On June 9th, the first day of the exhibition “Charlie Chaplin: A Vision” opening to the public, Eugene Chaplin (son of Charlie Chaplin), Tatyana Franck (director of the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne), Adrien Gardère (museographer and scenographer), Tang Weijie (associate professor in Tongji University and film scholar) and Justine Alexandria (Acting CEO of Yuz Museum) got together. After the first session of four speeches, all the guests had a panel discussion to present different facets of Charlie Chaplin, and something more, over the exhibition. Zeng Yan, deputy editor-in-chief of Life Week hosted the panel.

The Different Facets of Charlie Chaplin

Panel Discussion

Zeng Yan: To every guest of honor, as a warm-up topic, what is your favorite Chaplin’s film?

Eugene Chaplin: To tell you the truth, I don’t really have one because I like all of his movies, of course. The most special, I’d say it is City Lights. Because the music is playful, the story is beautiful, it is a really well film. But really, to me, it all depends on my mood, of course the City Lights is my favorite one, but I like The Circus and earlier films like Pay Day, so for me it is difficult to choose one.

Tatyana Franck: I agree with what Eugene said, what I like depends on my mood, what I like depends on which group you are. Each piece of Charlie Chaplin can touch your mood. You always feel different when you watch Charlie Chaplin. For me, when I was young, my mother was someone who really wanted me to watch classic movies, and Charlie Chaplin was the classic filmmaker. Therefore I watched all of his movies, really all of them as a child. I think The Kid for me had huge impact on my childhood, and maybe Modern Times. Especially when I hear Charlie Chaplin singing, at the end of the movie, singing his imaginary language, the universal language that we couldn’t understand, because he was inventing a language.

Adrien Gardère: Paradoxically, I find the presence of the language in Chaplin absolutely incredible, and it is quite significant because we do not imagine what the introduction of sound represented to the world of silent movies. The fact that Charlie Chaplin introduced sound through inventing languages, makes me think that is quite unique. For that reason, even though there is some incredible semi-Italian, Neapolitan kind of invented song in the end, I think the dictatorship and the language that Charlie Chaplin invented in The Great Dictator and the Hynkel language, is for me absolutely incredible. So for that reason I think I like The Great Dictator very much, because the language and the introduction of sounds suddenly goes along with the invention of language itself. I like to invent languages, and that’s why I feel very much like Chaplin in this movie.

Charles Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel, The Great Dictator (United Artists),1939-1940 © Roy Export SAS / courtesy Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, scan courtesy Cineteca di Bologna

Tang Weijie: Frankly speaking, to choose one favorite film of Charlie Chaplin’s, who won over audiences both in silent film and sound film, is crucial for him. When I was in university, I preferred Chaplin’s films that just had begun to have sound, such as Monsieur Verdoux. However, in recent years, I prefer his early ones, purely his actions, which can bring people pure happiness. Of course, there is political significance behind the happiness, and that’s great. It’s also fabulous that his actions that make you laugh are really similar to your daily actions.

Justine: The first Chaplin film I saw completely was The Great Dictator when I was a middle school student. I still remember the school was teaching Hitler and World War II at the time, so it left a great impression on me. If anyone knows this film, then he or she may know Chaplin played two roles in the film. No one had noticed it in the beginning. In fact, one is good and another is bad. The contrast between being Hitler-like figure giving a speech in the beginning, and another Chaplin giving a speech about how we should love and care for others in the later part made me feel the great difference. After that, I watched numerous Chaplin’s films with my family,and from this exhibition. However, I feel that every piece of his film has a new concept and it feels different every time. Thus, I also cannot choose my favorite film.

Zeng Yan: In the late years of Chaplin, he was no longer lonely but living a happy life. Your mother was the daughter of Eugene O’Neill, was her influence on him great? Do you think your father was happy in the end?

Eugene: I think, for sure, after all the troubles he had in America and all the hatred and people against him, of course, he came to Switzerland and maybe it was just the right time for him to move as well.

