It was early one morning when all the good work was done It was early one morning when all the good work was done And that big bird was loaded, with that awful atomic bomb
Wrote my baby, I was behind the risin’ sun Wrote my baby, I was behind the risin’ sun I told her, don’t be uneasy Because I’m behind the atomic bomb
Nation after nation, was near and far away Nation after nation, was near and far away Well, they soon got the news And there where they would stay
Over in East Japan, you know, they let down and cried Over in East Japan, you know, they let down and cried And poor Tojo, had to find a place to hide
Talkin’ World War III Blues – Bob Dylan (1963)
One time ago a crazy dream came to me I dreamt I was walkin’ into World War Three I went to the doctor the very next day To see what kinda words he could say He said it was a bad dream I wouldn’t worry ‘bout it none, though Them old dreams are only in your head
I said, hold it, Doc, a World War passed through my brain He said, nurse, get your pad, this boy’s insane He grabbed my arm, I said ouch As I landed on the psychiatric couch He said, tell me about it
Well, the whole thing started at three o’clock fast It was all over by quarter past I was down in the sewer with some little lover When I peeked out from a manhole cover Wondering who turned the lights on
Well, I got up and walked around And up and down the lonesome town I stood a-wondering which way to go I lit a cigarette on a parking meter And walked on down the road It was a normal day
Well, I rung the fallout shelter bell And I leaned my head and I gave a yell Give me a string bean, I’m a hungry man A shotgun fired and away I ran I don’t blame them too much though They didn’t know me
Down at the corner by a hot-dog stand I seen a man, I said, ‘howdy friend’ I guess there’s just us two He screamed a bit and away he flew Thought I was a Communist
Well, I spied a girl and before she could leave I said, let’s go and play Adam and Eve I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin’ When she said, hey man, you crazy or sumpin’ You seen what happened last time they started
Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptown And there was nobody aroun’ I got into the driver’s seat And I drove down 42nd Street In my Cadillac Good car to drive after a war
Well, I remember seein’ some ad So I turned on my Conelrad But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill So the radio didn’t work so well Turned on my record player It was Rock-A-Day, Johnny singin’ Tell your Ma, tell your Pa Our loves are gonna grow ooh-wah, ooh-wah
I was feelin’ kinda lonesome and blue I needed somebody to talk to So I called up the operator of time Just to hear a voice of some kind When you hear the beep It will be three o’clock She said that for over an hour And I hung up
Well, the doctor interrupted me just about then Sayin, Hey I’ve been havin’ the same old dreams But mine was a little different you see I dreamt that the only person left after the war was me I didn’t see you around
Well, now time passed and now it seems Everybody’s having them dreams Everybody sees themselves walkin’ around with no one else Half of the people can be part right all of the time Some of the people can be all right part of the time But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time I think Abraham Lincoln said that I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours I said that
The Sun Is Burning – Simon and Garfunkel (1964)
The sun is burning in the sky Strands of clouds go slowly drifting by In the park the lazy bees Are joining in the flowers among the trees And the sun burns in the sky
Now the sun is in the West Little kids go home to take their rest And the couples in the park Are holding hands and waitin’ for the dark And the sun is in the West
Now the sun is sinking low Children playing know it’s time to go High above a spot appears A little blossom blooms and then draws near And the sun is sinking low
Now the sun has come to earth Shrouded in a mushroom cloud of death Death comes in a blinding flash Of hellish heat and leaves a smear of ash And the sun has come to earth
Now the sun has disappeared All is darkness, anger, pain and fear Twisted sightless wrecks of men Go groping on their knees and cry in pain And the sun has disappeared
1999 – Prince (1982)
Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you I only want you to have some fun
I was dreamin’ when I wrote this Forgive me if it goes astray But when I woke up this mornin’ Could’ve sworn it was judgment day
The sky was all purple There were people runnin’ everywhere Tryin’ to run from the destruction You know I didn’t even care
Say, say, 2000-00, party over Oops, out of time So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999
I was dreaming’ when I wrote this So sue me if I go too fast Life is just a party And parties weren’t meant to last
War is all around us My mind says prepare to fight So if I gotta die I’m gonna listen to my body tonight, yeah
They say, 2000-00, party over Oops, out of time So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999 Yeah, yeah
Let me tell ya something If you didn’t come to party Don’t bother knockin’ on my door I got a lion in my pocket And, baby, he’s ready to roar Yeah, yeah
Everybody’s got a bomb We could all die any day, aw But before I’ll let that happen I’ll dance my life away, oh-oh-oh
They say, 2000-00, party over Oops, out of time We’re runnin’ outta time So tonight we gonna party like it’s 1999
Say it one more time 2000-00, party over Oops, out of time, no, no So, tonight we gonna, we gonna, whoa!
Alright, it’s 1999 You say it, 1999 1999 Oh, 1999 Don’t stop, don’t stop, say it one more time
2000-00, party over Oops, out of time Yeah-yeah So tonight, I’m gonna party like it’s 1999 (we gonna, whoa)
1999 Don’tcha wanna go (1999) Don’tcha wanna go, oh (1999) We could all die any day (1999)
I don’t wanna die I’d rather dance my life away (1999) Listen to what I’m tryin’ to say Everybody, everybody said party
C’mon now, you said party That’s right, everybody say (party) You can’t run from the revelation, no (party) Sing it for your nation, y’all (party)
Dreamin’ when youu’re singin’, baby say (party) Telephone’s a-ringin’, mama now (party) C’mon, c’mon, you say (party) Everybody, do tell me (party)
Work it down to the ground I say (party) Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh (party) Come on, take my body, baby (party) That’s right, c’mon, sing me the song (party) Yeah-yeah, oh, no no (party)
That’s right (party) Got a lion in my pocket mama, say (party) Oh, and he’s ready to roar (party)
Mommy Why does everybody have a bomb? Mommy Why does everybody have a bomb?
