Photo © Roy Export Est

Upon its release in June 1925, The Gold Rush was accompanied by a wealth of anecdotes in the American press: from the tons of chalk, salt and confetti used to reconstruct Alaska in the studio, to the sumptuous premiere with an “Arctic” themed orchestra and dancing at the Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, to the ten minutes of uninterrupted laughter broadcast live by the BBC for its British launch. It was reported that in some European theatres, projectionists were forced to rewind the reel to satisfy delirious audiences’ demands for an encore of the “bread roll dance”. The Gold Rush grossed astronomical amounts at the box office and was distributed in over 200 countries. In the early 1940s Chaplin decided to rework one of his purest films, replacing the original intertitles with a narrated commentary, changing the editing and shortening the ending. When the film was re-released in theatres in May 1942, few people understood the sense in these modifications which, by speaking the unspoken, had altered the perfect balance between fairytale and folly. However, even its greatest detractors acknowledged that the newly orchestrated score represented one of the expressive highpoints in his career as a composer: “He composed music not only for the blizzard, the fights between men, the dance scenes and the love scenes; but also for the weeping, the hunger, the tiredness, the hallucinations, for the snowball fight, for the suspicion, the dignity, the pride and the indifference.” From that moment, Chaplin’s lawyers legally pursued all the distributors and those in possession of silent copies of the film, leaving the sound version the only one available until the start of the 1990s, when Kevin Brownlow and David Gill undertook a complex reconstruction of the silent version starting from a variety of surviving sources. Almost 30 years later, we continued that project from those same elements along with others generously provided by FIAF film archives. The Gold Rush isn’t the only film for which Charlie Chaplin is remembered, but without doubt the decision to take The Tramp to the roots (or the precipice) of American mythology, to place his solitary figure against the snowy backdrop of the birth of a nation, makes it a work of unsurpassed, dizzying intensity.

Cecilia Cenciarelli