SOME PEOPLE may well have felt intimidated, in reacting to Limelight, by the critical terrorism that surrounded the first appearance of the film in Paris. There was no such favorable predisposition toward Monsieur Verdoux and no one was shocked by a divided press—nor by a divided public which had not exactly lined up for it. But then Chaplin had not come to play the traveling salesman for Monsieur Verdoux. His presence on this occasion created a strangely ambiguous situation. The wave of sympathy and curiosity stirred up by the person of the author broke over the film. To have any reservations about it was to set a limit to one’s admiration for its maker. This confusion reached its height on the occasion of the historic showing at which Chaplin presented Limelight to the French film press and film makers—a paradoxical apotheosis at which the author offered his audience the dramatic spectacle of his own downfall and death. Through the power of the cinema the death of Molière became the fourth act of Le Malade imaginaire. When the lights went up, the entire audience, in tears, turned toward that same face that had just faded from the screen and sat stunned, as if at the end of a marvelous and terrible dream, to find him still alive. We could no longer distinguish between the admiration we felt for Chaplin and our sense of relief at being released, thanks to his presence, from a delicious fear.
And truly it seemed at first that these were parasitic emotions, not belonging to the work itself. Probably more than one among all those who expressed themselves in superlatives over Limelight would have been bored if they had not been influenced by public opinion. Some critics, or for that matter a lot of spectators, who were a little more sensitive than the rest, had mixed feelings about the film. They had enjoyed this or that aspect of it, but not the whole thing. They were annoyed at the moral pressure, at the blackmail asking for total admiration, that was seemingly being practiced on them. Basically, they were right. Nonetheless, I would like to defend the remarkable atmosphere of snobbism which surrounded the premiere of Limelight.
Undoubtedly Chaplin came to Europe to insure the proper launching of his film. Monsieur Verdoux, boycotted in the United States and coolly received in Europe, had been a commercial failure. Although Limelight had been made in a much shorter time—actually just a few weeks—it is reasonable to think that its success was of vital concern to its author-producer. He was right in thinking that the best possible publicity would be for him to be present. What happened seems to have borne him out. Limelight had an exceptional run but it was not a resounding success. The distributor had trouble fulfilling the minimum attendence of half a million admissions required by his contract—an enormous figure but one that those handling the exhibition felt would be easily reached. If it had not been for the extraordinary publicity the press gave Chaplin’s visit and the sympathetic buildup this created for the film, the odds are strong that it would have been a resounding flop, even allowing for its importance.
There would have been nothing astonishing about this. It was easy at the outset to see how much in Limelight would disturb people who had gone in the anticipation of seeing “a Charlie Chaplin film”—which retained, even more than Monsieur Verdoux, some element of comedy. Nor was the melodramatic aspect of the story calculated to please people, because it was based on illusion. Limelight is a pseudo melodrama. Where melodrama is primarily defined by the absence of ambiguity in the characters, here Calvero is ambiguity itself; and whereas, from a dramatic point of view, melodrama requires that one should be able to forsee the outcome of the plot, Limelight is precisely a film in which what happens is never exactly what one might expect—its scenario is brim full of inventiveness as any ever written.
But the general public likes nothing better than to believe in a melodrama that is frankly one—parodies prove this. Only a minimum of camouflage is required so that the little housemaid in the balcony can feel that it is a proof of her intelligence when she cries. The public reacts all the more unfavorably to intelligent films that disguise themselves as melodrama—as in Le Ciel est à vous by Jean Grémillon. No film could predispose its audience more unfavorably than Limelight, which has all the surface appearance of a great tearjerking melodrama but which constantly plays havoc with the viewer’s emotions. There is not the slightest trace here of irony or parody which could serve as an intellectual guidepost, a recognizable manner. Chaplin is not trying to deviate from the conventions of melodrama as Cocteau did in Les Parents terribles—on the contrary, no one has taken himself more seriously. It is simply that situations which start out as conventional are exploited with complete freedom, and without any concern for their traditional meaning. In short, there is nothing in Limelight which on the face of it could guarantee it wide public acceptance unless through a misunderstanding. Under these conditions, there nothing reprehensible in the concern of its author to make psychological preparations for its launching; besides, for once the film journalists might justifiably act as accomplices in this.
