The Kid by Charles Chaplin - Movie Review Example

FILM ANALYSIS Introduction "The Kid" by Charles Chaplin is a 1921 American silent comedy-drama film written, produced and directed by starring Charlie Chaplin, and features Jackie Coogan as his adopted son and sidekick. This was Chaplins first full-length movie. It is the first feature length comedy film with equal balance of comedy and drama, with the opening titles: "A picture with a smile-and perhaps, a tear." One of the greatest themes I have picked up from the film is “the role of individual in society.”. When the boy becomes sick, a doctor comes to see him. He discovers that the Tramp is not the boys father. The Tramp shows him the note left by the mother, but the doctor merely takes it and notifies the authorities. Two men come to take the boy to an orphanage, but after a fight and a chase, the Tramp regains his boy. When the woman comes back to see how the boy is doing, the doctor tells her what has happened, and then shows her the note, which she recognizes. The fugitives spend the night in a flophouse, but the manager (an unaccredited Henry Bergman), having read of the $1000 reward offered for the child, takes him to the police station to be united with his ecstatic mother. When the Tramp wakes up, he searches frantically for the missing boy, then returns to doze beside the now-locked doorway to their humble home. In his sleep, he enters "Dreamland," with angels in residence and devilish interlopers. He is awakened by a policeman, who places the Tramp in a car and rides with him to a house. When the door opens, the woman and John emerge, reuniting the elated adoptive father and son. The policeman, happy for the family, shakes the Tramps hand and leaves, before the woman welcomes the Tramp into her home (Charles 2). The movie is about how love is important for people to build relationship, not based on economic situation. Styles To fully appreciate the cinematic genius of the film, it’s important to understand the context in which it was made. The Kid succeeded where many other silent films of the time failed, in conveying complex emotions and conversations without the use of any dialogue. While acting style was crucial to viewers understanding what was happening on screen, more important was the technical style in which the movie is put together.  The editing and camera techniques used are remarkable for the time, and exemplify how Chaplin uses the kid to pioneer many the basic cinematic concepts we see in many movies today.  There is one scene that is particularly special, when “The Tramp” is running from the police officer, scaling rooftops and jumping from building to building. In fact, the sequence is the first edited chase scene with a moving camera to appear in a feature film, and established the basic formula for a dramatic chase scenes to come. While the casual viewer would never know just by watching, the historic element certainly adds to the high production value of the film. Mise en scene "The Kid" in most scenes uses the method of mise-en-scene, but while it uses mise-en-scene the film also expands its film editing. This is all about “putting into scene” or “placing into stage” by: 1. Setting: which involves real locations versus the sets, painted sets, virtual sets, miniatures and the prominence of the set versus the characters and their movement. 2. Color palette: This involves warm versus cool color and limited versus varied color 3. Costumes and make up: This is about the context and cues which is what the audience assumes about the character purely based on how they are dressed and make-up color palette, motifs and naturalistic versus stylized. 4. Lighting: Entails quality lighting that is, hard versus soft, soft versus hard shadows, high key versus low key (chiaroscuro). Direction, that is, front-lit, back-lit, side-lit and top lit. the lighting sources comes from natural or artificial lighting like the three-point lighting system. In one of the scenes, this technique is clearly when the camera moves to John who is reaching for "The Tramp." There is a light that is focused on his face, yet there is darkness surrounding the outside of the light to give the viewer a more in depth looks onto the actors face. "The Kid" had plenty of, if not overly used the idea of mise-en-scene. From the start to the middle, all the way through the end, Chaplin focuses everything in front of the camera, he makes sure that nothing is out of the shot; and if it was the viewer would most likely see it in the next shot.  It gives his film a highly anticipated narrative story telling. Chaplin also uses the techniques of fast-cutting (quick cuts) and cross-cutting to make the film more dynamic (static versus dynamic). The film shows that Charlie Chaplins regard for moral compensation was well underway. Chaplin seems to insist on applying moral tones and ideals into this film, while also displaying his characters in a dynamic sense. After watching the film, viewers notice the part where he is running from the bully. How Chaplin uses the studio as a playground, as he weaved through the courtyard and employ slapstick elements to create a humorous composition. Within this scene, Chaplin showed us multiple elements of mise-en-scene. These elements of mise-en-scene allowed the viewer to have smooth and clear understanding of the film. In the use of costumes to reflect character, Chaplin wears a costume that, overall, seemed ill-fitted: his shoes that are too large, his pants baggy, his hat too small, and his coat too tight. His coat makes his shoulders seem small and thus diminished one of the more obvious visual cues of masculinity in American culture (broad shoulders). Other mens fashionable coats of the time were closely fitted, but they emphasized the breadth of shoulders. On top of all this, he carries a cane, like a rather old fashioned rich man, or, alternatively, like someone who walked with a limp. He probably looks strange to audiences; in The Kid, he was even insulted by being called an "Awkward ass." In blending poverty and comedy Charlie’s ill-fitted and patchy, clothing is that of a poor, even a destitute man. However, in the same instant that they identified Charlie as poor, they likely saw that he did not look like other poor people. His baggy