A new exhibition, Charlie Chaplin dans l’œil des avant-gardes, opens at the Musée d’Arts de Nantes on October 18, 2019 until February 3, 2020. The exhibition explores the many points of convergence between Chaplin’s cinematography and the arts of the same era, at a time when his films proved without a doubt that a brand new art form had arrived.
The Musée d’Arts de Nantes is hosting a conference on the same subject on December 5 & 6, 2019, with l’Université Paris 1 (Institut Acte) as co-organiser.
Several Chaplin films will be screened at Le Cinématographe in Nantes in October and November.
Continuing our collaboration with [PIAS], it is our great pleasure to announce the release of the double vinyl set of the Charlie Chaplin Film Music Anthology. The double vinyl edition is complementary to our double CD set with the same name released in April – a number of tracks vary from the CD edition, and the vinyl contains some hitherto unreleased bonus tracks of Chaplin at work on some of his most famous tunes.
The Philharmonie de Paris pays homage to Charlie Chaplin with a new exhibition which focuses on the work of the master of silent film from a musical vantage point, shining the spotlight on the close relation to dance, rhythm and the illusion of speech and sound, all rigorously “orchestrated” in each of his works.
With many film clips, photographs, artworks, rare documents and interactive installations, the new exhibition, The Sound of Charlie Chaplin (French title: Charlie Chaplin : L’Homme-orchestre) is open from October 11, 2019 to January 26, 2020, and offers an in-depth vision adapted to visitors of all age-groups, who will be able to explore the life and work of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century through a new light.
The Philharmonie de Paris also has a special programme of Chaplin-themed concerts from October 9-13, which includes Modern Times and Cineteca di Bologna/Immagine Ritrovata’s new digital restoration of A Woman of Paris with live accompaniment by the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris conducted by Timothy Brock, and more…
On September 24th 2019, the Criterion Collection released Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus.
In the last film he made during the silent era, Charlie Chaplin revels in the art of the circus, paying tribute to the acrobats and pantomimists who inspired his virtuoso pratfalls. After being mistaken for a pickpocket, Chaplin’s Tramp flees into the ring of a traveling circus and soon becomes the star of the show, falling for the troupe’s bareback rider along the way. Despite its famously troubled production, this gag-packed comedy ranks among Chaplin’s finest, thanks to some of the most audacious set pieces of the director-performer’s career, including a close brush with a lion and a climactic tightrope walk with a barrelful of monkeys. The Circus, which was rereleased in 1969 with a new score by Chaplin, is an uproarious high-wire act that showcases silent cinema’s most popular entertainer at the peak of his comic powers.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- New 4K digital restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s 1969 rerelease version of the film, featuring an original score by Chaplin, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New audio commentary featuring Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance
- Interview with Chaplin from 1969
- New interview with Chaplin’s son Eugene Chaplin
- In the Service of the Story, a new program on the film’s visual effects and production design by film scholar Craig Barron
- Chaplin Today: “The Circus,” a 2003 documentary on the film featuring filmmaker Emir Kusturica
- Excerpted audio interview from 1998 with Chaplin musical associate Eric James
- Unused café sequence with new score by composer Timothy Brock, and related outtakes with narration by comedy choreographer Dan Kamin
- Newly discovered outtakes featuring the Tramp and the circus rider
- Excerpts from the original recording session for the film’s opening song, “Swing Little Girl”
- Footage of the film’s 1928 Hollywood premiere
- Rerelease trailers
- PLUS: An essay by critic Pamela Hutchinson
Orecchio Acerbo Editore has just published a lovely new children’s book entitled “Io e Charlie” (Charlie and Me) by Luca Tortolini with illustrations by Giacomo Garelli (licensed by Bubbles Inc. SA).
