Classic Film: Chaplin’s “City Lights”

The HILLSBOROUGH CLASSIC FILM SOCIETY’s holiday movie this year will be Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights:” Sunday, December 7^th, at 2pm.  Please notice the location: this month only, the film will be shown at the ORANGE COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY on West Margaret Lane in Hillsborough.

Chaplin made the film in 1931, resisting the advent of sound just after talkies began to appear. In the essay that accompanied the Criterion restoration of the film, Gary Giddins called it “an indelible masterwork of cinema,” and noted that now, nearly a century after its release, it seems safe to call it a masterwork of Western civilization as well:

“City Lights …  represents both a beginning, in that it has been endlessly imitated, and an end, in that it has never been superseded. … Chaplin’s new art was a form of storytelling combining burlesque comedy and dreadful pathos, each tuned to a pitch so high that the audience is jolted from one physical response to another: laughter and tears, the two faces of Comedy and–not Tragedy but rather–the melodramatic concession of Pathos …. Familiar territory today, but …  no one had brought it off before, and Chaplin–the orphaned music hall clown who became, through movies, the most popular comedian the world has ever known–defied his partners warnings that his ambition would cost him his audience.”

It didn’t cost him his audience, of course. Chaplin, “the orphaned music hall clown,” became, through movies, “the most popular comedian the world has ever known.”

Francesca Talenti will introduce the film and lead the discussion afterwards. Francesca is a Professor Emerita of Media Production at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is a filmmaker and animator, a director and a media designer who has exhibited her work from The Folger and the Guthrie (design, Hamlet, Pericles), to Sundance, to PBS National, by way of Mumbai, Göteborg, Casablanca, and many others. She has won 18 awards and has received numerous grants. She’s led the discussion for us on Vertigo (2019); Top Hat (2022); The Searchers (2023) ; West Side Story (2024); and a Christmas program of Chaplin films back in our second year of operation, 2019. <www.FrancescaTalenti.com>

As always, the film is open to the public and free, and the popcorn is free too. If you would like to attend, please sign up by going to our website, <www.hillsboroughclassicfilms.com>,scrolling down to the line “PLEASE REGISTER HERE,” and clicking on the link.

And, once again, please don’t confuse the location: this month only the film will be shown in the Orange County Public Library, 137 West Margaret Lane in Hillsborough. (A  note for those who are helped by the presence of  subtitles: Since this is taking place in the Library Meeting Room subtitles would be difficult or impossible to see; luckily this is, by and large, a silent film.)