Charles Chaplin
Dictator Adenoid Hynkel tries to expand his empire while a poor Jewish barber tries to avoid persecution from Hynkel’s regime.
City Lights is the first silent film that Charlie Chaplin directed after he established himself with sound accompanied films. The film is about a penniless man who falls in love with a flower girl. The film was a great success and today is deemed a cult classic.
Three Chaplin silent comedies “A Dog’s Life”, “Shoulder Arms”, and “The Pilgrim” are strung together to form a single feature length film. Chaplin provides new music, narration, and a small amount of new connecting material. “Shoulder Arms” is now described as taking place in a time before “the atom bomb”.
Considered one of Charlie Chaplin’s best films, The Kid also made a star of little Jackie Coogan, who plays a boy cared for by The Tramp when he’s abandoned by his mother, Edna. Later, Edna has a change of heart and aches to be reunited with her son. When she finds him and wrests him from The Tramp, it makes for what turns out be one of the most heart-wrenching scenes ever included in a comedy.
A fading music hall comedian tries to help a despondent ballet dancer learn to walk and to again feel confident about life.
Charlie, a wandering tramp, becomes a circus handyman and falls in love with the circus owner’s daughter. Unaware of Charlie’s affection, the girl falls in love with a handsome young performer. Charlie’s versatility makes him star of the show when he substitutes for an ailing tightwire walker. He is discharged from the company when he protects the girl from her father’s abuse, but he returns and appeals to the handsome performer to marry the girl. After the wedding the father prevails upon them to rejoin the circus. Charlie is hired again, but he stays behind when the caravan moves on.
The miraculous discovery of a hand-colored print of the world-famous TRIP TO THE MOON, the 1902 Georges Melies film, that took 12 years to restore, and opened the Cannes Film Festival in May 2011. The story of this film, from its shooting more than a century ago to its spectacular revival in 2011, is the subject of THE EXTRAORDINARY VOYAGE, the film Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange just completed, which will world premiere at Moma, in New York, November 11, at 7pm, along with the George Melies film with a new spectacular sound track by French group AIR.
