One hundred years ago, a new character burst onto screens for the first time. On February 7, 1914, the release of a 6-minute film, Kid Auto Races at Venice, marked the birth of the ‘Little Tramp’, the character that made Charlie Chaplin famous and left an indelible imprint on cinema history.
Audiences watched as a figure clad in baggy pants, a derby hat, and outsized, ill-fitting shoes, sporting a toothbrush moustache and wielding a cane, jerked and lurched across the screen, leaving chaos in his wake; an icon was born.
In Kid Auto Races at Venice — which allegedly took just forty-five minutes to shoot and was mostly improvised — Chaplin plays a tramp that repeatedly spoils a director’s takes by interrupting the shot. The following year’s film The Tramp (1915) saw the character develop more fully into the vagrant as which he would be best known. Chaplin would continue to play the Tramp for the next 22 years. The character’s hundredth birthday this year has been celebrated by film festivals and special screenings around the world.
A tramp might seem an unlikely candidate for such wild popularity, considering a constantly unlucky vagrant is far from your typical hero. Chaplin, who grew up intermittently in the workhouse, created a character that was deliberately unheroic: the Tramp is one of capitalism’s victims, not its victors. In City Lights (1931) the Tramp is mistaken by a blind girl for a millionaire and struggles to make enough money to pay for an operation to cure her sight. The film ends ambiguously, as the girl sees the Tramp for the first time; we never know if she shuns or accepts her poverty-stricken admirer.
In Modern Times (1936) we watch as the Tramp struggles against the punishing repetitiveness of industrial labour. In one scene he becomes wedged in the cogs of a great machine, literally trapped in the mechanisms of industrialised capitalism. In the hands of other filmmakers, capitalism’s upheavals and injustices would be material enough for tragedy. In Chaplin’s hands they were translated into another language: comedy.
Chaplin was the slapstick comedian par excellence. He detested talkies so much that he completed City Lights as a silent picture, despite considerable pressure to turn it into a talkie. He was notorious for the precision with which he constructed his scenes (he famously demanded 342 takes of a single scene from City Lights). And who could forget the film’s perfectly choreographed boxing scene — which took four days to rehearse and six to shoot — and the incredible deftness of Chaplin’s performance, at once graceful and hilarious?
Cinema was a different form one hundred years ago. It was more a medium than anything, and still emerging as an art in its own right. Chaplin’s Tramp helped shape cinema’s development; to Walter Benjamin, Chaplin’s 1928 film The Circus was, “The first work of maturity in the art of film.”
How impoverished might that art be today if Chaplin had never donned his derby hat? We might not have the comedy of Jacques Tati and his character Monsieur Hulot, or the sublime films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Without Chaplin’s example we would not have Giulietta Masina’s luminous performance as Gelsomina in Federico Fellini’s La St rada, another film that spins humour out of despair. Animation would be severely diminished — both Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse bear traces of the Tramp.
Another of the Tramp’s admirers, T.S. Eliot, once remarked that “Charlie Chaplin is not English, or American, but a universal figure, feeding the idealism of hungry millions in Czecho-Slovakia and Peru.” A century on, the Tramp continues to inspire. If he was a universal figure, it was because he stirred universal emotions: in 1929, Walter Benjamin observed that Chaplin “appeals both to the most international and the most revolutionary emotion of the masses: their laughter”.