I will go even further. In my opinion a critical argument of much greater importance can be added to this external justification, itself moral rather than aesthetic. Undoubtedly everyone has the right to have reservations about masterpieces—to criticize Racine for Théramène’s speech, Molière for his dénouements, Corneille for his awkard handling of the rules. Nor do I suggest there is anything false or barren about such criticism. But given a level of artistic creativity, and certainly when faced with evidence of genius, a contrary attitude is necessarily more rewarding. Instead of thinking of removing so-called faults from a work it is wiser, rather, to be favorably predisposed to them, and to treat them as qualities, whose secret we have not so far been able to fathom. This is, I agree, an absurd critical attitude if one has doubts about the object of one’s criticism; it requires a gamble. One has to “believe” in Limelight to become its complete advocate in this way—but there is no lack of reasons for believing in it. The fact that they are not equally evident to everybody simply proves, as Nicole Vedrès says in Le Cahiers du Cinéma, that if everyone loved it, it had arrived too late.
However, perhaps I am exaggerating. This defensive criticism will undoubtedly not be valid for every masterpiece, even if one grants that the author is a genius. But it surely does apply to that type of work to which Limelight belongs and which I would classify as “meditated” rather than “made” or “thought out.” I am speaking of those works which are their own body of reference and whose interior structure might be compared to the stratification of crystals about a central point. Their structure cannot be completely grasped except in relation to this focal point. If one is prepared to see them from the inside, their apparent disorder, their very incoherences, are transformed into a perfect and necessary order. Where it is a question of this kind of artistic creation, it is never the artist who errs but the critic who is slow to grasp the need for a “flaw.”
I was confirmed in this view precisely on the evening at the Comédie Française when the gods brought together Don Juan and Chaplin. How often has one read or heard that Molière’s tragicomedy is without doubt his richest work but also his least “well-made”? He wrote it quickly, and its seeming disorder—its chopped-up quality, the breaks in its tone—would all be a natural consequence. To be sure, we are always ready to find a certain charm in these defects, even to forgive them, but never to doubt they are defects. However, it was to the great credit of Jean Meyer’s production that it was played at some speed and without an intermission, so that we saw for the first time the perfection of its dramatic structure. It is like some movements in nature that the eye is unable to connect but that the speeded-up camera can reveal to be of a wondrous harmony. Beside Don Juan, Les Fourberies de Scapin seems slow and disorganized.
If I may dare to compare them, the resemblances between Molière’s masterpiece and Limelight go very deep. Like Don Juan, Limelight is a work at once deeply pondered and quickly written, revealing beyond doubt Chaplin’s most secret heart, borne inside him over a long period, perhaps even unaware, but brought forth in an interval of time that allowed for few changes or second thoughts—while ordinarily Chaplin spent months or even a year on his films. The speed with which it was made, or rather the rapid development of this last and visible stage, instead of producing blemishes and weakness gives the work the impeccable harmony proper to something arising directly from the unconscious. I am not arguing here in favor of romantic inspiration, rather on the contrary for a psychology of creation calling at one and the same time for genius, reflection, and a fine spontaneity in execution. It is precisely these conditions that I find fulfilled in Limelight.
That is why I find that a predisposition to admiration for the film is the most prudent critical approach, more rewarding and more certain than one that ifs and buts. Almost everybody praises the second half, but many deplore the longueurs and the talkiness of the first half. However, if one were truly responsive to the last 24 minutes of the film, in retrospect one could not imagine a different opening. It becomes apparent that even the boredom one might experience enters mysteriously into the harmony of the over-all work. In any case, what do we mean here by the word boredom? I have seen Limelight three times and I admit I was bored three times, not always in the same places. Also, I never wished for any shortening of this period of boredom. It was rather a relaxing of attention that left my mind half free to wander—a daydreaming about the images. There were also many occasions on which the feeling of length left me during the screening. The film, objectively speaking a long one (two hours and twenty minutes), and slow, caused a lot of people, myself included, to lose their sense of time. I see that this phenomenon and the special nature of my periodical boredom have a common cause, namely that the structure of Limelight is really more musical than dramatic. I find this confirmed by the English pressbook of the film, three quarters of which is devoted to the music of Limelight, to the importance that Chaplin attached to it, and to strange details such as that before he rehearsed a scene, Chaplin would have the score played so as to steep himself in its musical content. In which case time in Limelight would be essentially not that of the drama but the more imaginary duration of music, a time that is more demanding on the mind but also leaves it free of the images that nourish it, a time that can be embroidered.
