Chaplin's America
Between Dream and Illusion
Undoubtedly, there is a subversive side to Chaplin’s work. Some scenes are apt to be considered as signs of Chaplin’s intention to ridicule mainstream American society and debunk the myth of American exceptionalism. However, historical and political approaches do not really account for the complexity and the depth of Chaplin’s work. Ironically enough, Chaplin’s films may well be not so much about the American Dream as about a dream of another kind, less tangible and more ethereal. Far beyond the socio-economic or comic aspects it is traditionally associated with, there emerges from Chaplin’s work a more philosophical and metaphysical dimension, a genuine Weltanschauung. God, if He has ever existed, is at best an absentee Landlord and yet, in the midst of universal chaos, there still arises a dream of that remnant of Terra Incognita within all of us, which takes on the colors of a prelapsarian world free from the contradictions of existence here below.
Published with the financial support of the University of Angers (France).
Écrit à partir d'une traduction de Lily Robert-Foley.
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America And The American Dream In The Work Of Charlie Chaplin
- The American Dream In All Its States
- America, A Land Of Freedom ?
- A Subversive Turn Of Mind
Of The Unheimlichkeit Or Unsettling Strangeness Of The World
- From The Bankruptcy Of Traditional Worldviews To A Sense Of An Undecipherable World
- Of Human Contradictions
Of Dreams And Attitudes Towards Life
- The Tramp, Or Innocence Retrieved
- From Paradise Lost To The Dignified Refusal To Surrender
- Pathways… Between Heaven And Earth
- Unexpected America
- Auteur(s)keyboard_arrow_down
Morgane Jourdren is Associate Professor of American studies at the University of Angers and a member of the AFEA. She wrote a doctoral dissertation on Charlie Chaplin and organized an international symposium to celebrate the centennial of the Little Tramp in 2014, the proceedings of which were published as La Figure de Charlot et ses Avatars (Rennes, PUR, 2015). She participated in the “Chaplin in the Eye of the Avant-Garde” exhibition at the musée d’Arts de Nantes in 2019. She was also the special guest of various radio shows, including “Grande traversée : Charlie Chaplin, the artist” (France Culture, July 21st, 2016) and “La Compagnie des Oeuvres : L’Amérique de Chaplin” (France Culture, May 11th, 2021).
- Fiche techniquekeyboard_arrow_downNb de pages : 136Tags : Charlie Chaplin, États-Unis, cinéma, norme, marge, mouvement protestataire, mythe, rêve américain
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