“Charlie – The Kid. It seems to me that the title of one of Chaplin’s most popular films ought to be accosted specifically for its name: let’s consider the essentials […].
Chaplin’s particularity is the following: despite his white hair, he conserved his ‘child-like gaze’ and his instinct to react in the first degree at the drop of a hat.
From here his freedom with regard to the ‘moralizing gaze’ […].
Chaplin chose to return to infantilism as a means to evade the real world, the bound and regulated world that revolves around him. It is insufficient. It is a palliative. But it is relatively within his proportions, the proportions of his means […].
This is the secret of Chaplin. The secret of his eyes, of his gaze. It is in this sense that he is inimitable. Here lies his greatness […]. To perceive even the most terrible, most pitiful, most tragic events through the smiling eyes of a child. To be capable of capturing these various manifestations of the world immediately, in a single stroke of genius, beyond any sort of moral or ethic appreciation, devoid of judgment and without condemnation – to be capable of perceiving them as a child does in a fit of laughter: in this sense he is different, incomparable, unique.
This immediacy and this spontaneity of the gaze generates a comic sensation. A comic sentiment […]. The capacity to see as a baby sees appertains only to Chaplin, present in no one else […].
To see the world in this manner and to have the courage to manifest it on the screen, is the genius’ perogative […].
Chaplin and reality act in unison, ‘in a pair’, all in a series of circus entrances […].
Elie Faure wrote of Chaplin: ‘Dances from one foot to the other, – and what sad feet they are! – showing in this way the two extremes of thought: one is called consciousness, the other concupiscence. Hopping from one foot to the other, he seeks an equilibrium of the soul, that he finds with the intention to quickly lose it’.
That which a satiric author must develop on two levels of his work, Chaplin puts on only one level. He laughs spontaneously, ingenuously […].
If the method of Chaplin’s child-like gaze makes a thematic decision that eventually develops the comedy, at the level of the subject matter, he is almost always a situation comedian opposing an infantile approach to life with a rude-adult manner of affronting it […].
The cruel amorality of infantile conduct (the nature of Chaplin’s comedies) shines through his characters along with all the rest of the emotionally moving quirks of infancy.
The last frame of The Pilgrim is practically the consummate model of the intrinsic characteristics of a hero: in fact, it is the model that recurs from one film to the next in every conflict, that we could reduce to a single, fundamental situation; it’s a diagram of the method that permits him to obtain all those incredible effects.
The flight on horseback across the frontier, is effectively the symbolic dead-end where one finds the individual half-adult/half-child in an environment and a society that is decisively composed of grown-ups.
However Chaplin might interpret his finale, it is clear that, for the ‘little man’ in contemporary society there is no place to go […].
That which is so disconcerting is the liberty of Chaplin’s moral tones. No chains, no obstacles, no impediments: this gives the author the possibility to project a comic light upon the phenomenon that might furnish his character with its distinguishing traits”. (Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin, Circé, Belfort, 1997)