THE GREAT CHAPLIN MONOGRAPH, THE AVANT-GARDE MYTH BY BOJAN JOVIĆ
par Branko Aleksić
February 19, 2023
The Institute of Modern Literature in Belgrade has recently published Bojan Jović's monograph, Avangardni mit Čaplin 2018, which deserves to be noted. From the moment Tristan Tzara declares that Chaplin joined the Dada movement 1919, his character enters into the polyphonic experiences of avant-garde artists, who become the speaking echo of the silent film with the little tramp of discontinuous destiny. Bojan Jović reproduces in full page the handwritten dedication of Ivan Goll on a copy of his turbulent poem Chapliniade:
"to Tristan Tzara / Balkan-American-European poet / dark brother of this Charlot / January 1, 1921"1.
Jović has also compiled the discoveries of Two Humorous Fantasies for Charlie Chaplin by Pierre-Henri Cami, published by Kickshaws editions, La Charité-sur-Loire in 190 numbered copies 2004, and the scenario for a cubist animated film, which Fernand Léger proposed unsuccessfully to Chaplin, known only at the beginning of the 21st century (from Léger's estate, in: Chaplin and Images, NBC editions, 2005).
While previous studies, such as Norbert Aping's "Charli Chaplin in Deutschland 1915-1924: Der Tramp kommt ins Kino," Marburg, 2014, have limited themselves to researching Chaplin's influence in a restricted sector, Bojan Jović shows the different ways in which the entire European avant-garde used the semantic and aesthetic potential of the character. In turn "primitive" (for Henri Michaux), "anarchist" (in the eyes of Iris Barry, 1926; film critic and theorist, companion of the vorticist artist Wyndham Lewis), epic and humanitarian in Ivan Goll's Chapliniade, the character of "sentimental Charlot" (Aragon's poem, 1918 – in both magazines, Delluc's Cinéma and Reverdy's Nord-Sud, but also the allusions in Anicet or the panorama 1921, is reinvented in plastic works, collective investigations (the special Chaplin issue of the Disque vert magazine 1924), but also rethought in theoretical studies such as those of Soupault (Plon ed., 1931) and Viktor Šklovski ("Literature and Cinema"). To the benefit of this theorization, Bojan Jović also cites a version of W. Benjamin's essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction" (Druckvorlage: Benjamin-Archiv, Ms 1011), and does not neglect any aspect of this back and forth between the new art of cinema and other arts. That of lifestyle is not the least. The Chaplin myth rubs off on the private life of the actor-artist, and the surrealist group rises to his defense in the sordid affair of his American divorce with Lita Grey (La Révolution surréaliste n° 9-10, 1927). The manifesto has the English title: "Hands off Love," since three American writers co-sign it – Paul Horreman, Eliot Paul, and Eugène Jolas, editor of Transition who presented the truncated variant of the manifesto. Among other things, the protest manifesto quotes from Chaplin's wife's deposition that he "tried to make her read books where sexual things were clearly treated." The surrealists around Breton demand, ironically, "professional secrecy for married women," and rise up against the "most arbitrary rights" in conventional marriage. Following his divorce (22-VIII-1927), Chaplin became "a scoundrel and a Nasty Gentleman" (the capitals are from the surrealist group); Lita Grey made him lead "a dog's life." However, City Lights – "City Lights," American dramatic comedy directed by Chaplin in 1931, made the Belgrade surrealist group change their opinion. Ðorđe Jovanović, on the left wing of the group, protests in the magazine Nadrealizam Danas i Ovde – "Surrealism Today and Here," n° 1/1931, that this sound film degrades Charlot into a bourgeois clown and completely invalidates the "Hands off Love" manifesto by which the surrealists honored him in 1927...
Bojan Jović's exhaustive examination of "the phenomenology of the Little Tramp" (title of the 1st chapter), passes through different media channels – film, drawing, caricature, poems and texts, up to the margins of newspapers – the hoaxes. The character irradiates the popular imaginary and culture with such power that one can speak of a turning point in the relations between art and politics. Chaplin is apt to satirize the mustachioed Nazi buffoon in the film Great Illusion 1940. But well before this deadly satire of Adolf Hitler, following the German dadaists (Der Dada n° 3/1920, protests against the ban on Chaplin films in Germany), German and Czech caricaturists appropriate Chaplin to represent him attacking Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister ("Laughing in Goebbels' inimitable face," p. 82) and the Czech caricature from the newspaper Die Simplicissimu, documented p. 229 ("Mussolini: Chaplin hraje diktátory" – "Chaplin plays dictator Mussolini"). The paradox that Chaplin had neither the ear nor the taste for modern poetry, as he writes in his Autobiography when evoking his meeting with the poet Hart Crane, adds spice to the works of this "Charlot factory" that modern artists opened. Bojan Jović's beautiful book – 345 abundantly illustrated pages (and for copyright reasons difficult to translate). The author was right to insist: the life and work of Charlie Chaplin represent the common and probably unique, almost unavoidable theme for the important representatives of the vorticist, expressionist, dadaist, futurist, eccentric, constructivist, and surrealist movements.
Branko Aleksić February 20, 2023
- Henri Béhar has paid particular attention to Chaplin's participation in Tzara's artistic experiments, who sees Charlot's films for the first time in Zürich as early as 1918 (H. Béhar, "Chaplin and Dada," article published in the catalog of the exhibition Charlie Chaplin in the Eye of the Avant-gardes, at the Nantes Museum, October 2019-February 2020), accessible on his personal page: http://melusine-surrealisme.fr/henribehar/wp/?s=charlot. (See rather Charlot-Dada