Charlie Chaplin was notoriously reluctant to reveal his filmmaking techniques, but this much is known: he started each production with an idea and little else. Usually it was a premise, a character and a location. But all signs indicate that The Circus (1928) was conceived backwards; the climactic scene was envisaged, and it was the backstory, the becoming, that needed to be invented.

It is a story of confused identities. A tramp is mistaken for a talented circus performer; his bungling antics in his escape from the police inadvertently take centre stage and subsequently bring the house down. The film mirrors Chaplin’s own life and success as an actor, and if he chose this period to dwell on questions of the nature of comedic talent and the transience of fame there is little wonder. He was staring obsolescence in the face with the rise of “talkies” — anathema to Chaplin’s style — becoming not only the standard but required. A Woman of Paris (1923), his only film in which he didn’t star, had flopped, causing Chaplin to question whether the public truly understood his credentials as a filmmaker and not simply as a performer. His mad ambition, fueled by total artistic control, produced his reply in The Circus.

So in The Circus we have Chaplin playing the tramp playing Chaplin: a hugely popular performer owing not necessarily to any innate talent, but a fortuitous sequence of events, a mismatched wardrobe, an assortment of vaudeville tricks.

The production of The Circus, Chaplin’s final silent film proper (City Lights and Modern Times both used synchronized soundtracks and sound effects), was delayed. Fire destroyed the sets, Chaplin’s own on-set laboratory had botched all the early rushes, and vital props were stolen. Three years of filming for a film that barely cracks 70 minutes was unheard of during this time. In 1916 alone Chaplin had produced eight two-reel films for Mutual, somewhere between 160-190 minutes worth of footage. And, ostensibly, The Circus bears many of the same characteristics to those shorts: the standstill chase recalls the escalator in The Floorwalker or the revolving doors in The Cure.

But this time, he had a climax to build towards, rather than an initial gag leading to zanier and zanier situations before some sort of resolution. This time he had to somehow get the tramp into the circus, and Chaplin agonized over every step from streetwalker to tightrope walker.

He also had the pathos of The Kid to work with and expand upon. He had discovered the thin line between comedy and tragedy — to use Marx’s phrase “first as tragedy, then as farce,” or to paraphrase Chaplin’s own coinage, “tragedy in close-up, comedy in long-shot.” We forget that this hapless fellow has been unjustly accused of a crime, cruelly taken advantage of by a pickpocket as his scapegoat. It’s tragic! He could be caught and sentenced to a hefty time in jail for a crime he didn’t commit! But Chaplin understood that without this backdrop, all he had were the tricks; it was just vaudeville on celluloid, and he always wanted more than that. He saw film’s capability to be greater.

Mack Sennett had nearly dropped Chaplin after signing him to Keystone in 1914, something he references with the tramp’s official audition scene. Chaplin preferred working with nonprofessional or first time actors, but not to discover any innate qualities to bring out, but to operate on them as a tabula rasa and impose his own methods upon them. So we can interpret the tramp’s accidental funniness more as a commentary on how fickle Chaplin perceives his audience to be. The romance is inconsequential, necessary only as motivation for the climactic scene.

And then, the tragedy in the close-up. The tramp’s life is at stake, and it is the funniest scene in the film. As it was in The Circus, so it was with the turmoil in his personal life: the IRS, his wife’s lawyers, his associates, climbing all over him, doing all they can to disrupt the tightrope walk that is filmmaking.

A new 35mm print of The Circus plays at Cinematheque Jan. 7-9. Winnipeg filmmaker Deco Dawson will introduce the film opening night, Jan. 7.