“Theme: Charlot conductor beats time. In front. The European with a hat and the wife in a corset”. The first to mention Charlot was Blaise Cendrars in 1916, in this extravagant pre-Dadaist poem dedicated to Erik Satie. Just two years later Louis Aragon wrote in his article Du décor that to appreciate fully The Vagabond it was essential “to know and love Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period paintings, […] to have read Kant and Nietzsche, and to believe one’s soul is loftier than other men’s”. Innovator, irreverent of authority and middle-class conformism, Chaplin embodied the desire for freedom and anarchy expressed by the authors and artists of the avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 30s. Crucial to the figure’s explosion in avant-garde culture was Yvan Goll’s Chapliniade, a ‘cinematographic poem’ illustrated by Fernand Léger in 1920 (followed by the uncompleted work Charlot cubiste, an impossible love story between Chaplin and the Mona Lisa, the remains of which were incorporated into Ballet mécanique). February 5, 1920, Parisian Dadaists advertised their event at the Grand Palais claiming Chaplin would appear at it and that he supported the movement; in 1921, German artist Erwin Blumenfeld depicted himself in a collage for Tristan Tzara with a woman’s body covered in a sheer negligee and a shirt and tie with the words “President – Dada – Chaplinist” written across the image. President Dada to all intents and purposes, Chaplin is portrayed on the cross in one of Blumenfeld’s more successful collages, nailed to it with words and symbols, including ‘religion’, a swastika, the star of David and the yin and yang symbol. Almost a premonition, albeit an unconscious one, that reactionary America would eventually banish Chaplin.

Cecilia Cenciarelli