The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion has put out a new edi­tion of Char­lie Chap­lin’s City Lights, and on the disc they’ve includ­ed the rare footage above of Chap­lin direct­ing that most famous of his pic­tures. We see him giv­ing instruc­tions to young Vir­ginia Cher­rill, who appeared in the film as a blind flower girl for whom Chap­lin’s Tramp falls head over heels. Chap­lin’s char­ac­ter approved of Cher­rill much more hearti­ly than Chap­lin him­self did. The direc­tor con­sid­ered the actress an “ama­teur” and remem­bered her often “doing some­thing which wasn’t right. Lines. A line. A con­tour hurts me if it’s not right.” That remark, orig­i­nal­ly made in an inter­view con­duct­ed in 1968, 37 years after City Lights, comes quot­ed in David Robinson’s new book, Chap­lin: His Life and His Art. The New York­er’s Richard Brody also uses it in his post on City Lights and Chap­lin’s direc­tion of Cher­rill, of whom he, for one sequence, demand­ed as many as 342 takes.

Does that send Chap­lin straight to the canon of per­fec­tion­ist film­mak­ers? You may say yes, but Brody, whose pow­ers of cin­e­mat­ic obser­va­tion at times make me want to scrap every­thing and ded­i­cate my life to film crit­i­cism, has a more inter­est­ing response. “It’s tempt­ing to ascribe Chaplin’s obses­sion­al direc­tion,” he argues, “but I think that the episode reveals an even more pow­er­ful strain of Chaplin’s art, a sort of imper­fec­tion­ism.

Chap­lin didn’t have a men­tal tem­plate that he want­ed Cher­rill to match; he approach­es the scene not quite know­ing what he want­ed.” Chap­lin, so it seems, sim­ply worked this way, seek­ing per­fec­tion, but an unusu­al “per­fec­tion of results, not of con­for­mi­ty to a pre­con­ceived schema. He sought what pro­voked, in him, the per­fect emo­tion, the per­fect aes­thet­ic response—but he wouldn’t know it until he saw it. He start­ed to shoot in the con­fi­dence that the thing—whatever it was—would hap­pen.” And now you can watch 65 of the fruits of Chap­lin’s quest for this imper­fec­tion­is­tic per­fec­tion for free on our very own col­lec­tion of Chap­lin films on the web.

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three Great Films Star­ring Char­lie Chap­lin, the True Icon of Silent Com­e­dy

The Pow­er of Silent Movies, with The Artist Direc­tor Michel Haz­anavi­cius

Hol­ly­wood, Epic Doc­u­men­tary Chron­i­cles the Ear­ly His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma

535 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

Among his many accom­plish­ments at the inter­sec­tion of show­man­ship and pure cin­e­ma, Alfred Hitch­cock man­aged, in 1948, to make a fea­ture film with­out any cuts — or rather, more impres­sive­ly, he made a fea­ture film peo­ple believed had no cuts. Though cinephiles will know sev­er­al fine exam­ples of no-cut or few-cut movies from recent years (I’ve enjoyed Mike Fig­gis’ four-screen Time Code since it came out in the nineties, and I often rec­om­mend Il-gon Song’s more recent but rar­er one-cut Magi­cians), they’ll also know that, due to phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions in the film tech­nol­o­gy of Hitch­cock­’s day, nobody — not even Hitch­cock — could pos­si­bly have made a film longer than ten min­utes out of a sin­gle, unbro­ken shot.

So how did Rope, one of Hitch­cock­’s less­er-cel­e­brat­ed but still thor­ough­ly fas­ci­nat­ing projects, con­vinc­ing­ly fake its own form? Edi­tor Vashi Nedo­man­sky shows us in the three-minute video above. “On fur­ther exam­i­na­tion,” Nedo­man­sky writes on his blog, “Hitchcock’s gem actu­al­ly con­tains ten edits. Five of them are hid­den as the cam­era lens is filled by fore­ground objects. The oth­er five edits are reg­u­lar hard cuts that not many peo­ple either real­ize or acknowl­edge.”

Nofilm­school offers a post that goes into greater depth on Rope and edit­ing: “Even though there is edit­ing, it’s often described as a film that plays out in real time. Why? Prob­a­bly because it’s such an immer­sive piece of film­mak­ing; the hid­den edits and use of hand­held cam­eras fol­low and track its char­ac­ters, allow­ing audi­ences to expe­ri­ence and react to each sit­u­a­tion at the same moment the actors do — right in the thick of the action.” You can find a more the­o­ret­i­cal take from Peter J. Del­lo­lio at Flick­head, who describes Rope as a pic­ture explor­ing “some of the fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the cin­e­mat­ic abstrac­tion of time and space by using the mobile cam­era as an agent that gives plas­tic real­i­ty to sub­jec­tive mate­r­i­al” whose “syn­the­sis of real time and filmic space forces the view­er to absorb nar­ra­tive infor­ma­tion on mul­ti­ple, often dis­taste­ful­ly iron­ic lev­els.” For a dif­fer­ent fram­ing, pre­sen­ta­tion, and analy­sis of Rope’s cuts, see also the short video essay “Skip­ping Rope.” Hitch­cock may not have had the abil­i­ty to real­ly make the movie in one shot, but he cer­tain­ly had the abil­i­ty to keep us all tak­ing about it these 65 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

21 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Hitchcock’s Sev­en-Minute Edit­ing Mas­ter Class

Who Cre­at­ed the Famous Show­er Scene in Psy­cho? Alfred Hitch­cock or the Leg­endary Design­er Saul Bass?

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

There’s noth­ing real­ly wrong with Back to the Future. Crit­ics loved Robert Zemeck­is’ sci-fi com­e­dy when it first came out in 1985. (Roger Ebert likened it to a great Frank Capra film.) And it still delights old and new view­ers almost 30 years lat­er. But, like every film, Back to the Future has its minor flaws. The web site/YouTube chan­nel Cin­e­ma Sins is “ded­i­cat­ed to point­ing out all the sins [they] can find in movies, some big and some small. Some … down­right micro­scop­ic.” And that’s what you get here. A break­down of every lit­tle prob­lem and incon­sis­ten­cy in Zemeck­is’ film. For­tu­nate­ly, the folks behind Cin­e­ma Sins don’t take them­selves too seri­ous­ly. Nor do they con­sid­er them­selves beyond reproach. Heck, this sum­mer they pro­duced Every­thing Wrong With Cin­e­ma Sins In 3 Min­utes Or Less. You can watch it here.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and make us part of your dai­ly social media diet.