Seconds – Canción de U2 (1983)
Takes a second to say goodbye Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh It takes a second to say goodbye Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh, say bye bye Where you going to now
Lightning flashes across the sky East to west, do or die Like a thief in the night See the world by candlelight
Fall, rise and fall, rise and Fall, rise and fall, rise and
In an apartment on Time Square You can assemble them anywhere Held to ransom, hell to pay A revolution everyday USSR, GDR, London, New York, Peking It’s the puppets, it’s the puppets Who pull the strings, yeh
Fall, rise and fall Fall, rise and fall
Say goodbye, say goodbye Say goodbye, say goodbye Say goodbye
It takes a second to say goodbye Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh Push the button and pull the plug Say goodbye, oh, oh, oh
Fall, rise and fall Fall, rise and fall
And they’re doing the atomic bomb Do they know where the dance comes from Yes they’re doing the atomic bomb They want you to sing along Say goodbye, say goodbye Say goodbye Say goodbye
Los cines de verano: Recuerdos de las noches entre pipas, pepsicolas y «olor a jazmín»
Los estragos del calor durante la década de los sesenta y el ‘boom’ del turismo en la costa Mediterráneo provocaron la eclosión de las proyecciones de películas de la cultura clásica española, con la peculiaridad de que eran al aire libre. En la memoria colectiva de los españoles quedan los cines de verano como un recuerdo de los veranos en los pueblos o en la costa, como refleja uno de los capítulos de Verano Azul en el que la pandilla visiona una película en los cines veraniegos del pueblo malagueño de Nerja. La Familia Alcántara de Cuéntame cómo pasó durante sus primeras vacaciones en Benidorm también acude a ver una película en los cines de verano de la localidad valenciana.
El recuerdo de los cines de verano perdura en la memoria de aquellos niños de la década de los sesenta y setenta que veranaban junto a su familia a orillas del Mediterráneo o se desplazaba hasta los pueblos del interior peninsular. “Yo soy un niño de los años setenta, donde aún estaban en vigor. Por la noche no quedaba otra cosa que ir a los cines de verano. Recuerdo el de Calafell o Torrevieja donde veraneaba. Visitábamos nuestro bar, donde comprábamos pipas, altramuces o pepsicolas”, recuerda Javier López Galiacho, presidente de la Asociación de los Teatros Históricos de España (AMITHE) al ‘elcierredigital.com’.
Los cines de verano, un símbolo del estío español
En España el número de cines de verano llegó a hasta los 1800 y se ha convertido en todo un ícono del verano en España. Un emblema del entretenimiento durante los años en los que la juventud no estaba pegada a la pantalla del móvil o el ordenador. “Como no había pantallas, nos teníamos que inventar la vida”, afirma Javier López Galiacho a elcierrredigital.com.
El fenómeno del retorno de aquellos emigrantes a las principales ciudades españolas a disfrutar del verano en el pueblo también influyó en el auge de los cines de verano. Asistían desde los padres hasta los abuelos a disfrutar de películas como La Gran Familia, No os comáis las margaritas o El Turismo es un gran invento. “Eran reestrenos de salas privadas en salas al aire libre”, rememora Javier López Galiacho a elcierredigital.com.
“El bolso del bocadillo, la silla y la rebeca
Los cines de verano sirvieron como un escape de las noches veraniegas y en aquellos puntos de España en los que la pantalla grande era un rumor de las grandes ciudades. “Eran las noches del bolso del bocadillo, la silla y la rebeca. Íbamos los hermanos o amigos y la entrada costaba 70 pesetas. Me acuerdo que bajaban las señoras con las sillas”, recuerda Javier López Galiacho.
Múltiples anécdotas e historias que a día de López Galiacho afirman que hoy ya son iguales a aquellas sesiones en las noches “con olor a jazmín”. “Recuerdo que las salamanqueras se comían las moscas que se posaban en la pantalla”, afirma.
La vida en la playa o en el pueblo de aquellas décadas de la televisión en blanco y negro o de los viajes en el Seat 600 no se concibe sin la presencia de los cines de verano. “Era una fiesta. Veías las estrellas. Para mí, como cinéfilo, era onírico”, afirma Javier López Galiacho a elcierredigital.com.
Un recuerdo icónico que se está perdiendo
Los cines de verano fueron un ‘boom’ durante las temporadas estivales. “Estaban enclavados en parcelas eliminadas durante la especulación inmobiliaria de la década de los ochenta y los noventa”, sentencia Javier López Galiacho a elcierredigital.com. Algunos de los cines míticos ya solo perduran en la memoria, como el Cine Calatrava en Ciudad Real. “Ya no es lo mismo. Los Cines Avenida de Albacete ya no existen”, recuerda Javier López Galiacho a elcierredigital.com.
Uno de los cines de Verano que se resiste a desaparecer es el Cinema Tomares, ubicado en el pueblo sevillano de Tomares. “Los cines de verano se están perdiendo. Solo son tres meses de negocio y tiene sus complicaciones”, afirma Rafael Cansino a elcierredigital.com. Una empresa familiar que ha sido abanderada del cine. “Desde 1964 aguantamos con el cine de verano en Tomares. En 1957 inauguramos el cine de invierno, pero lo tuvimos que vender en 2003”, afirma Cansino.
Son un clásico del verano. Junto al pertinente chapuzón, el abanico y los globos de agua, el cine al aire libre forma parte de ese imaginario estival que siempre vuelve. Agosto transforma los patios centenarios, las plazas de toros, los jardines y las terrazas en salas de proyección. La época de la pared encalada a modo de pantalla ya pasó, la sofisticación en los sistemas de proyección se impuso y las programaciones, no siempre a gusto de todos, devanean entre las complacientes superproducciones americanas y un cine de autor que se aleja de lugares comunes.
