in Chaplain that matter.

And they declare for character, rather than

for some cosmic understanding of the world.

We can get at another fundamental difference

and some of the strengths and the alternate kinds

of strengths of both Keaton and Chaplin

by talking about the different protagonists or heroes that are

characteristic of their works.

In Chaplin's case, let's start with Chaplain,

we often have heroes who have grand visions, or schemes,

or hopes.

They tend to be chivalric characters.

So sometimes the project they take on is rescue the damsel,

protect the woman.

In the first feature-length film or nearly feature-length film

that Chaplin made-- it was a film called The Kid.

And it actually involves a child.

The kid of the title is a young boy, an urchin, very much

like the real Chaplain in his childhood in London.

And the Tramp character, who is himself starving,

encounters the kid and has to protect him.

So it's actually a story of maternal--

there's a maternal quality to Charlie in this.

He's much more like a mother than he's like a father.

But anyway, it's in a certain sense a kind of sentimental

parenting fable, in which we see starving, miserable,

down-at-the-heels Charley defending a person who's even

more vulnerable and even weaker, even less able to take care

of himself than Charlie is.

And although it is a deeply sentimental film in many ways,

it also was a film that provides another occasion in which we

can see the Tramp character's imaginativenes operating.

Because as I suggested this afternoon,

one way you can also see it operating in chase sequences

because he makes such amazing split second decisions

about how to elude his pursuers.

And often those decisions reveal his intelligence

and his improvisatory quickness.

So almost everything that happens in a Chaplain film

returns in some sense to our sense of the Tramp's character.

And we feel that especially strongly I think in The Kid

because one of the things that happen--

I think The Kid is 1921.

And one of the things that happens in The Kid

is that we see Charlie exceeding himself