Certainly the principal obstacle to a satisfactory criticism of Limelight is the work’s fundamental ambiguity. Undoubtedly there is not a single essential ingredient of the scenario of this dubious melodrama, which on analysis is not revealed to be fundamentally ambiguous. Let us look for example at the character of Calvero. Since we tend to think of him in the likeness of Charlie, we do not doubt that we are here dealing with a brilliant clown whose reputation in his great days was not overrated. But nothing could be less certain. Chaplin’s real theme is not the decline of the clown through old age and the fickleness of the public, but something more subtle—the value of the artist and the evaluation of his public. Nothing in the film allows us to attribute to Calvero more than a talent for a solid traditional craft. None of his numbers is original—not even the one of the shrinking legs: Grock did it, doubtless following many others. Besides he repeats it twice, leaving us to conclude that his repertoire is not very varied. Are his routines even funny? We are told in the film that they were funny, but not that they are so objectively, independent of public approval. And that is the real point. The value of Calvero, his talent and his genius, are not an objective reality affected by varying fortunes, but a fact relative to success itself. As a clown Calvero exists only “for the others.” He knows himself only as reflected in the public mirror. Chaplin is not asserting that, inversely, there have never been great artists who were misunderstood and that success or failure are the only true realities of the theater; he is asserting only that the artist is incomplete without his public, that the public does not grant or withhold its approval like an object added to something or subtracted from it, but that this approval consitutes the theatrical personality. We shall never know whether Calvero had genius, and he is less likely to know than we are. What does his glorification by friends who remember him prove? Does not a collective emotion come in here—like the one the audience felt over Limelight because Chaplin came to the opening? What is the value of a favorable prejudice such as this? If the audience felt sympathetic, might this not have been as a result of the drinks that were served? Such self-interrogation, lying deep in the heart of the clown as an actor, is at once repudiated and asked for by Calvero. As one grows old, he says, one aspires to be dignified. The actor is less than a man, because he needs other people before he can fulfill himself, because at every appearance he throws himself on their mercy. The wisdom of an aging Calvero is to attain to a serenity beyond success and failure but without denying his art. He knows and affirms that life, just life itself, is the supreme good, but he who is called to be an artist may never renounce his vocation. “I do not love the theater,” says Calvero, “neither can I stand the sight of the blood that circulates in my veins.”
The theme of theater and of life grasped in all its ambiguity is combined with the Faustian theme of old age. Drink has ruined Calvero but it is old age that prevents him from setting foot, however tentatively, upon the boards again. Just as Limelight is not exactly the story of the downfall of a clown, the relation between Calvero and Theresa cannot be reduced to a renunciation of youth by old age. To begin with it is not certain that Theresa does not genuinely love Calvero. It is rather he that persuades her that her feeling for him is unlikely. Of the two it is he who has the freer heart, he who suffers less from their separation; old age is in no sense a weakness, it embodies more strength, more faith in life than does Theresa’s youth. Calvero is the anti-Faust, a man who knows how to grow old and renounce Marguerite, who had been captivated by his advanced age. And yet Limelight is the most moving of the tragedies of old age, and there can be no questioning this, remembering those wonderful shots in which all the weariness of the world finds its way into this tired mask: the dressing-room scene of the taking off of the make-up, or of the old clown pacing restlessly in the wings during the ballet.
If we compare Calvero now with Chaplin himself as the film compels us to do, the ambiguities of the work are raised to further heights. For, after all, Calvero is at once Chaplin and his opposite. First, and irrefutably, by the identity of the faces. It is not by chance that Chaplin here for the first time is clean-shaven and tells us the story of an aging clown. But, secondly, the truth about Chaplin is the opposite of Calvero’s failure: in his art as in his life, Chaplin is a Calvero whose fabulous fame has never known eclipse and who at sixty married a girl of eighteen like Theresa, by whom he has five lovely children. All the same, the Socratic wisdom of Calvero in the midst of his misfortunes may not differ so greatly from that of Mr. Chaplin, showered with success and love. It is difficult not to see Calvero as the shadow thrown by Chaplin—what the most prestigious author of all times might have been if success had abandoned him (as it abandoned Keaton for example) and if Oona, less sure of herself, had believed, like Theresa, that her love was only a profound pity. But at the same time one must admit that in his hour of happiness Chaplin has known how to fashion the wisdom that would have allowed him to put up with Calvero’s lot—otherwise, where would Calvero have found it? Still, one must surmise that the possibility makes Chaplin shudder and haunts his nights—else why would he have made Limelight?