pants and over-large shoes belonged to a vaudeville tradition of clown costumes, as did his painted, pale face.Thus, the serious framework of suffering, belonging to the deprivations of poverty was, in less the blink of an eye, subverted by a framework of resilience and laughter: that of a clown. Cinematography Cinematography involves “movement-writing or how the captured picture moves in photography. During photography, the Director of Photography (DP) controls the images by: 1. Range of tonality: In which the “Film stock”, fast stock must be equal to low-contrast stock, slow stock is equals to higher contrast as lighting affects contrast. Secondly, the “image exposure” can be overexposed, underexposed or double exposed. Thirdly, the DP can develop image procedures by tinting, toning, hard-coloring, flashing and filtering. As technology advances, we see more and more advancements in cinematography, such as CGI (computer generated imagery) and 48 fps (frames per second). In the “kid” film Charlie Chaplin uses 48 fps which is the fast motion in contrast to 24 fps which is the standard fps. While its interesting to have all these special effects composited into a movie, a movie can sometimes lose the audience with all these effects. In Charlie Chaplins film, "The Kid" demonstrates a good example of how a movie can be effective without these special effects. Besides good acting, Chaplin employed other elements such as inter-titles and camera close ups for a more effective experience. He used inter-titles to complete scenes to help with narration since it was a silent full-feature film. Chaplin also changes the camera focal length by using a wide-angle that exaggerates depth and distorts horizon lines and angles to convey feelings, such as the scene the kid is on the orphanage truck. 2. Photographic image;-The video is a but different from the other films that were produed in this era.the graphics are of high quqalaity, they are more clear, there is a reduction in the number of the white spots on the screen the same case applies to lines plus the burn spots that were ccurrent in almost al thefilms done by chali chaplin 3. The sound era, chalichaplin produced the film the kid in a time that acttos had basically learned the indirect skill of pantomime. This is technique that uses silent or no sound, it is also accompanied with ubiquity talks. This type of film has ni proper form of dialogue, howver it’s uunique ness gave it a huge success. . For instance, in the film the musical notch to the two shorts that entails of jazz instrumentals from that era that matches perfectly with the actions going on in the film. The score of the kid is uptempo conventional tune. By using the depth of field and focus, the DP uses the background and foreground focus as a way of defining how much an image is in focus on the lens. For instance the camera zooms in on the kid crying to dramatize the sadness. In this article, the write states "Coogans tears, outstretched arms, and silent wailing all communicate total devastation as do the cuts to Chaplins underplayed looks of horror and desperation."The films success was comprised of Chaplins slapstick comedy, as well as his use of elements of cinematography which allowed the viewer to have a more concise understanding of the film. If Chaplin was able to effectively convey his idea in a silent film like "The Kid" with the technology he had, it makes you wonder what he could have done with the modern technology we have. Sounding The film uses silent film technique in which there is no synchronized or recorded sound especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, mime and title cards. The sound analysis is non-dietetic and is on-screen. The relationship between the sound and the narrative is that the gestures are used to layout the message and theme to the audience without using sounds so that the audience could better understand what an actor was feeling and portraying on screen. In the film, the piano gives the audience vital emotional clues. Conclusion The Mutual-Chaplin Specials were frequently revived serve as a foundation for all that would follow in Chaplin’s remarkable career. Chaplin’s prior films, although wonderful in their time, failed to ignite the cinematic alchemy that would come to be called “Chaplinesque”the blending of comedy, pathos, and social commentary into a single narrative whole, as seen in The Vagabond, Easy Street, and The Immigrant and in all of Chaplin’s best films thereafter. No other filmmaker had consistently injected this combination of elements with such an exquisite level of skill into a comedy film. The Mutual films are extraordinary because they represent the only period in Chaplin’s career during which he allowed himself to revel in rather than to revile the creative process, to tinker in his comedic laboratory, resulting in some of the finest work of his career. A testament to the enduring quality of the Mutuals is not only that others appropriated sequences from the films (including Chaplin’s contemporaries Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and later comedians such as the Marx Brothers), but that Chaplin himself often borrowed liberally from the Mutuals in his later, more sophisticated films. Perhaps he had great fondness for the Mutuals simply for the same reason that generations of audiences have as well because of the sheer joy, comic inventiveness, and hilarity of this extraordinary series of films. The movie is about how love is important for people to build relationship, in the beginig of the movie, it opens with the following statement, “a picture with a smile, and perhaps a tear” love is potrayed in the relationship between the trap and the kid, actually, the production of this movie was based on the real death of chaplin’s child. He tries to show how the death of his son had a big impact on him for the love that he had for him. There is a strong philoshical bond of a father and a son that involves a lot of love in this film. Works cited Charles,Cain. Billy Rose Theatre Collection photograph file / Personalities / C / Charles Chaplin, JEPG image, New York Public Library Digital Gallery Press. 2011.Retrieved on March 25, 2011, from http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?TH-01875. Read More