I Hone My Art as a Performer Using Humor Pathos

"More pathos!" That is what Harry Langdon demanded for his future films in 1927, according to director Frank Capra, who had helped institute Langdon's popular überbaby graphic symbol. Despite the success of his movies, Langdon felt he was not being perceived as an artist on the level of Charlie Chaplin, so he wanted to add the ingredient that, he thought, had made Chaplin'due south reputation. But the film Langdon then made, Three'south a Crowd, wrecked his career. What went wrong?

Chaplin himself would describe that special element, in his introduction to his first feature, 1921's The Kid, as "a smile and, perhaps, a tear." Information technology was something he'd been edifice up to; the raucous version of his Tramp grapheme that audiences had fallen in honey with when he began actualization in Keystone short comedies near a decade before didn't bear a trace of it. The public fabricated Chaplin a star because he fabricated them laugh. What he was doing back then wasn't all that different from what the other knockabout Keystone clowns were doing. He was just doing it much better.

If Chaplin had continued to make Keystone-style films, his public would likely have remained quite happy. But one marker of the visionary creative person is that he doesn't just give the audition what they want; he gives them something they don't fifty-fifty know that they want yet. As Chaplin gained greater creative control over his work, he began to add unexpected levels to his character. Start with shorts similar The Tramp, The Depository financial institution (both 1914), and The Vagabond (1915), he dared to temper the slapstick with moments of sadness, asking audiences to feel for the Tramp, who might lose the girl, the job, or even the future. These emotional grace notes were something wholly original in silent comedy, and they were noticed and admired by both audiences and critics. Chaplin was no longer simply beingness referred to every bit a great comic; he was being called a great creative person.

The word pathos, meaning "a quality that evokes pity or compassion," became synonymous with Chaplin's art early in his career. Perhaps because some artists who followed him (Langdon amid them) misused or abused desolation in their ain work, this element in comedy has acquired something of a bad reputation. Nosotros associate it with cloying sentimentality and special pleading. Only Chaplin was a subtler artist than that. The Tramp is not, in total, a pathetic character. His losses are temporary and his successes always possible. The homo who walks alone downwardly the road at the end of his films does so with more than promise than sorrow. What Chaplin was really later was not but pity but empathy—a bond between the audience and the Tramp that would carry them through all his ups and downs. His strategic deployment of pathos tightens that bond, giving united states reasons to cry for his losses and cheer for his successes.

In The Bank, for example, Charlie is a janitor infatuated with a banking company teller (Edna Purviance). He leaves her a honey note and a flower. He watches from a distance equally she reacts angrily to his appeal (we tin read her lips as she calls him a fool). Chaplin uses an extended close-upwards to show us the rejection sinking in (a similar close-upward would be crucial years later in City Lights). Later, the janitor dreams that he foils a bank robbery and wins Edna'due south middle. When he awakes and remembers the truth, he pretends not to care, but we know better. Chaplin had discovered that a careful knitting together of laughter and tears would make united states of america honey him even more.

Chaplin's enrichment and deepening of the Tramp character would prove invaluable to him every bit he made the movement into feature films. The trouble of how to extend slapstick over more one or 2 reels of pic had not every bit yet been conspicuously faced. When Chaplin's old dominate at Keystone, Mack Sennett, made features, he simply added more than of the frantically paced gags he'd packed his shorts with, letting them run ad infinitum (some would say ad nauseum). Chaplin institute that giving the audience a sustained emotional connection with his characters could bind his comedy into a coherent whole. Weaving pathos into the comedy helped to create an affecting series of peaks and valleys well suited to the longer form.

Chaplin begins The Kid with a slice of tragedy. The film's opening sequence could have come from a Victorian melodrama. A woman "whose sin," a title card informs united states "was maternity" leaves a charity hospital with her babe, and ultimately leaves the baby in a machine. Although Chaplin would create subtler scenes than these in the future, he was taking intendance to allow the audience know that this female parent and this baby really matter—they are non disposable caricatures. The Tramp discovers the baby and takes him in, and Chaplin builds the human relationship betwixt Charlie and the kid (played past Jackie Coogan) through purely comic sequences. Tragedy has introduced us to the kid, but comedy makes u.s.a. autumn in love with him, as the Tramp raises the kid to go his partner in piffling scams. Because Chaplin has muted the emotion nosotros initially felt for this abased child, when information technology does suspension through again, as the two are separated and so reunited at the film'southward conclusion, information technology is all the more overwhelming. We tin can no more bear to encounter this pair we've laughed at and with parted than Charlie tin.

The theme of unrequited love animates Chaplin's next two films: The Golden Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928).  In both, the Tramp mistakenly believes the girl is in love with him. The plot elements that found this—a misdirected love letter of the alphabet in The Gold Blitz, a fortuneteller'southward prediction in The Circus—are slim, just the force of Chaplin's performances gives them weight. We believe that he believes that these girls honey him, and the pathos lies in the distance between what he believes to be true and what we know to be true. The comic sequences in these films don't always take a straight impact on their plots, but the feeling we take for the Tramp's situation creates an emotional through line that unifies the disparate elements.

