I recently viewed a film which I have seen many times before. Yet viewing it again was akin to the feelings one experiences when visiting an old friend or tasting luscious wine stored in fine oak barrels. After having undergone a particularly harsh and gloomy period of my life where everything seemed bleak and hopeless, I needed an urgent boost of optimism and comfort, which came to me in the form of this old motion picture. It is a silent, black and white little movie made in 1931, the worst year in the great economic crisis that eerily parallels our current economic situation. The film was made by one of the greatest artists that the world has ever had the luck and opportunity to know and cherish. He was a master of facial expression, where every minutiae of human emotions was broadly painted on the face that would forever be etched into public consciousness. That man was Charlie Chaplin, and his movie was City Lights.
City Lights is of special meaning to me because I first fell in love with it when I was 14 years old. At that time I was going through a period of what can be called characteristic of the common North American youth. Peer pressure and the volatile nature of man at the early stages of puberty got hold of me. Delinquency in school and rebellion against parental authority at home trumped any advice on the part of my parents to study well and look out for the future. I endured many confrontations with my high school authorities and eventually got expelled and sent to a correctional campus where I had a second chance to behave like a decent human being. At that time, I often felt like I lived a life of pretentiousness and superficiality. I was just pretending to be someone that I was not. I was miserable at that time. My grades were falling down a slippery slope yet I did not care. I desperately needed to find something that could reconcile me with my own self. I needed a retreat, to find passion in something that could provide me with means of escape from the dullness and superficiality of my life at that time. I ended up finding those means through watching classic movies, and City Lights was one that made an everlasting impression on my heart and soul.
Many people find it strange that I would take the time to watch an old, grainy, sometimes even silent grandpa movie from yesteryear with little special effects and outrageous acting. I respectfully disagree with that viewpoint. Just like classic literature, many old movies focused on the intimate stories of characters and their relationships with one another. Such attributes are often lacking in our MTV age of cheesy, effects-laden, big budget films that provided little more than gratuitous sensations for the eyes. Classic films had the taste of ancient wine. They offered something more than the simple pleasure of an eye popping digital effect. The Romanticism of many of these classic films were an effective cure of misery. No wonder why so many masterpieces were made in the dreadful years of the Great Depression and later on, admist the horrors of World War II and the Post-War reconstruction period.
I had heard, as any human being who've lived on earth in the last 100 years have, of Charlie Chaplin ever since my early youth. I remember my parents, as a reward after surviving my first day of school in Canada all the way back in grade 1, renting a videotape of some early Chaplin shorts. Yet I never learned to appreciate Chaplin until those early formative years of early adolescence. I indulged in many of the old classic movies of that era: the romanticism and nobleness of Casablanca along with the great tragedy of Citizen Kane. I decided to watch Chaplin mainly because I wanted a good, belly-hurting laugh. I didn't expect much of Chaplin at the beginning. I thought: "How can any story of depth emerge from a silent movie"? I conceived of the silent movie as nothing other than pure slapstick. Outrageous and dated humor where people get hurt and the comedic effect was supposed to arise from the ways these people got hurt. Such an impression was left on me because the only silent films I've seen then were those Chaplin shorts I viewed after my first day in grade 1. And truth be told, those early films contained little story and all slapstick. Yet even geniuses need time to grow and sharpen their talents. Chaplin was no different. By the time he made The Kid and the Gold Rush, he fully displayed his artistic prowess and genius on screen. The first feature length film I saw of Chaplin was the deeply sentimental yet hilarious The Gold Rush. I later watched the uproariously funny Modern Times which contained enough sardonic wit and satire of American capitalism that would provide Michael Moore with enough inspiration to make another documentary. These two works of art solidified my conception of Chaplin as a talented comedian with a gift for combining pathos and hilarity in novel ways. City Lights, though, pushed the envelope even further.
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