A Film Canon

With Limelight, Chaplin exhibits his greatest ease with the sound medium, eschewing - or at least parodying - the grandiloquent verbosity of The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux, as well as ensuring that the inevitable residue of his silent heyday is fully thematised, in the form of a narrative structured around an aging clown brought to the recognition that his theatrical world is on the verge of collapse. Appropriately, this occurs at precisely the time - 1914 - when Chaplin's own cinematic career was on the verge of existence, fusing retrospection and projection to create a pervasive atemporality; or, rather, a poignant disjunction between Calvero's dual senses of himself as an aging man, and a timeless image. The resultant "elegant melancholy of twilight" is reiterated by Chaplin's decision to present Calvero as a series of dim, distant echoes of the Tramp, rather than a mere transplantation or inversion of him, as occurs in The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux respectively. However, it is with the set design that this twilight quality finds most poetic expression, as Chaplin structures the action around two denuded spaces - Calvero's apartment, and the stage of the theatre to which he finds himself summoned for a revival - both of which are shot in such a way as to emphasise their void, or waste; or, perhaps more accurately, to conjure up the gaze of an audience that is no longer present. This, in turn, ensures that Calvero's tendency towards speechifying is not merely parodied, but pathologised, as the poignant attempt to transform himself into his own audience, thereby subsuming all Chaplin's motivational, pedagogic tendencies into a cry of personal despair, albeit one whose intensity never mitigates the pervasive sombreness, if occasionally puncturing it with the kind of hopeless joy of someone teetering on the precipice of suicide.