The Circus (United Artists), 1926-1927 © Roy Export SAS / courtesy Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, scan courtesy Cineteca di Bologna

He always tried to forget all the bad things he had in his life. I will give you an example. When he did The Circus, there was laugh in every minute, but he did not even mention it in his autobiography. The reason why he made this film was because he was having a really bad divorce, his studio had a fire, so he was very melancholy. In 60s, he joined music with his movies, and he liked it very much. His tendency was to leave his problems behind him. When he left the United States, he also hoped to put his worries behind him. When my father met my mother, my mother was eighteen years old, and my father was fifty-four years old. There was a great distance between their ages, but age could not stop them. I always saw my parents hold hands. It gave us a sense of security. Later, I had my own girlfriend and I thought, ‘This is going to be great, it’ll be just like my parents’. The first time I had a fight, I was shocked, because I thought fight only happens in movies. Therefore, my life was different than normal people, because fights usually happen in normal life.

Zeng Yan: I have another question. In a lot of film articles, Chaplin was quite against talking films, but later he shot talking films, so have you ever heard your father speaking about it? Did he change his views on it?

Eugene: He never talked about it, but I think his reaction to talking films was the City Lights. Everyone said, “he is dead now”, due to the presence of talking films, no more silent films are going to be able to survive, but I think it must have been a challenge for him, he wanted to prove to the world that a movie with solely music and sound but no speech could survive. So he did City Lights. I think that challenge was as well why he composed music for the first time.

Opening Talk Scene

Zeng Yan: Throughout documents of Musée de l’Elysée, I found that you had many exhibitions of famous people such as Picasso and Chaplin, as well as photography exhibitions on contemporary art. Could you please introduce us the position and the unique principles on photography collection of Musée de l’Elysée?

Tatyana: Musée de l’Elysée is one of the most important photography museums in Europe. We are generally a photography museum, which means our aim is to show the diversity of photography since the creation and invention of photography in the middle of the 19th century until the very contemporary photographs. What distinguishes us from other photography museums around the world is the diversity of collection. We have very important collection of over one million objects; two hundred thousand clips, eight hundred thousand negatives, twenty thousand photo albums. It’s a huge collection. We are very well known for managing entire archives of photographers such as Charlie Chaplin archives. In total, we have twenty-four archives of photographers such as René Burri, Nicolas Bouvier, Sabine Weiss. For us, as curators, it is very important to understand in viewing his or her negatives that how a photographer or an artist is working, which for us are totally precious. We are not only conservation place, we are museum that organizes exhibitions all around the world. So, Charlie Chaplin exhibition is a travelling show. As we premiere here in Shanghai, we would like to travel elsewhere afterwards. We have around twelve exhibitions per year that travel in America, Asia, Europe and Africa. We also help photographers to raise their career. We have a photography prize, which is organized every two years for very young emerging photographers to exhibit very first time and we accompany them to exhibit around the world. So we really have a mission of helping photographers and following photographers since their very young career and to become more well-known.

Thanks to the support of Budi Tek, he is amazing at dealing with museum and improving. This cannot happen without support from private donation or people who believe in us. Our brand new photography museum in Lausanne will open in 2021, we welcome you very soon to be able to discover our treasures because we finally find a place to show our collections and organize major shows.

Zeng Yan: Yuz Museum mainly presents contemporary art, however, this is a photography exhibition on celebrity. I want to ask how did this exhibition come about, how did you plan to do this in such an amazing way?

Mrs. Carole Sandrin, Curator, Chaplin Photographic Archive at the Musée de l’Elysée and Mr. Budi Tek, founder of Yuz Museum, 2015

Justine: The founder of Yuz Museum Budi Tek once was invited to visit Musée de l’Elysée. He was amazed by the huge collection of the museum, especially the archives of Chaplin’s whole life, so he wanted to bring this amazing experience back. Yuz Museum is committed to advancing the development of contemporary Chinese art, promoting cultural dialogue between the East and the West. But contemporary art hasn’t got a complete definition yet. We present exhibitions of Giacometti and Chaplin, because they were avant-guard in their age and their thoughts are contemporary. We present this contemporaneity in another way as well. Since that age till now, so many artists had been influenced by Chaplin. You can find there are contemporary artworks in the last chapter of this exhibition, showing such influence. We make a connection in this way, trying to let people know the impact of Chaplin is over our imagination. The exhibition is cooperated with Musée de l’Elysée, and what is interesting is that it is curated from Chaplin’s eyes, his vision. There are also some works showing Chaplin in China, hoping to let people know Chaplin relates to China a lot.

Zeng Yan: We can see contemporary artists show respect to Chaplin in the last part of the exhibition, how did you choose what to show in the exhibition? What’s your consideration? Is there any relevance between Chaplin and these artworks?

