Refocusing Chaplin A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses [Hardcover]

One effective method of teaching theory is to focus on a popular text and provide competing interpretations. Howe, Caron, and Click gather a cluster of such perspectives as they converge on the polysemic, iconic auteur filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. Offering a wide range of theoretical perspectivesMarxism, feminism, psychoanalysiscontributors exhume and dissect the body of Chaplin and his work, studying his screen persona and public celebrity. The approach serves both to highlight neglected aspects of the complex artist and to illumine theory. Charles Maland's introductory essay inaugurates this conversation by exploring the enduring appeal of both Chaplin and his cinematic persona Charlie. In his phenomenological study of Charlie's kinesic slapstick, Caron shows the clown as clumsy fool, 'eironic trickster,' and comic acrobat. Several essays offer particularly fascinating perspectives, especially Cynthia Miller's 'A Heart of Gold: Charlie and the Dance Hall Girls' and Click's rhetorical analysis of The Great Dictator. The critical collisions and cross-fertilizations among the contributors foster a lively, worthwhile intellectual exchange. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.Refocusing Chaplin is recommended for libraries and research centers, especially at the university level, for its intelligent, thorough examination of perhaps the most important figure in cinema's history.This collection proves to be a valuable resource on one of the leading masters of cinema.This is a collection of scholarly essays that focuses on particular phases of Chaplins career through various critical lenses, in order to highlight the understated, and often overlooked, complexity of Chaplins filmmaking, and to provide insight into both the extensive range and the limits of the critical leverage of a broad array of interpretive theories.Widely recognized in his character of the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin transcended the role of actor to become screenwriter, l