City Lights : Charlie Chaplin

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After watching City lights, I couldn’t move for a while. I stayed on the bed. Only thing I could think of was that Kazi Nazrul Islam had made his boldest poetry out of poverty and  struggle as well as Charles Chaplin made his greatest films out of dearth and disparity.

 

When I watched the narrative of the blind girl and her improvised status quo, I recalled the passage from Charlie’s Autobiography [1964] where he boldly narrated how he attempted in a flower business after his father’s funeral and made a progressive encashment using his grief:

 


For weeks I wore crêpe on my arm. These insignia of grief became profitable when I went into business on a Saturday afternoon, selling flowers. I had persuaded Mother to loan me a shilling, and went to the flower market and purchased two bundles of narcissus, and after school busied myself making them into penny bundles. All sold, I could make a hundred percent profit. [4]

 

The parallel plot with the suicidal, drunk and amnesiac millionaire [Harry Myers] is one of the most dramatic-comedy in the silent era, if I may not be wrong. But with all their absurdity and ludicrousness, I have noticed one the most trustworthy and compassionate friendships in the Tramp chronicles. Without the laughter and wit of the millionaire, the blind girl narrative would not have progressed with all of their subtlety and pathos in the human relationship.

 

Charlie was so adamant not to switch from the silence to the sound film. One of the reasons was he firmly believed that The Tramp would necessarily not fit with voiced  expressions but  inherent soundless slapstick movements  are the greatest strength for the art sake. I am also a bit not sure that I will go with the sounded  movement after watching all of these mindblowing film, as if I were got addicted to the silence after all.

 

City Lights [1931]

Charlie Chapli

English, USA.

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