Anyone who followed me on Twitter in 2021 probably noticed more posts about Mickey Mouse cartoons than a normal adult should make.
I’m not sure I ever fully explained what I was doing. On January 1 of that year, I watched the first Mickey short, Steamboat Willy. On December 31 I watched the most recent, Get a Horse! The goal was to watch every single Disney short in between. All 487.
It drove me mad.
Bad news: I’m gonna do it again. I’ve been interested in early 20th century history lately. It was a tumultuous period in world history. Centuries-old empires collapsed. Technology revolutionized the ways we communicate, entertain, and kill. While monarchies fell and republics and fascist states took their place, there was still one king everyone bowed to.
I’ve always adored Charlie Chaplin. He is undoubtedly among the greatest geniuses in the history of the medium and one of the only silent era artists so exceptional that he maintained full creative control well into the studio era, perhaps the only way such a notorious perfectionist could operate. His films have also held up remarkably well; he never (almost never? I’ll find out.) resorted to racial caricatures, and in fact the degree of sympathy he afforded people of all walks would be used against him by the government later on. It makes me feel guilty for, it’s embarrassing to admit, not having seen all that much of his oeuvre. I mean, I’ve seen most of his features — City Lights, for my money, remains the funniest movie ever made — and I’ve seen the bulk of the important shorts while studying film history in college. While I have a general idea of the timeframe and arc of his career, the specifics are an amorphous blob of trivia.
Last year I read his autobiography, an entertaining and impressively detailed memoir that nevertheless carried a whiff of historical revisionism. While referencing his filmography, I was surprised to learn that, similarly to Disney’s catalog, nearly all of Chaplin’s 82 films still survive. Only one currently remains lost. They’re out there. If I wanted I could just… watch them.
So I will.
I’m going to start the year by watching his first Keystone release, Making a Living. Around the end of the year I will watch his final film, A Countess from Hong Kong. In between, the other 80, from immigration to exile. That’s a pace of one every 4 or 5 days, far more manageable than the Disney adventure, which I’ve finally stopped having nightmares about, so now’s the time.
And after each viewing I’ll be tracking my progress here. A post for each film. I have no idea how long or in-depth they will be, or even what I’ll write about. I’m aware this isn’t a particularly novel idea. There are plenty of books and blogs out there dissecting and reassembling these films frame by frame. This is a personal project. The idea is to write anything. It will be more of a journal than anything else.
The goals of this project are:
- See the arcs of Chaplin’s creative output. His autobiographically seemingly pointedly brushes over large swaths of the productions with barely an acknowledgement.
- Write. I want to get better at writing, and I’m hoping forcing myself to churn out words regularly will exorcise me of some bad habits.
- Look, we all know how this will end. By June I’m going to hate myself for committing to this, and by October I’ll have fallen into silent, monochrome madness. Again. I think that will be a spectacle for the onlookers at least.
Part of me hopes you will join me. The rest hopes you will avert your eyes.
Next:
Making a Living