Is It Worth Devoting an Entire Floor at W20 to Chaplin?

Chaplin's well-composed, carefully viewed iconography replaces a long and boring lecture on the cultural anthropology of the 20th century. What you would find out at the end of it you will see in the ending frames Ballet Mécanique Leger and Murphe from 1924. Chaplin's puppet is falling apart (reconfigures?) Into fragments, crumbles under the influence of the crazy, mechanical, swaying movement of the camera and light, after the first Great War. Exactly a hundred years ago, in the mid-twenties, the process of slewing a new, "steel" man will begin. One that will not fall apart, will not hesitate, fulfill every order.

Charles Spencer Chaplin was born on April 16, 1889 in London.  

What do you wish for your one hundred and thirty-fourth birthday? Certainly not the Legion of Honor, if it is another brawl, such as the one caused by young writers on October 29, 1952, when Chaplin in Paris, as befits an Elder, personally received the decoration. Such attacks, attacks from the street, attacks on the street are a sign that someone still acts as it should, acts like a stick in an anthill. 

Today the movement is supposedly greater, traffic jams are nightmarish, we are starting to miss some, even a dictator, as long as he embraces it all, organizes it. Will we find a better dictator than the one played by Chaplin? Unfortunately, rather yes.

Illustration: Chaplin's look, worker's gaze, from the group: Worker and collective farmer (Rabóчий i kolkhóзница) by Vera Muchina, 1937, the sculpture was a pictorial analogy of the first articles of the USSR Constitution of 1936 talking about the "unshakable workers-peasant alliance".