Su origen habría que situarlo a comienzos del siglo XX, pese a que no fue hasta mediados de los 50 y sobre todo en los 60 cuando tuvo su gran eclosión, con el desarrollo del turismo en el Mediterráneo. Si bien fueron las salas de cine, con su moqueta y su oscuridad, las que configuraron toda esa liturgia tan cinematográfica, el visionado al aire libre es tan antiguo como el nacimiento del séptimo arte. Tal y como apunta el historiador y documentalista de cine Luis E. Parés, “en su origen, más allá de la pura invención por parte de los hermanos Lumière, el cine siempre estuvo vinculado con feriantes que iban por las carpas de los circos mostrando sus proyecciones”.
Aquellos trashumantes primigenios fueron los pioneros en la democratización del cine. Más tarde, aunque también en paralelo, fueron proliferando las salas de proyección, auténticos templos para el visionado y el primerizo escarceo carnal. “Creo que es bueno desacralizar un poco el cine, las salas le confieren ese aire como reverencial, algo que es muy romántico y que forma parte de su esencia pero que no está mal romper de vez en cuando y convertir la experiencia en algo popular”, apunta Parés.
En efecto, la plaza del pueblo –con sus neveritas cerveceras, el niño que no se come la fruta y el bocadillo de mortadela– restó afectación al disfrute cinéfilo, como si sacándolo de su refugio habitual le quitara ínfulas al asunto. Si en los 60 el tándem conformado por Manolo Escobar y Clint Eastwood era garantía de éxito en las programaciones de media España, en la actualidad son las grandes superproducciones las que se llevan la palma. “Se ha vinculado tradicionalmente cine de verano con cine de entretenimiento o evasión, pero no tiene por qué ser así; el cine es un arte por sí mismo y no por lo marcos que lo contienen”, remata el historiador.
Siempre hubo y siempre habrá excepciones. Es el caso, por ejemplo, del Ateneo Socio-Cultural Viento del Pueblo, sito en la conservadora localidad alicantina de Orihuela. Un reducto de cine poco convencional proyectado al aire libre y al margen de las instituciones. Carlos Escolano, su programador, saca pecho: “Ante la desidia institucional, decidimos autogestionarnos, proyectar un cine que no llega a nuestra provincia e incluso contactar con los autores para que vengan a los coloquios posteriores y nos hablen de su película”.
Como lo oyen, cine en los márgenes –a Escolano no le gusta la etiqueta– bajo la noche estrellada y junto a la ribera del Segura. Un proyecto extemporáneo dentro de un panorama, el levantino, que busca satisfacer al turista con taquillazos de ayer y hoy. “Pretendemos deshipsterizar la cultura –añade Escolano–, no queríamos que este tipo de cine, tan sugerente y nutritivo, quedara relegado al gueto del festival, el museo o la muestra”. Hablamos de joyas como La estrella errante, de Alberto Gracia, Cantares de una revolución, de Ramón Lluis Bande y de prometedores pases venideros a cargo de las realizadoras María Antón y Elena López con ❤ y Los que desean, respectivamente.
Entre el disfrute y la responsabilidad social
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, quien junto a su socio Luis Miguel Rodríguez, comanda Lince Comunicación, es uno de los pioneros en nuestro país en este tipo de proyecciones al aire libre. Una historia que tras su esplendor en los años 60 –sobre todo en las barriadas de las grandes ciudades y en la costa levantina–, encontró en la década de los 70 un cierto retraimiento. El resurgir, como apunta Miguel Ángel, se produjo a principios de los ochenta de la mano de Rita Sonlleva, promotora del cine de verano de la Bombilla: “Fue ella quien se inventó un nuevo modelo que dio origen al cine de verano de El Retiro, lo hizo con la ayuda del Ayuntamiento y proyectando películas de interés mayoritario, clásicos y cine de autor, una receta con la que fue creando un nuevo público que hasta la fecha no existía”.
Una fórmula que sigue vigente en las grandes ciudades pero que es difícilmente exportable a provincias, en especial a aquellas localidades de pocos habitantes donde carecen de sala de cine. “En los pueblos de Jaén, Almería o Granada, por ejemplo, donde a lo mejor no ven una película en pantalla grande en todo el año, no podemos llegar con la última de Ken Loach, pero sí podemos evitar los estrenos de las grandes multinacionales que son películas de usar y tirar”. Se trata, a fin de cuentas, de lidiar con la eterna tensión entre la viabilidad comercial y la responsabilidad social. “No se debe obviar el hecho de que son salas que se nutren de dinero público, tenemos la obligación de intentar vehicular un cine, no distinto porque está todo inventado, pero no olvidar que el cine además de espectáculo, es una forma de aprender a ver la vida”, zanja Miguel Ángel.
La cartelera de hoy se antoja ridícula si la comparamos con la de hace medio siglo. Entonces, sesenta títulos diferentes se anunciaban como si fueran el sueño de una noche de verano de cualquier cinéfilo. Y eso que los multicines estaban todavía por inventar. Pero existían sus precedentes estivales, los cines de verano que con las calores hacían las veces de dos salas ya que exhibían programas dobles y de lo más dispares. Como el éxito español ‘La Gran Familia’, con Alberto Closas y su prole, y la aventura safari de John Wayne ‘Hatari’, en el Carmen Cinema de El Perchel. A la misma hora que en otra punta de la ciudad, el Real de Carretera de Cádiz, la cosa quedaba en familia con las hermanas Pili y Mili haciendo honor al título ‘Como dos gotas de agua’ frente a otro clan absolutamente subversivo, los inmortales Hermanos Marx, retorciendo el más difícil todavía en ‘Una noche en el circo’. Bajo la fórmula de las sesiones dobles a la luz de la Luna, decenas de terrazas hicieron furor entre los malagueños del siglo XX. Cada barrio tenía su propio cine, que se convirtieron en auténticos centros sociales que entretenían a toda la familia por un módico precio y una bolsa de pipas.