For Limelight can be likened to an exorcising of its author’s fate. Calvero is at once Chaplin’s fear and his victory over that fear. A double victory, first because the phantom of failure is therein objectivized, incarnated by the person it could haunt, and furthermore because the fallen artist of the film has something better than the strength to recapture his serenity; he is able to justify himself in the success of a young being who will carry his venture forward. When the camera pulls away from Calvero lying dead in the wings and goes to the ballerina onstage, dancing despite her grief, its movement seems to follow transmigration of souls: the theater and life go on.
Here we come to the basic originality of Limelight: its “confessional” side, or the “portrait of the author” which shocks some people. Still, such things have long been accepted in literature. I am not talking only about literary “journals” whose explicit purpose this is, but about many novels which are more or less transpositions of the author’s life story. Besides, the most impersonal works are not always the least immodest. LoDuca recalls in Cahiers du Cinéma, apropos of Limelight, the phrase borrowed by Vittorini for the preface to Conversazione in Sicilia: “Every work is an autobiography even if the subject is Genghis Kahn, or the New Orleans cemetery.” Flaubert says, “Madame Bovary is me.” The expression is only astonishing or shocking when it is a question of the cinema, and this can be explained in two ways:
First, its relative novelty, even though the works of von Stroheim for example, or in France of Jean Vigo, are also an endless moral confession. True, the relation is not so explicit, but the more personal nature of Chaplin’s confidences constitute a progression, a proof of the maturity of his art. Charlie was a moral silhouette, a marvelous aggregrate of symbols; his existence, totally metaphysical, was that of the myth. Monsieur Verdoux presupposes already a dialectic relation between the myth and its author—an awareness of Charlie outside the character. Beyond that it only remained for Chaplin to throw away his mask and speak to us face to face, his countenance laid bare. Everyone agrees that when one sees Limelight it is impossible to separate what we know of “Charlie,” from what we know of Chaplin—but this knowledge does not differ essentially from the tendency of all contemporary criticism of great works, which serves to feed our admiration by way of an ever-deepening knowledge of the lives of their authors. This knowledge of the author’s life is not an end in itself, but it allows us to discover new relations which clarify and enrich our understanding of the works. In Chaplin’s case the process is simply reversed. The prodigious popularity of its author and of his earlier works put the contemporary spectator in a privileged position that the next generation will not be able to enjoy. Already many young people between fifteen and twenty lack our points of reference and are unable to look back and see Calvero in the light of the Chaplin myth. Is this to say that Limelight is valueless except as it relates to Charlie and to Chaplin and that its significance will disappear with time? Certainly not—no more than that works of an autobiographical character demand a deep knowledge of literary history. You do not need a textbook to read Villon’s Ballade des Pendus or Rousseau’s Confessions. Many novels and plays à clef fade into oblivion because they roused interest solely by reason of indiscretion or curiosity, and this is what distinguishes them from works of real importance in which the author has dealt with his own misery in the perspective of our human condition. If a hundred years from now we came across Limelight and no record remained either of Chaplin or his works, that face of his, the deep melancholy of those eyes, would still be enough to tell us that from beyond the grave a man is talking to us about himself, and that he is calling us to witness his life because it too is life, our life. The screen has never before given so clear an example of transposed autobiography, principally because genuine authors are rare in the cinema; the vast majority of directors, even the best of them, are far from possessing the creative freedom enjoyed by the writer. Even when he writes his own screenplay, the film maker remains primarily a director, that is to say a master craftsman who organizes objective elements. Such working conditions are sufficient to warrant artistic creation and the development of style but they lack that total identification, that biological cohesion often found in other arts—between Van Gogh and his painting, between Kafka and his novels. Claude Mauriac has rightly pointed out that Chaplin makes the cinema serve him while others make themselves its servant. In other words, he is the artist in the fullest sense of the term, one who meets art on an equal footing. If he expresses himself by way of cinema, it is not so much because his talents and gifts are more readily adapted to it than for example to literature, but because the cinema can express what he has to say more effectively. The great artists of the late sixteenth century were primarily painters and architects because painting and architecture were the arts of their time. But this was only the best way of being an artist, not of serving a particular art. However, it was thanks to this absence of humility—not toward art but toward the particular forms in which it is categorized today—that the art par excellence of the Renaissance, painting, made such great progress. Leonardo was no more a painter than Michelangelo was a sculptor; they were just artists. That Chaplin, who composes music, has his moments of philosophizing, and even draws a little, is a mediocre musician, a second-rate philosopher, and a Sunday painter, is unimportant. What is crucial is not Chaplin’s objective freedom to choose the cinema but the subjective freedom of his relations with the twentieth-century art par excellence, the film. Chaplin is perhaps the only example to date of a creative person who has totally subordinated the cinema to what he had to say, without worrying about conforming to the specifics of its techniques.
