Schneider Steven - Steven jay schneider стр 22.

The Battleship Potemkin has been seen too often in excerpted form, or on the basis of its most famous scenes and sequences. It may come as something of a surprise to find how powerful it is to see the film in its entiretythat is to say, as a dramatic and touching storyrather than treating it as a priceless jewelry box from which to remove individual pieces on occasion.

Such a renewed, innocent approach to the film will bring back a real sense of being to those icons that have become familiar to us all: the baby carriage on the steps; the face of the dead sailor under the tent at the end of the pier; the worms in the meat; the leather boots; the iron guns pointed toward bodies and faces; the glasses of a blind political, military, and religious power waiting in the void. Then, before it all becomes ideological interpretation, the stone lion coming alive to roar with anger and a desire to live will become a metaphor for the film itselfand for the high and daring idea of cinema it was bearingescaping from its monumental status to be found, alive and fresh once again, by every new pair of eyes that looks upon it. J-MF

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1920s

THE GOLD RUSH (1925)

Director: Charles Chaplin

Producer: Charles Chaplin

Screenplay: Charles Chaplin

Photography: Roland Totheroh

Music: Max Terr (1942 version)

Cast: Charles Chaplin, Mack Swain, Tom Murray, Henry Bergman, Malcolm Waite, Georgia Hale

The Gold Rush affirmed Charles Chaplins belief that tragedy and comedy are never far apart. His unlikely dual inspiration came from viewing some stereoscope slides of the privations of prospectors in the Klondyke Gold Rush of 189698, and reading a book about the Donner Party Disaster of 1846, when a party of immigrants, snowbound in the Sierra Nevada, were reduced to eating their own moccasins and the corpses of their dead comrades. Out of these grim and unlikely themes, Chaplin created high comedy. The familiar Little Tramp becomes a gold prospector, joining the mass of brave optimists to face all the hazards of cold, starvation, solitude, and the occasional incursion of a grizzly bear.

The film was in every respect the most elaborate undertaking of Chaplins career. For two weeks the unit shot on location at Truckee in the snow country of the Sierra Nevada. Here Chaplin faithfully recreated the historic image of the prospectors struggling up the Chilkoot Pass. Some 600 extras, many drawn from the vagrants and derelicts of Sacramento, were brought by train to clamber up the 2,300-foot pass dug through the mountain snow. For the main shooting, the unit returned to the Hollywood studio, where a remarkably convincing miniature mountain range was created out of timber, chicken wire, burlap, plaster, salt, and flour. In addition, the studio technicians devised exquisite models to produce the special effects that Chaplin required, like the miners hut, which is blown by the tempest to teeter on the edge of a precipice, for one of cinemas most sustained sequences of comic suspense. Often it is impossible to detect the shifts in the film from model to full-size set.

The Gold Rush abounds with now-classic comedy scenes. The historic horrors of the starving 19th-century pioneers inspired the sequence in which the Little Tramp and his partner Big Jim (Mack Swain) are snowbound and ravenous. The Little Tramp cooks his boot, with all the airs of a gourmet. In the eyes of the delirious Big Jim, he is intermittently transformed into an oven-worthy chickena triumph both for the cameramen, who had to effect the elaborate trick work entirely in the camera, and for Chaplin, who magically assumes the characteristics of a bird.

The lone prospectors dream of hosting a New Years dinner for the beautiful dance-hall girl (Georgia Hale, who replaced sixteen-year-old Lita Grey when Lita became pregnant and married Chaplin) provides the opportunity for another famous Chaplin set piece: the dance of the rolls. The gag had been seen in films before, but Chaplin gives unique personality to the dancing legs created out of forks and bread rolls.

Today, The Gold Rush appears as one of Chaplins most perfectly accomplished films. Though his affections for his own work changed over time, to the end of his life he would frequently declare that this film was the one by which he would most wish to be remembered. DR

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1920s

THE BIG PARADE (1925)

Based on a story by Laurence Stallings, who wrote the Broadway smash What Price Glory?, King Vidors epic film about the American experience of World War I traces the adventures of three soldiers from different backgrounds who find themselves in France. Rich boy Jim (John Gilbert), whose fiancée had encouraged him to join up, meets a beautiful French woman (Renée Adorée) in the