Como mostraba la película ‘Cinema Paradiso’, las terrazas de verano fueron un fenómeno especialmente común en el ámbito mediterráneo y, en el caso de Málaga, estuvo asociado incluso a las primeras proyecciones del cine mudo. De hecho, las pioneras barracas itinerantes que pasaban por la ciudad se multiplicaban en julio y agosto ocupando espacios al aire libre, fundamentalmente en el Parque, el Muelle Heredia y la Alameda Principal. Uno de los más imperiales fue el Gran Cinema Iris, que se inauguró en 1915 y tenía vocación de sala estable y descubierta para los veranos. El cine era tan popular en aquella época silente que hasta la plaza de toros de La Malagueta cambiaba la muletas por la pantalla en el albero para proyectar películas.
Los cines de verano no sólo fueron una modalidad de exhibición, sino una necesidad. Y es que en aquellas salas de las primeras décadas del siglo pasado no existía refrigeración, lo que imposibilitaba la aglomeración del público en época estival por las temperaturas y los olores. Para no perder la clientela –ni los ingresos–, muchos empresarios crearon terrazas anexas a sus salas, a las que trasladaban las proyecciones desde mediados de junio a finales de septiembre, como el Capitol (calle Mármoles), Cayri (Martínez Maldonado), Cinema España (Huelin), Duque (El Molinillo), Monumental (Ciudad Jardín) y Royal (Armengual de la Mota).
Como los gustos y los cines iban por barrios, las preferencias y los recuerdos están divididos entre los espectadores, aunque hay consenso entre los cronistas en que el mejor fue el Cine Las Delicias, que se inauguró en 1929 con más de 800 sillas y que mantuvo sus proyecciones hasta 1943. Situado junto al antiguo Conservatorio María Cristina en la calle Marqués de Valdecañas, las entradas en su primer año costaban 0,30 pesetas y, además de «estrenos de incalculable valor artístico», la publicidad del local aseguraba que era «el lugar mejor acondicionado y más delicioso para pasar las insoportables noches veraniegas». Y es que Las Delicias presumía no solo de su bello jardín, sino también de la amplitud del mismo que refrescaba las noches bajo la pantalla.
La época dorada de los cines de verano se produjo entre los años 50 y 60, momento en el que la historiadora María Pepa Lara llega a contabilizar la creación de 29 salas. Algunas fueron muy populares, como Los Galanes y Acacias (Pedregalejo), Eliseos (Paseo de Reding), Maype (Carretera de Cártama), Las Flores (ídem), Portada Alta (frente al hospital Carlos Haya), Los Pinos (Calle Ferrándiz), Los Rosales (Martínez de la Rosa), Solymar (Avda. de la Paloma), Tívoli (Santa Julia), Trinidad (calle Sevilla), Jardín Cinema (Ciudad Jardín) y La Fuente (compartiendo espacio, un campo de fútbol, con el equipo de la Olímpica Victoriana) y Las Palmeras (ambos en Capuchinos).
Todas estas salas ofrecían «precios populares», además de una programación doble en la que, como recordaba el cronista de SUR Julián Sesmero, se solía mezclar el reestreno de una película «de amores para las damas y otra de tiros o de guerra para los caballeros. Y a ser posible, las dos en color». La segunda película de la jornada se repetía en primer lugar al día siguiente y, a continuación, la novedad. Y_así sucesivamente para responder al criterio de «para todos los públicos» con el objetivo de que se llenaran las sillas que, de madera o metálicas, distaban del confort para soportar tres y cuatro horas sentados. Amén de los baños que, si quedaban cerca del patio de ‘butacas’, podían «resultar infernales» ya que no había jardín, dama de noche o jazmines que taparan los aromas a humanidad.
Además de haberse recorrido los cines de verano de toda Málaga, Sesmero también ilustraba con sus palabras el éxito masivo de aquellas terrazas a mitad del siglo pasado. «No había otra alternativa en aquellos años ya que la televisión no había entrado en los hogares de Málaga», explicaba el periodista, que también recordaba como familias completas se traían la cena a la proyección, los niños corrían por las instalaciones cuando les aburría la película, los vendedores voceaban sus chucherías sin parar o desde el bar del propio cine no se paraba de hablar. Vamos, que a veces ver la película era toda una prueba de obstáculos.
Hasta El Lute
El apartado comestible tenía también una gran importancia. Para distraer el estómago, el principal argumento eran las pipas de girasol que se vendían al grito de «¡A gorda el vagón! ¡No mantienen, pero entretienen!». Y los que no tenían ni para chuches, se las traían de casa con fabricación propia, aprovechando las pipas del melón, las cuales se ponían a secar al sol con abundante sal para que por las noches acompañaran las pamplinas de Cantinflas, las canciones de Marisol o los tiros de los ‘combois’.
En los 70, los cines de verano comenzaron su lento declive e, incluso, algunos vecinos mostraban su descontento por el volumen de las películas que extendían sus diálogos, tiros y explosiones a todo trapo hasta casi las dos de la madrugada. No obstante, seguían teniendo un gran tirón popular, como lo demuestra que hasta el fugitivo El Lute no se resistía al cine a la fresquita. Tras ocultarse en Málaga durante más de un año y ser detenido en 1972, sus vecinos del Camino de Antequera confesaron que solo veían a los miembros del clan cuando acudían al cine de verano. Paradójicamente, Eleuterio Sánchez acabaría convirtiéndose años después en protagonista de sus propias películas con la cara de Imanol Arias. Unas cintas en la que se retrataba su agitado paso por Málaga.
