Charlie Chaplin's remarkable life and comedic talent have been the focus of countless popular and scholarly studies. In this groundbreaking work, Chaplin's often underrated skills as a film director take center stage. Highlighting the screen icon's significance as a filmmaker, this study focuses on the heart of Chaplin's cinema--his silent works starring his alter-ego, Charlie--and examines both his great silent film features like The Kid, The Gold Rush and Modern Times, and his shorter, earlier films like The Immigrant, The Pawn Shop, The Pilgrim and A Dog's Life. An analysis of the formal properties of Chaplin's filmmaking reveals the merit of his cinema, the depth of its emotion and the extent of its meaning. Chaplin is among the great artists of any medium, in any time, with an ability to touch on very subtle aspects of the human condition.

Charlie Chaplin's remarkable life and comedic talent have been the focus of countless popular and scholarly studies. In this groundbreaking work, Chaplin's often underrated skills as a film director take center stage. Highlighting the screen icon's significance as a filmmaker, this study focuses on the heart of Chaplin's cinema--his silent works starring his alter-ego, Charlie--and examines both his great silent film features like The Kid, The Gold Rush and Modern Times, and his shorter, earlier films like The Immigrant, The Pawn Shop, The Pilgrim and A Dog's Life. An analysis of the formal properties of Chaplin's filmmaking reveals the merit of his cinema, the depth of its emotion and the extent of its meaning. Chaplin is among the great artists of any medium, in any time, with an ability to touch on very subtle aspects of the human condition.

Charlie Chaplin was a skilled comedian, filmmaker and composer, and the mission of this book is to educate readers on the wide variety of Chaplin’s artistry: the subtlety of his mimetic satire, the sophistication of his film direction, and his prodigious musical skill that resulted in some of film’s greatest orchestral arrangements. This encyclopedia also emphasizes the singular nature of Chaplin’s biography: his unprecedented renown, the wide list of notables in art and culture with whom he fraternized, and the controversies that seemed to dog each stage of his life, perhaps most notably in his run-ins with the FBI and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, both of whom suspected him of communist leanings. Charlie Chaplin: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works captures his life, and legacy. It features a chronology, an introduction that offers a brief account of his life, and a dictionary section listing entries on Chaplin’s childhood, career, family, and associates. The bibliography is one of the largest available of works concerning Chaplin.

Charlie Chaplin was one of the cinema’s consummate comic performers, yet he has long been criticized as a lackluster film director. In this groundbreaking work—the first to analyze Chaplin’s directorial style—Donna Kornhaber radically recasts his status as a filmmaker. Spanning Chaplin’s career, Kornhaber discovers a sophisticated "Chaplinesque" visual style that draws from early cinema and slapstick and stands markedly apart from later, "classical" stylistic conventions. His is a manner of filmmaking that values space over time and simultaneity over sequence, crafting narrative and meaning through careful arrangement within the frame rather than cuts between frames. Opening up aesthetic possibilities beyond the typical boundaries of the classical Hollywood film, Chaplin’s filmmaking would profoundly influence directors from Fellini to Truffaut. To view Chaplin seriously as a director is to re-understand him as an artist and to reconsider the nature and breadth of his legacy.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was a stage performer before he was a filmmaker, and it was in English music hall that he learned the rudiments of his art. The last film he made in the United States, Limelight, was a tribute to the music hall days of his youth. As a parallel to Chaplin's past, the film was set in 1914, the year he left the stage for a Hollywood career. This collection of essays examines Limelight and the history of English music hall. Featuring contributions from the world's top Chaplin and music hall historians, as well as previously unpublished interviews with collaborators who worked on Limelight, the book offers new insight into one of Chaplin's most important pictures and the British form of entertainment that inspired it. Essays consider how and why Chaplin made Limelight, other artists who came out of English music hall, and the film's international appeal, among other topics. The book is filled with rare photographs, many published for the first time, sourced from the Chaplin archives and the private collections of other performers and co-stars.

In Music Hall Mimesis in British Film, 1895-1960, Dr. St. Pierre examines strategies of representing British music hall performance (1854-1919) and the performance of the body in British cinema in the silent era (1895-1927) and the sound era (1927-60). The focus is on films of Fred and Joe Evans, Frank Randle, Will Hay, George Formby, Arthur Lucan and Kitty McShane, Cicely Courtneidge, Jessie Matthews, Norman Evans, Max Miller, Stanley Holloway, Jack Warner, Gracie Fields, and Charles Chaplin. Consideration is given to themes such as war propaganda and gender impersonation.

This collection of essays by Rudolph Arnheim (film criticism, U. of Michigan) explores film theory, criticism, and many classic films from the silent and early sound period (the 1920s and early 1930s). The majority of essays included in this collection were written and published in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and have been translated into English for the first time. Arnheim argues that up until 1930, film artists created pure forms of cinema crafted with a narrative economy which could unify the most varied of effects. As movies became more realistic looking due to technical advances, cinema began to lose its integrity and viability. Paper edition (unseen), $18.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR