Chaplin at Keystone Restored (review)

In the 1980s, I researched and wrote a book called Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image, which sought to trace the shifts in Chaplin's public reputation in the United States, centering on the concept of his "star image." I proposed that Chaplin's star image was shaped by a variety of factors, including Chaplin's private life and writings; studio publicity; commentary on Chaplin and his work by reviewers, critics, and biographers; and of course, Chaplin's films and his roles in them. ¹

As one might expect, there was a mountain of commentary to work through, given Chaplin's status as a major movie director and star for much of his time in the United States between 1913 and 1952. However, many magazines and some newspapers were well indexed, and most of the citations were available on microfilm in my university library or in other archives such as the Library of Congress. Within five years of his arrival in Hollywood, starting with his First National contract, Chaplin had maneuvered himself into a position in the film industry that allowed him to own the rights to the films he directed and in which he starred. By 1920, he was making his films in his own movie studio and—once he completed his First National contract in 1923—distributing them through a company that he cofounded: United Artists. Because he respected the long-term financial and historical value of those movies, he took good care of them, making it possible for me to access his movies made from 1918 on. I even located good versions of almost all the fourteen movies he made at Essanay in 1915 and the dozen he made at Mutual in 1916 and 1917.

The same was not true for the thirty-six films he made at Mack Sennett's Keystone Studio in 1914, his first year in the movie business after a successful career in the English music halls. Many of the Keystone films had vanished, and those still available were often stored in faraway archives and available only in scratched, poorly framed, fragmentary, or otherwise visually inferior condition. Despite visiting archives in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York, London, and Stockholm to see all the Chaplin Keystones available in these locations, I still lacked a complete picture of how Chaplin learned to make films and how he developed his Tramp character during his first year in the industry. It was frustrating and a bit ironic to find complete runs of trade and fan magazines from 1914, like Moving Picture World or Motion Picture Magazine, yet so few of the films they covered. Apparently, our forebears on the eve of World War I had learned to respect print, but they surely didn't worry much about the images that were flickering on nickelodeon screens.

In some ways, it should have been no surprise that the films were in such poor shape by the 1980s. When Chaplin was at Keystone, the company generally churned out a comic short about every other day. The original negatives were used to strike up to fifty prints, but sometimes accidents damaged or destroyed the negative even before that many prints could be created. The prints were then distributed to movie theaters, and because the Keystone films were popular—particularly by late 1914, after Chaplin's Tramp character had gained recognition—some were projected hundreds of times. Poorly maintained projectors could break the film or scratch the image. Projectionists repairing torn film often lost frames during the repair. Many prints were worn out within a fairly brief time after their release. When Keystone closed in 1917 (Sennett went on to create his own production company), its prints were sold off by weight, and prints of Chaplin's movies were scattered in many directions. Those with prints of Chaplin Keystones continued to project them in theaters—sometimes reediting, renaming, and even rewriting the title cards—until they could be played no more or were in very different form from the original release. Two decades before...