A mediados de los ochenta, la crisis del cine también se llevó por delante las terrazas peliculeras, de las que ya solo funcionaban tres: las veteranas Las Palmeras y Cayri y la nueva sala Universal (Martínez de la Rosa), que se inauguró en 1985. No obstante, el último cine de verano que funcionó en Málaga se denominó Altamira y en realidad fue la versión modernizada del antiguo cine capuchinero La Fuente. Su empresario, Juan José Perles, lo mantuvo hasta 1992, ya que al año siguiente se encontró con que las obras en este espacio para construir un pabellón acababa con la historia de los cines de verano. Entonces intentó reflotar Los Galanes, pero no llegó a un acuerdo con la propiedad y se dio por vencido. «Hoy día, este tipo de negocio es una aventura: no son rentables en relación con la inversión que necesitan», se quejaba el último romántico de los cines de verano.
Pero de forma automática, el Ayuntamiento de Málaga se dejó llevar por la cinefilia nostálgica y rescató a comienzos de los 90 estas proyecciones en el recinto Eduardo Ocón. Unas sesiones gratuitas que también llevó a los barrios y que, finalmente, acabaron resurgiendo de forma masiva en las playas de Málaga con esa misma fórmula de cine de reestreno. Este verano ofrecen comedias, ‘thrillers’ y cine de animación de éxito reciente. Y no estaría mal que, si nos dejamos caer por una playa a la luz de los fotogramas, nos llevásemos una bolsa de pipas para homenajear aquellas antiguas noches de Cinema Paradiso.
Uno de los cines de verano más antiguos de España está en Córdoba: el Coliseo de San Andrés
Martín Cañuelo, gerente de Esplendor Cinemas -la empresa que gestiona los cuatro cines de verano de Córdoba-, tiene en su haber archivadores repletos de carteles que nos cuentan la historia fílmica y teatral del Coliseo de San Andrés, uno de los cines de verano más antiguos de España de los que aún se encuentran en activo. Fue el gestor cultural Antonio Cabrera, madrileño aunque enamorado de Córdoba, quien levantó este cine-teatro que lleva más de 80 años amenizando las calurosas noches de verano de Córdoba.
Tras su llegada a Córdoba, Cabrera dio a este edificio una clara arquitectura andaluza; un enorme patio donde las casas se levantaron a su alrededor, conformando así un perfecto círculo donde se ha concentrado la mejor oferta cultural. Ya en los años 60 se anunciaba como “el mejor local de la época” y su gerente no escatimaba en mensajes publicitarios para atraer al público cada noche.
Durante la gestión de la familia Cabrera, el Coliseo de San Andrés fue cine y teatro. La proyección de las películas se alternaba con verdaderos espectáculos de variedades: desde el teatro más puro hasta los musicales “o lo que los críticos llaman la ópera flamenca”, especifica Cañuelo. A lo largo de los años 40, 50 y 60, este último género fue realmente importante ya que en un mismo espectáculo cabían el baile, el cante y el humor.
El espacio anexo a la gran pantalla de este cine de verano, de trece metros por ocho de dimensión, también sirvió de escenario para la comedia y la revista musical, “lo que luego puso de moda Lina Morgan: un género musical a la española”. Aunque la hemeroteca recoge que este cine cerró sus puertas durante la guerra civil española, Cañuelo asegura que esa afirmación no es del todo correcta. El Coliseo de San Andrés “nunca se llegó a cerrar aunque entre 1936 y 1939 sí hubo temporadas más cortas, nada más”.
En manos de Martín Cañuelo desde 1986
Junto a este cine de verano, la familia Cabrera llegó a disponer de otros tres locales en 1947: El Rinconcito, El Duque de Rivas y Cinema España. Por estas fechas ya estaban también en funcionamiento el cine Delicias (1943) y el Fuenseca (1945). Tras el fallecimiento de Antonio Cabrera, la empresa pasó a manos de su hijo, quien, posteriormente, cedió el testigo a sus nietos hasta los años 80, momento en el que varias empresas se turnaron en la gestión de los cines. Todo se unificó en unas mismas manos con la llegada de Cañuelo en 1986.
La despoblación de esta zona del casco histórico de Córdoba, los derrumbes y las nuevas edificaciones hicieron que a partir de los años 90 desaparecieran buena parte de las salas de verano. En este punto, Cañuelo hace una nueva aclaración: es cierto que Córdoba llegó a disfrutar de hasta 50 cines de esta categoría, pero no todos se dieron simultáneamente en el tiempo. Asimismo, mientras que unos proliferaron en espacios de grandes dimensiones, otros lo hicieron en zonas de huertos, como los cines Olimpia, Delicias y Fuenseca.
El Coliseo de San Andrés, por su parte, es el único insertado en un patio de vecinos, lo que le da un aspecto aún más singular. De las viviendas que rodean a este cine, sólo cinco están habitadas. El resto requiere de un gran trabajo de rehabilitación que todavía no ha llegado. Durante las horas de proyección, las luces de las casas se apagan y los vecinos deben respetar las cerca de cuatro horas que dura la actividad diaria del cine.
Cuando el espectador atraviesa la puerta del Coliseo, el ambigú ya tiene preparados los bocadillos y las bebidas, el suelo está refrescado y sillas y mesas, limpias. Aunque la gestión de estos cines es complicada dado que requiere una enorme inversión, hay quienes todavía no renuncian a vivir una noche de verano en enclaves históricos para seguir manteniendo vivo un verdadero patrimonio material y humano.
Cines de verano: historia de los cines al aire libre
¿A quién no le apetece ver una película bajo las estrellas? En ‘Más de Uno’ con Begoña Gómez de la Fuente, hablamos de cines de verano, cómo surgieron, cuántos hay en España, cómo funcionan y cómo se encuentra el sector. El profesor de Historia del Arte de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela Jesús Ángel Sánchez y el propietario del Cinema Tomares, Rafael Cansino, nos cuentan todos los detalles sobre esta experiencia al aire libre.