Yet this is what some reproach him for—those who have confidence in literature because it passes through the confessional box of language, but who find public confession lacking in modesty. A theatrical art, an hyperbole of incarnation because of the overwhelming physical presence of the image, the cinema is actually the most immodest of the arts. Therefore, by the same token, it calls for the maximum of modesty: for mask and disguise, in style, in subject matter, in make-up. Chaplin in Limelight half removes the first two, the third he renounces entirely. Ecce homo.
Doubtless nothing short of his genius could have succeeded in such an audacious undertaking, drawing its meaning from the very popularity of the Chaplin myth, and therefore comprehending in its premises the maximum risk of pride and immodesty. In France we have a caricature of this in Sacha Guitry. He had to be sure of public affection to go on about himself, to tens of millions of people, with such seriousness and such conviction: sure of himself too to remove the mask that had made him so loved. But the most admirable thing of all is not that—it is that Limelight should be, because of its personal references, so searing, so pure; it is that the trancendence of its message, far from being weighted down by its incarnation, should on the contrary derive from this its most spiritual strength. The greatness of Limelight is one with the greatness of the cinema itself—it is the most dazzling display of its very essence, abstraction by way of incarnation. Undoubtedly only the unique position of Chaplin, the universality and vitality of his myth (we must not forget that he is still shared today by the Communists and the Western world) allow us to take the dialectic measure of the cinema. Chaplin-Calvero, the twentieth-century Socrates, drinks the hemlock in public. But his wisely chosen death cannot be conveyed in words. It is first and foremost in the public exhibition he makes of it, daringly based on the flesh and blood ambiguity of the cinematographic image: see and understand!
It is ridiculous to talk of immodesty here; on the contrary, we should marvel that thanks to the cinema and to Chaplin’s genius, the most profound and simple truth may take on a countenance—no longer even that of the actor (and what an actor!) but of a man whom each of us loves and knows, a countenance that speaks to him personally, face to face, in the secret places of the heart, in the darkness.
Chaplin is the only film director whose work stretches over forty years of the history of cinema. The genre in which he first appeared and was triumphant, the silent comedy, was already in its decline before the arrival of sound. Sound finished off Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton, who could not truly survive the genre in which they had shown genius. Von Stroheim’s life as a director lasted no more than five years. The average duration of film genius is somewhere between five and fifteen years. Those who hold on longer owe it to intelligence and talent rather than to genius. Only Chaplin has been capable, I will not say of adapting himself to the evolution of the film, but of continuing to be the cinema. Since Modern Times, the last of his films to come directly out of the primitive genre of Mack Sennett and the last of his virtually silent films, Chaplin has never stopped moving forward into the unknown, rediscovering the cinema in relation to himself. Alongside Limelight, all other films, even those we most admire, seem cut and dried and conventional. Although they may express their author’s views, although they may have a personal style, they are only original in part; they conform to some film usages, they are defined by current conventions, even when they contravene them. Limelight is like no other film, above all like no other Chaplin film.
It would be an understatement to say that this man of sixty-four is still in the vanguard of the cinema. At one stroke, he has forged ahead of everyone else; more than ever, he remains an example and a symbol of creative freedom in the least free of the arts.