Call for papers - Conference Charlie Chaplin in the Eye of the Avant-Garde Nantes, December 5th and 6th, 2019
Musée d’arts de Nantes
Institut ACTE (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Venue: Auditorium, Musée d’arts de Nantes Conference Directors: Claire Lebossé, José Moure Advisory Board: Martin Barnier (Université Lyon 2), Francis Bordat (Université Paris-Nanterre), Élodie Evezard (Musée d’Art de Nantes), Kate Guyonvarch (Chaplin office, and Roy Export SAS), Morgane Jourdren (Université Angers), Claire Lebossé (Musée d’arts de Nantes), Sophie Lévy (Musée d’arts de Nantes), José Moure (Université Paris 1)
From 18 October 2019 to 3 February 2020, the Musée d’arts de Nantes is organising an exhibition entitled Charlie Chaplin in the Eye of the Avant-Garde highlighting for the first time the connections between the cinematic work of Charlie Chaplin and avant-garde experiments in the visual arts. As the first international star in the history of cinema, Charlie Chaplin has exerted a powerful fascination ever since the invention of his Tramp persona in 1914. However, the interaction between the work of Chaplin and the artistic output of his contemporaries remains unexplored. Charlie Chaplin in the Eye of the Avant-Garde, which brings together many different art forms (paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, documents and, of course, flm), offers an immersion in the visual world of the first half of the 20th century, with works by Frantisek Kupka, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, John Heartfeld, and Claude Cahun…
The conference will be based on the same four axes as the exhibition:
Machine Man
The geometrical way that Chaplin’s tramp moves, with his jumpy walk and his famous 90 degree turn, inspired Fernand Leger in his development of a cubist Chaplin. It also evokes machine movements which Chaplin either mimes (c.f. his transformation into a clockwork statue to escape capture in The Circus) or becomes part of (when Charlie is swallowed by the conveyor belt and ends up trapped the cogs, in Modern Times.) Contemporary admirers of Chaplin such as Frantisek Kupka and Francis Picabia were similarly preoccupied by a fascination for machine movements and the art of engineering heralding a new world order.
The poetry of the world
The freedom of the Tramp is exemplified in his refusal to consider the world as a constraint to which he must submit: demonstrated in his reinterpretation of objects. Objects are diverted from their intended functions and lose all practicality, such as the scene in The Pawnshop when Chaplin takes the alarm clock apart and ends up completely destroying it. Objects undergo poetic transformation in the hands of an inventive hero trying to make the world fit his needs (the bread roll dance in The Gold Rush, 1925) in the same way as in the works of Victor Brauner et François Kollar. The counter-uses of objects proposed by Chaplin can be seen as deviations of meaning based on semantic ambiguities, establishing close, formal links with the work of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
Spectacle « mis en abyme »
The travelling world of performers is a privileged universe for the tramp character, himself a wanderer, on the outskirts of society (The Circus, 1928 ; Limelight, 1952). Chaplin loved the microcosm of the circus, as did Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall or Alexander Calder. There, reality is transformed, reflected by deforming mirrors- mockery and doubt question the ordinary. The clown and the tightrope walker are often used as metaphorical representations of artists, deliberately putting themselves in danger for the audience or on the high wire. In his work Chaplin equally explores the joyous burlesque of the tramp and the melancholy of the ageing white clown (Limelight) This exploration of the artist figure is to be accompanied by a reflection on the film industry in which he evolved.
The absurdity of history
The success of the tramp character places an emblematic and displaced character at the centre of Chaplin’s film work. The poverty of one category of the population is forced upon the eyes of the viewers, and in particular upon the eyes of the cameras of Lewis Hine, Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott. The theme is all the closer to Chaplin in that he experienced extreme poverty in his childhood (The Kid, 1921). His work also expresses clear antimilitarism, from Shoulder Arms (1918, echoing the work of artists who experienced the trenches during the First World War and often attended screenings of Chaplin films when on leave) to The Great Dictator (1940), ridiculing Hitler and Mussolini through infantilization and derision, similar to photomontages by John Heartfeld, himself a Chaplin admirer.
Submissions
Please send an abstract (1000 to 2000 characters) in English or French, a short curriculum vitae, a bibliography of maximum 5 lines, and your contact information to:
José Moure (jmoure@univ-paris1.fr) and
Claire Lebossé (colloquemuseedartsnantes@gmail.com).
Deadline for submissions (extended): May 22nd 2019 Answers will be given in June.