El de Tomares, en Sevilla, es uno de esos cines que, desde hace más de medio siglo, no ha faltado a su cita ni un solo verano
La familia Cansino es la propietaria del cine de verano de Tomares que lleva más de medio siglo proyectando películas al calor del verano en esta población sevillana. A los Cansino lo del cine les viene en el ADN ya que están emparentados con una de las grandes estrellas de Hollywood, con la mismísima Rita Hayworth, nacida Margarita Carmen Cansino.
En los años 60, cuando abrió sus puertas, su actual propietario aún llevaba pantalón corto y ya ayudaba a su padre a colocar las sillas de tijera o recoger las entradas de los clientes. Con él recordamos cómo eran esas noches calurosas de los 60, con sesión doble, películas para todos los públicos, tortilla de patatas, abanico y gaseosa para calmar el calor.
«chess opening in which a pawn or piece is risked for advantage later,» 1650s, gambett, from Italian gambetto, literally «a tripping up» (as a trick in wrestling), from gamba «leg,» from Late Latin gamba «horse’s hock or leg» (see gambol (n.)).
Applied to chess openings in Spanish in 1561 by Ruy Lopez, who traced it to the Italian word, but the form in Spanish generally was gambito, which led to French gambit, which has influenced the English spelling of the word. The broader sense of «opening move meant to gain advantage» in English is recorded from 1855.
The Queen’s Gambit is one of the oldest and most reputable 1.d4 openings for White. Unlike 1.e4 openings, the Queen’s Gambit usually evolves into a strategic game rather than an all-out tactical battle. Despite being around for centuries, this opening is still one of the cornerstones of every elite players’ repertoire. It’s also an excellent choice for beginners and intermediate players.
Walter Tevis Was a Novelist. You Might Know His Books (Much) Better as Movies.
The wildly popular Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” has done for chess what Julia Child once did for French cooking. Chess set sales have skyrocketed; enrollment in online chess classes has surged. The series has been the subject of hundreds of articles and interviews. The novel that inspired the show, first published in 1983, has been on The New York Times’s trade paperback best-seller list for five weeks.
Yet little attention has been paid to Walter Tevis, the author whose creation has stirred all the commotion.
Tevis once pegged himself as “a good American writer of the second rank.” But Allan Scott, the screenwriter who first optioned “The Queen’s Gambit” in the 1980s, disagrees. Mr. Scott co-created and executive-produced the current Netflix show.
“I think very highly of Tevis,” he said in an email. “I think he was one of the best American writers of the 20th century. ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ lays out a terrific story very simply. Child, mother killed, orphanage, touch of genius, addiction. It’s Dickensian.” (It took decades to bring the book to the screen, Mr. Scott said, because studios thought the subject of chess was a commercial dead-end.)
Born in 1928, Tevis wrote six novels, a surprising number of which made high-profile leaps to the screen: “The Hustler,” about a young pool shark played by Paul Newman; “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” starring David Bowie as a lonesome alien; and “The Color of Money,” a follow-up to “The Hustler,” which won Mr. Newman his first Oscar. Tevis’s 1980 science fiction book, “Mockingbird,” a commentary on humanity’s dwindling interest in reading, has long had a modest cult following.
Tevis was a family man who played board games and fished with his kids; a popular professor of writing and literature at Ohio University in Athens; a cat-lover and movie aficionado; and a talented amateur chess and pool player. He was pale and gangly; some of his students called him “Ichabod Crane.” He was also a three-pack-a-day smoker, a serious gambler and an alcoholic who made several suicide attempts. His fiction often plumbs his psyche, metaphorically.
“He’s the hero of all his own books,” said his son, Will Tevis, 66, before correcting himself: “He’s the antihero.”
Tevis considered his terrain to be the world of underdogs.
“I write about losers and loners,” he told this newspaper in 1983. “If there’s a common theme in my work, that’s it. I invented the phrase ‘born loser’ in ‘The Hustler.’ In one way or another I’m obsessed with the struggle between winning and losing.”
Tevis was born in San Francisco, into what he called a “feelingless, uptight” home. His parents moved to Kentucky when he was 10. Because young Walter had a heart condition, his parents left him behind in a convalescent home, where he spent months drugged on phenobarbital like Beth Harmon, the main character in “The Queen’s Gambit.” In an essay published in 1990, Tevis’s first wife, Jamie, wrote: “He never got over the scars of the early experience with narcotics.”
Tevis believed that early experience fueled his later alcoholism.
When he left California to rejoin his family, Tevis found his new environment bewildering. In a 1981 interview, he said that “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” about an alien who lands in Kentucky and can’t adjust to life on this planet, was “disguised autobiography.”
“[It] has to do with my having moved from what I thought was the city of light, San Francisco, when I was 11, to Lexington, Kentucky, where I went to a tough Appalachian school in the fifth grade and was beaten up regularly,” Tevis said. (Tevis gave the movie version of the book a C-plus, calling it confusing, but when he met David Bowie found him to be “a wonderful man.”)
The day he turned 17, Tevis joined the Navy. On a ship home from Okinawa, he met Hilary Knight, who went on to illustrate the Eloise books. The two connected instantly, Mr. Knight, now 94, recalled, because both were “total misfits.”
“We were two people in a dream world, though his was much more logical than mine,” Mr. Knight said. “The other crew paid little or no attention to us. They didn’t want to know these weirdos. Walter was too smart, and the ship was full of dumbbells. We had a great time laughing about everything.”
“The Hustler,” drawn from Tevis’s rough-and-tumble pool hall experiences before and after the war, came out in 1959, followed by “The Man Who Fell to Earth” in 1963. Then, Tevis published almost nothing until 1980. He and his wife, whom he met when they taught at the same high school, raised two children while Tevis was at Ohio University. He played chess and shot pool, often with his colleague Daniel Keyes, who wrote “Flowers for Algernon.” Tevis drank heavily and his marriage suffered. Even so, his children remember Tevis as a devoted parent.
