Chaplin Self--Portrait
RTY YEARS IN FILMS (1YA and 1YC) was a dull title for the BBC’s interview with Charlie Chaplin. For this, as Chaplin himself remarked of Limelight, was not an autobiegraphy but a self-portrait. Instead of memories of early days, we had a Cockney’s nostalgia for London, and a great comedian talking informally about his art. There was the well-known voice, the voice of Verdoux and Calvero, quizzical, urbane, egocentric. As it talked, one could sense behind it a combination of man-in-the-street moralist and poet which is very much Chaplin and, perhaps, very much Cockney, too. It was the shrewd and humane Chaplin who said, "I have never talked down to the public," and who argued that the story was no more than a "framework" for the display of human personality. It was the clown and dreamer, bred in the tradition of musichall, who protested that sound had destroyed the poetry of the film, and that "an art form is great in virtue of its limitations." Although he qualified this by admitting technical progress, older filmgoers might agree that the film has yet to capture a certain imaginative freedom, which it possessed before 1928.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530828.2.22.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 737, 28 August 1953, Page 10
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195Chaplin Self-Portrait New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 737, 28 August 1953, Page 10
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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