Chaplin'southward 1931 masterpiece Urban center Lights is, perhaps, his greatest marriage of comedy and pathos. In the film's opening scene. Charlie meets a poor bullheaded flower girl on the street. He buys a bloom from her, merely as she reaches out to manus him his modify, she hears a car door slam and the car drive away. She is certain what she hears is Charlie leaving. And the Tramp, afraid to let her know his true identity, slips abroad. In this 1 scene, Chaplin makes us experience both for the blind daughter and for Charlie's shame at his low condition in life. But he also maintains the comedy—even playing a peachy joke, involving a flowerpot of h2o, off of the daughter'south blindness.

The Tramp is determined to help the daughter and her grandmother evade eviction and pay for an operation to restore her sight. His selflessness gives the grapheme a new annotation of nobility. To help the pair, Charlie must find work. Sequences of the Tramp at piece of work are constants in Chaplin's films, from the short subjects through his concluding appearance as the character in Modern Times (1936). In City Lights, Charlie first gets a gig as a street sweeper. Nosotros laugh equally he presents the frustrations of the task in a three-office gag masterfully executed in a single shot. In his side by side endeavour to enhance money, Charlie agrees to fight in a stock-still boxing match, which, unbeknownst to him, becomes unfixed. In this hilarious sequence, the Tramp displays a technique that might exist described as "Bladder like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly."

These sequences are classic Chaplin one-act, simply while nosotros laugh at the gags, we also get emotionally invested in the Tramp'south need to succeed. When he fails, we feel his loss, not just considering it affects him but because it besides endangers the souls he longs to help. Equally the film plays out, Charlie is able to get the coin for the girl but is jailed for a offense he didn't commit. After he is released, a more bedraggled than e'er Tramp returns to discover the girl, who can at present see, running her own flower shop. In an unforgettable determination, the flower girl finally recognizes her true distributor.

The close-up of Charlie that ends the movie leaves the audience in exquisite suspension. The mixture of hope, shyness, and fear on his face chimes with the audience's own emotions. We don't know what will happen subsequently the image fades, simply nosotros leave with the Tramp's dream in our hearts. A grinning and a tear, indeed. In creating City Lights, Chaplin conceived the basic idea for this concluding scene first. With this loftier point always in his listen, he was able to meticulously build the film with comedy and desolation in perfect harmony.

For all the critical acclaim Chaplin received for the emotional currents of these films, the combination of desolation and comedy was rarely imitated by his contemporaries in silent one-act. Harold Lloyd was capable of creating delicate moments of pathos, but mostly he effectively relied on the lowest qualities of his "Glasses Character" to connect with his audition. Buster Keaton never asked for sympathy. He just assumed nosotros would share his understanding of what it was similar to be at state of war with the cosmos.

Merely Chaplin green-eyed would bring the gifted Harry Langdon to grief in 3's a Crowd. The plot, in which Harry takes in a runaway girl and her baby, certainly sounds those Chaplin-esque notes. But where Chaplin kept comedy and pathos closely together, Langdon simply dropped the one-act for extended periods, hoping the audience would be entranced by the minute shifts in his dramatic functioning. He was wrong. Without the laughter to necktie us to Harry, we go bored and alienated. Langdon would return to comedy in subsequent films, but he never really recovered.

In the sound menstruation, studios often tried to impose Chaplin-esque desolation on comedians who were ill suited for it. MGM was a specially heavy-handed user of this strategy. Buster Keaton's first MGM sound film, Gratuitous and Like shooting fish in a barrel (1930), ends with a close-upwardly of a devastated Buster in sad clown makeup—about equally un-Keaton an paradigm every bit 1 could conceive. Other comedians, similar the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy, who had never needed sentiment got it anyhow (to, it must be admitted, the Marx Brothers' commercial, if not artistic, benefit). And MGM turned the rambunctious Our Gang kids into multiple Andy Hardys, learning life lessons in lugubrious ten-infinitesimal shorts that seemed to last for days.

In the fifties and sixties, Jerry Lewis, who idolized Chaplin, wrestled with the pathos problem. In The Ladies Man (1961) and The Disorderly Orderly (1964), Lewis picked upwardly some threads from City Lights and had Jerry attempt to help girls who are emotionally rather than physically handicapped (well, it was the sixties). But unlike Chaplin, Lewis but alternated funny scenes with sad ones, and fifty-fifty his most devoted fans tend to sideslip off to the restroom when the sad scenes starting time up. It was in his 1963 classic The Nutty Professor that Lewis finally accomplished his own perfect synthesis, assuasive desolation to evolve naturally from Professor Julius Kelp'south misguided want to turn himself into something he's not.

What Jerry Lewis discovered is what Chaplin knew: comedy and pathos must come from the aforementioned place: character. Nosotros cry for the Tramp non because we compassion him but because laughter has fabricated us love him. Comedy plus pathos becomes empathy. "A smile and, perhaps, a tear" bind together in perfect unity. This is the art of Charlie Chaplin.

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Source: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3004-a-smile-and-a-tear

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