His daughter, Julia McGory, 63, said that his kids had experienced some of “the sadness and complexities of our father,” but “never doubted how much he loved us and enjoyed being with us.”
In the mid-1970s, Tevis sobered up, partly with help from Alcoholics Anonymous. Deeply frustrated by his writer’s block, he got a divorce and decided to try his creative luck in Manhattan. He began a relationship with, and eventually married, Eleanora Walker, who worked for his agent. He reconnected with Mr. Knight: “We became great friends again,” Mr. Knight said.
Tevis also regained his writerly mojo, finishing four more novels and a collection of short stories. He helped convince Paul Newman to star in the movie version of “The Color of Money.” He also wrote “The Queen’s Gambit”during those years.The writer Tobias Wolff called it an “overlooked masterpiece.”
“Tevis has a gift for vivid characterization and propulsive narratives,” Mr. Wolff said in an email. “His style is direct and efficient, never calling attention to itself; yet it grows in power through the course of a novel by its very naturalness.”
Describing young Beth learning a chess move in “The Queen’s Gambit,” Tevis wrote: “She decided not to take the offered pawn, to leave the tension on the board. She liked it like that. She liked the power of the pieces, exerted along files and diagonals. In the middle of the game, when the pieces were everywhere, the forces crisscrossing the board thrilled her. She brought out her king’s knight, feeling its power spread.”
More lyrically, as Beth sits bored in class, Tevis wrote that her “mind danced in awe to the geometric rococo of chess, rapt, enraptured, drawing in the grand permutations as they opened to her soul, and her soul opened to them.”
In the book, Beth is a harder-edged, less obviously triumphant character than in the Netflix series. Tevis once explained why he made the choice to portray a female chess champion. “Sometimes I was really more wrapped up in the idea of intelligence in women, for which I have an enormous respect and a kind of awe, more wrapped up in that even than the game of chess itself,” he said.
In a 1981 interview, Tevis said he’d realized in middle age that “life is worth living.” He hoped to write one book per year for the rest of his life. Just three years later, he died of lung cancer, at 56.
Tevis’s publishing career may not be over. His estate holds two unpublished children’s books, said Susan Schulman, the agent who represents it. “Gangster Cat” is the story of a New York City cat and his gang. “Turnip Island” is the story of a family who live on an island of nothing but mud.
“They are completely delightful,” Ms. Schulman said.
If he were still alive, Will Tevis said, his father would be “basking in glory right now. He had desires for the spotlight. He wanted to be known and noticed.”
“Will you teach me?” Mr. Shaibel said nothing, did not even register the question with a movement of his head. Distant voices from above were singing “Bringing in the Sheaves.” She waited for several minutes. Her voice almost broke with the effort of her words, but she pushed them out, anyway: “I want to learn to play chess.”
Mr. Shaibel reached out a fat hand to one of the larger black pieces, picked it up deftly by its head and set it down on a square at the other side of the board. He brought the hand back and folded his arms across his chest. He still did not look at Beth. “I don’t play strangers.” The flat voice had the effect of a slap in the face. Beth turned and left, walking upstairs with the bad taste in her mouth. “I’m not a stranger,” she said to him two days later. “I live here.” Behind her head a small moth circled the bare bulb, and its pale shadow crossed the board at regular intervals. “You can teach me. I already know some of it, from watching.” “Girls don’t play chess.” Mr. Shaibel’s voice was flat. She steeled herself and took a step closer, pointing at, but not touching, one of the cylindrical pieces that she had already labeled a cannon in her imagination. “This one moves up and down or back and forth. All the way, if there’s space to move in.” Mr. Shaibel was silent for a while. Then he pointed at the one with what looked like a slashed lemon on top. “And this one?” Her heart leapt. “On the diagonals.”
The Queen’s Gambit was a surprise smash for Netflix when it debuted on the platform in October 2020. In just four weeks, it became Netflix’s most-watched scripted miniseries ever and won itself a treasure trove of awards including 11Primetime Emmys and 2 Golden Globes – one being Best Actress In a Miniseries or Television Film for the show’s main star Anya Taylor-Joy. The show’s success sent shockwaves throughout the chess community. Inspired by Beth’s story, people all over the globe discovered or rediscovered their love for one of the world’s oldest games. Demand for chess sets hit an all-time high (and came rather unexpected for the team here at Regency Chess!) According to US figures, in the three weeks following the show’s debut, unit sales of chess sets jumped 87% and chess book sales rose a whopping 603%. But is the Queen’s Gambit a true story?
Is The Queen’s Gambit Based On a True Story?
No… but kind of. The character of Beth Harmon and her story is fictional. It came from the mind of writer Walter Tevis (1928 – 1984) way back in 1983 when the novel ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ was first published. At the time of release, there was fervent speculation on the inspiration for Beth Harmon. In a New York Times interview, Tevis denied that Beth was based on anyone in the chess community and considered ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ to be his ‘tribute to brainy women’. That’s not to say the show isn’t infused with real-life elements. Chess experts have praised the quality of the playing and have noted that many of Beth’s moves have even been modelled off of famous contests.
But what about Beth herself?
Beth & Bobby
Tevis was a keen chess player himself. In the acknowledgements of The Queen’s Gambit, the author mentions how he was inspired by the chess greats of the time, notably the Grandmasters Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, and Anatoly Karpov. Tevis writes:
“The superb chess of Grandmasters Robert Fischer, Boris Spassky and Anatoly Karpov has been a source of delight to players like myself for years. Since The Queen’s Gambit is a work of fiction, however, it seemed prudent to omit them from the cast of characters, if only to prevent contradiction of the record.”
