Charlot #2: Kid Auto Races at Venice

He is elbowing his way into immortality. … And he is doing it by calling attention to the camera as camera. He would do this throughout his career, using the instrument as a means of establishing a direct and openly acknowledged relationship between himself and his audience. In fact he is, with this film, establishing himself as one among the audience, one among those who are astonished by this new mechanical marvel … He looked at the camera and went through it, joining the rest of us.

Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns

It’s Venice, California, obviously. Not Venice, Italy. That would be silly. I definitely didn’t go my whole life until now thinking the Tramp debuted at an Italian car race.

There he is! Our beloved Tramp appears nearly fully-formed in his first film appearance. While the character will evolve over the next couple decades, some of his mannerisms are already in the repertoire. He twirls his cane and kicks a cigarette butt and falls on his own exactly as he will for decades to come. Technically this is the second film featuring the character to be shot, as Mabel’s Strange Predicament was produced a couple days earlier, but theatergoers won’t see that one for another… two days. The turnaround on these early comedies was intense.

It’s some genius costuming, really. Inspired by similar hard up characters in the English music halls, the Tramp is built out of contrasts, a tight coat exaggerating the baggy pants and ill-fitting shoes. Combined with the bowler cap, the ensemble conveys everything you need to know about the character: he is trying to present as middle-class and failing spectacularly. The mustache in particular is essential to the costume’s success. It does a great job of disguising Chaplin’s young age without necessarily aging the character up.

The immediately iconic image of the Tramp almost feels contrasted against the total lack of reaction to him by the rest of the crowd. Nobody knows they are standing mere yards away from a man who’s about to become one of the most famous people to ever live. For all they know this is an actual vagabond interrupting an actual documentary.

If you choose to watch this film, I hope you find the same historical intrigue in this debut as I do, because that’s about all there is to sustain this one-note one-reeler. Charlie, while attending what appears to be a soap box derby event, notices a camera filming the action and determines to get himself in as many frames as possible, to the chagrin of the director and cameraman. Chaplin’s job is to stretch this single gag across the full six minute runtime. I’d say he succeeds, but only barely.

I kept waiting for a particular gag that never materialized: surely at some point Charlie will be kicked out of the frame in the foreground and then reemerge as a distraction in the background. It happens at mid-distance once, but never to the extreme that felt so inevitable to me. Maybe that’s a modern sensibility.

After six minutes of mostly identical setups and actions (barring one shot where a second camera is placed opposite the first, giving us a spectator’s point of view), the film ends on an incongruous close-up of Charlie making faces at his nemesis the camera. In the context of this marathon, the shot feels like a meaningful symbol of what’s to come. In isolation, it’s a childish antic that places the character firmly in the realm of cartoon. But endearingly so.

This is a film that would be fairly anonymous if it weren’t accidentally historic. I have a hunch the next one, a collaboration with another silent comedy icon, will have endured the last century much more successfully.

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