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Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival 2016


Modern Times 327 scan par Claire
Charlie Chaplin will open the 30th edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna, Italy on Saturday June 25 with Modern Times. Chaplin’s extraordinary original score will be performed in Piazza Maggiore by the orchestra of Bologna’s Teatro Comunale, conducted by Timothy Brock.

A second live orchestral screening, on Wednesday June 29, will feature Charlie Chaplin again with Cineteca di Bologna’s brand new restoration of The Kid accompanied by Chaplin’s 1971 score, newly restored by Timothy Brock.

Visit the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival’s website for more information.

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11330 m² of Chaplin


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A gigantic new work of land art by artist Franck Bonneau (Land’Art & Co) was inaugurated on 11th June 2016 at the Aérodrome de Thise in France. Having been a Chaplin fan since childhood, Bonneau is thrilled to pay homage to Chaplin with this huge portrait, which to our knowledge, at 11330 m² is the biggest portrait of Charlie Chaplin in the world.

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Coldplay Concert Intro




Coldplay have licensed from our office the use of Chaplin’s legendary final speech from The Great Dictator to open their current “A Head Full of Dreams Tour”.

Watch the original speech here:



Timothy Brock on Restoring Charlie Chaplin’s Sound


CC with Abe Lyman Orchestra circa 1925

Chaplin’s archive does contain the entire, full, orchestrated scores. But Chaplin, as a filmmaker, was making changes all the time, sort of trial and error, and he was that way as a composer as well. He would compose a piece of music, they would make a short score of it and orchestrate it, and he would sit down with the orchestrator and tell him what to do. They’d make a full score, they’d make parts for the forty to sixty musicians, and then they would listen to it, and he’d go, “Hmm, no, I don’t like that, let’s have the oboe do this line instead, on trumpet here . . .” So players were writing stuff down all the time, because he was dictating the changes he was listening to. All of those changes were done on the parts, or on pieces of paper they attached to the parts. I found music for Modern Times on the back of laundry receipts and paper menus and things like that, whatever scraps of paper players could find at the last moment and write down some notes. - Timothy Brock

Read more about the delicate process of restoring Charlie Chaplin’s music in a new interview of Timothy Brock on Criterion’s website.