Tatyana: We really want to present how Chaplin influences the artists of his time and his peers. This is why we want to have special focus of this exhibition on the avant-guard artists. Chaplin was considered as the symbol of modernity, of the avant-guard artists in Russia, Germany, and France. We look for very important artworks throughout Europe and America, from museums such as Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Museum and Kunsthaus Museum in Zurich to show the importance that Chaplin played in avant-guard artists at the time. In the exhibition, we are able to see the works by Marc Chagall and Erwin Blumenfeld. Erwin Blumenfeld really considered Chaplin as a hero. We managed to involve not only collage or photo montage from his direct family. He even invented the Dada movement in Netherlands, and the Dada Chaplin Movement at the time. So you can really see how Chaplin was so important already in the twentieth century. We want to add the exhibition with Chaplin’s legacy, how he continues to inspire artists in our days.

Erwin Blumenfeld

Dada Collage (Charlie Chaplin), 1921

Gouache

Private Collection

We’ve been working with Yuz Museum to find Chinese artists who are inspired by Chaplin, such as the painter Zhou Tiehai, he features the famous camel character that is incorporated inside the very famous scene of Modern Times. And we also feature a young photographer called Silin Liu, who was discovered by Musée de l’Elysée three years ago. She incorporates herself inside a famous scene of Limelight. So it shows that Chaplin is so alive as Eugene said after 30 years of his death. We really hope this exhibition will continue to inspire young and emerging artists, thanks to Chaplin’s huge and extreme modernity.

Zhou Tiehai

Modern Times-5, 2008

Acrylic on canvas

Courtesy of the Artist

Zeng Yan: I think the impact of Chaplin is amazing. He is the artist of the artist, and has become an inspiration and nutrient to many artists. Before Chaplin, film was not recognized as art, it’s an entertainment for high-educated people, but Chaplin is an exception. He was highly recognized among the intellectuals. I want to know why he was preeminent above all the artists in his field, and is that anything related to the time?

Tang weijie: Chaplin started to shoot films from one hundred years ago. Benjamin, the German scholar said that the invention of photography and film in the nineteenth century overturned former art. Chaplin lived basically in the twentieth century, when he faced with a circumstance totally different from former artists. For example, he had to work with machines, with capital, with a group of people together. He could no longer achieve his work by himself like former painters, who can merely complete a sketch with a brush in the countryside. The film The Artist gives the hint that many silent filmmakers gradually disappeared when talking films arose, while Chaplin is few of them who won great success both in silent films and talking films. We always talk about his political and cultural glory, but I think he made contributions to films in tiny, micro level. For example, the subtle facial expressions, body position in his early films distinguish only a little from our daily life actions, but this is why people burst into laughter. They release when they laugh and also reflect on their own life.

Eugene: I have two things to say. First, I heard an interview. It says it is not that you choose the crowns, but the crown chooses you. I think my father was born and he saw the crown coming to him, because it is the way he moves, he lives. Second, I want to say that in history, you have people who write about human problems, like Shakespeare’s impossible love, Moliere, and so on. My father came to the United States to use the new medium of film to write the eternal problems of love and the gap between the rich and the poor and the dignity which can never be solved. So people can recognize themselves in his movies.

Adrien: I think Chaplin, Picasso and some other great artists of the twentieth century, you may not know their works, but their work can be completely universal. Some of the figures of Chaplin may be unfamiliar to those who’ve never seen his work before, but you can recognize him, that’s why I said the Tramp, the figure of the Tramp or Chaplin is in the collective imagination. Like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it had established a universal perception of what it means to be in space and what science fiction is. Those who have not seen the film will also resonate in the collective representation. The image of tramp and poverty are also very old in America’s culture, but today, for anyone in the world, the Tramp is Charlie Chaplin. I believe this is the extraordinary influence he has brought. He reaches people no matter someone’s cultural background, and that’s why he has such cultural influence.

Eugene: That is why I say you can see Chaplin in everyone.

Previous review:

yuztalk | Eugene Chaplin: the Man & the Father & the Tramp

yuztalk | Tatyana Franck：Chaplin’s Timeless Photography Legacy

yuztalk | Tang Weijie: Chaplin in Shanghai

yuztalk | Adrien Gardère: Translation of Space

来源： 余德耀美术馆