Much like Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, City Lights is a film that exists for its ending alone, a “comedy romance in pantomime” as the opening title indicates, which, in 1930, makes it even more of an anomaly. Chaplin thought that synchronized sound would bring an end to the active viewing experience that had elevated the cinema to an art form. There would no longer be any mystery, any guessing — just entertainment.
City Lights is ostensibly one of Chaplin’s few imprecisely titled films, not specifically referencing either the protagonist or the location. But is it? Instead of The Blind Girl, or The Flower Girl, or even The Gift, a film about the city, and that which, in all its luminescence, often remains hidden. It’s also his angriest film; his previous forays into social critique and class conflict had always held at its centre some notion of the dignity of man, of innate human goodness. In City Lights we have no such thing, even the tramp’s tremendous self-sacrifice is suspect.
If The Circus had Chaplin autobiographically (intentionally or not) chronicling his rise to fame, City Lights is about what he did with it. Again there is a confused identity, in this case as a wealthy and romantically beguiling character who manages to woo a blind flower girl through some of the silent era’s most sophisticated visual narrative techniques. Chaplin was a seducer of women at the peak of his fame who, instead of the blind girl, had a deaf image of himself — an image that could be altered if he were to open his mouth and speak.
Chaplin cast Lita Grey in The Kid; by 1924, at 16 years old, she was pregnant with his child (Nabokov is rumoured to have based Humbert and Lolita’s relationship on theirs), forcing Chaplin into both shutting down production of The Gold Rush, in which she was also the lead, and into marrying her. She was replaced by Georgia Hale, who he also had rumoured affections for. And the lead of The Circus, Merna Kennedy, was mentioned during the divorce proceedings as another amorous participant. The one actress he didn’t sleep with was Virginia Cherrill, star of City Lights. Strange, considering Chaplin’s famous line regarding the film’s famous ending: “I wasn’t acting.”
But we have to return to the title. Chaplin intended City Lights to start off with a seven-minute sequence of the tramp attempting to push a rectangular stick of wood through a steel grating on a city sidewalk (this footage can be seen in Kevin Brownlow’s excellent series Unknown Chaplin). Although it didn’t make the final cut, it indicates the simplicity Chaplin was aiming for. One can only imagine the most famous entertainer in the world, on the lot built exclusively for him, on the set built exclusively for his film, directing awe-struck extras to pass by his humble character with disdain once the camera was rolling. And one can only imagine the bipolar persona, going from awkwardly twirling his cane and smiling sheepishly to screaming tyrannically at his actors for fouling up the minutest of movements.
It’s a film about moments of recognition and how the lights of the city cloud and pervert them, how these subsequent inferences and observations lead into larger judgments, and he thinks that most of us are mostly wrong most of the time. We act rashly, dismissively, wistfully, nonsensically.
As one scene in the film portrays, it is hyperbolic that an alcoholic would get so blindly drunk on so many occasions that he would have no recollection at all of a friend so dear to him while inebriated. But, for Chaplin, it represents how fleeting so many human relationships can be, especially in the world of Hollywood. In another key scene, the tramp, borrowing his new friends’ Rolls Royce, jumps out of the vehicle and bowls over a fellow pauper for a tossed cigar. The moral logic just isn’t there.
And yet, the character of the tramp’s motives for helping the blind girl are not ends-based — they can’t be. It’s something else, something spontaneous and ethically cloudy, and it’s this something else that the final scene captures so magnificently in its ambiguity, as a clarion call at the death of the roaring twenties that such rampant selfishness and superficiality simply could not last.
In the first Sight & Sound poll of 1952, City Lights ranked second. Modern cinema simply would not exist without it. In the face of its extinction, silent cinema needed a final cumulative statement, and its master practitioner obliged.
A new 35mm print of City Lights plays at Cinematheque Jan. 14-16. Winnipeg filmmaker Deco Dawson will introduce the film opening night, Jan. 14.