Of all the chess legends who inspire Beth’s character and career, it’s Fischer who had the most obvious influence. Both had a difficult start in life and would become self-sufficient teens. Although Fischer didn’t grow up in an orphanage, he and his sister were raised by their single mother – who was homeless at the time of Bobby’s birth – and was shuttled to different schools as his mother sought ways to support her young family. Career-wise, there are also notable similarities. Both Fischer and Beth won the U.S. Championship whilst still in their teens (in the same year, 1967, no less.) Beth would have been 18 while Fischer became the youngest ever U.S. Champion at 14 years and 10 months. The last match we see Beth play is against the USSR’s Borgov in Moscow. The contest closely imitates Fischer’s 1972 ‘Match of the Century’ against Boris Spassky, also from the USSR. What’s more, both Fischer and Beth took time to learn Russian to prepare for their quest for chess greatness. That’s where the similarities end. Although Bobby Fischer had his demons (that would be a whole other article!) the reclusive Grandmaster isn’t known to have struggled with drugs or alcohol addiction.
Who influenced Beth’s addiction struggles?
Beth’s addiction to the fictional drug xanzolam, after being introduced to it as a child in an orphanage, is an important theme throughout the novel and series – and rather than a chess great, her issues with narcotics were inspired by non-other than her creator himself. In the 1983 New York Times article, Tevis admits to mixing a certain part of his background to form the Beth character. He says:
”When I was young, I was diagnosed as having a rheumatic heart and given heavy drug doses in a hospital. That’s where Beth’s drug dependency comes from in the novel.”
Tevis goes on to explain how cathartic it was to express this difficult experience through Beth:
“Writing about her was purgative. There was some pain – I did a lot of dreaming while writing that part of the story. But artistically, I didn’t allow myself to be self-indulgent.”
The endgame
Although a work of fiction, The Queen’s Gambit is littered with real-life elements and inspiration from the greats of chess. This ‘true feel’ has no doubt helped the show and its stars enjoy the enormous success it has achieved. While we wait (and hope!) for season two, we have time to reflect on Beth’s journey and improve our own chess game!
The Queen’s Gambit May Not Be a True Story, But the Chess Matches Are Very Real
he Queen’s Gambit has all the makings of a true story—a scrappy, once-in-a-generation prodigy, a meteoric rise from orphanage rags to designer riches, a globe-trotting historical setting, and a stunning triumph over adversity. But if you’re looking to Beth Harmon, the brilliant chess champion at the heart of the series, and hoping to find her real-life counterpart, you can expect to come up short. As it turns out, there’s no real-life Beth Harmon, by that name or another name.
That said, the show isn’t entirely imagined. Based on the same-titled 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, an American novelist and passionate amateur chess enthusiast, The Queen’s Gambit draws inspiration from the insular world of competitive chess, circa the 1950s and 1960s. That also explains why the search for a season two is fruitless. Though Beth herself is fictional, Tevis was inspired by the extraordinary talents of Grandmasters Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky, and Anatoly Karpov, whose chess games he described as “a source of delight to players like myself for years.”
Tevis sketched the character of Beth with an eye toward the remarkable accomplishments of the era’s most notable Grandmasters, but he also looked inward, informing her battle with drug addiction through elements of his own story, tellingThe New York Times, «I was born in San Francisco. When I was young, I was diagnosed as having a rheumatic heart and given heavy drug doses in a hospital. That’s where Beth’s drug dependency comes from in the novel. Writing about her was purgative. There was some pain—I did a lot of dreaming while writing that part of the story. But artistically, I didn’t allow myself to be self-indulgent.»
While Beth herself is a fictional character, the unforgettable games she plays are not. Many are based on real-life competitions, like the match in which she defeats Harry Beltik for the Kentucky State Champion title, which is derived from a 1955 game played in Riga, Latvia. The final showdown of the series, in which she faces off against Russian champion Vasily Borgov, was played in Biel, Switzerland in 1993. Among the most surprising real life matches pulled into the series is Beth’s final game of speed chess against Benny Watts, which was played at the Paris Opera in 1858.
To ensure the verisimilitude of these games and this insular world, The Queen’s Gambitworked with Bruce Pandolfini, a chess champion largely considered to be the United States’ most distinguished teacher of chess. Pandolfini coached numerous champions to prominence during the 20th century, making him the perfect choice to teach cast members how to play the game. Through Pandolfini, the show was able to consult with Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players of all time and a former child prodigy himself.
“[Kasparov] had so much to give on a personal level about what it’s like to be seven or ten years old and a genius, taken out of regular circumstances and having your life changed—family dynamics, the KGB, going to tournaments,” said executive producer William Holberg. “That was gold for us.”
Though Beth herself may not be real, her uphill battle against the sexism inherent in the world of competitive chess is all too accurate. Early in the series, we see tournament organizers sneer at a teenage Beth, attempting to dissuade her from competing. In her first match at the Kentucky State Championship, Beth is pitted against the only other female competitor, who explains that women must compete against one another before they are allowed to compete against men. This sexist attitude was ubiquitous at the time, reaching even and especially the upper echelons of the sport, with chess’s leading luminaries insisting that women would never scale the same heights as men. In a 1963 interview, Fischer said that female players were “terrible,” with the likely explanation being that “they are not so smart.” In 1966, the U.S. Women’s Championship prize was $600, while the male victor of the U.S. Championship was paid ten times that sum at $6000. To this day, that pay disparity remains unchanged, with male champions continuing to take home ten times the prize money awarded to women.
Until the 1986 World Chess Championship, when Susan Polgar fought to qualify and to remove the word “men’s” from the title, the championship was open only to male competitors. More than three decades later, only one woman has ever competed for the championship title: Judit Polgar, widely considered the best female player ever to play the game, who, in 2005, competed valiantly but failed to take the top prize.
To this day, competitive chess remains largely segregated by gender, with women disproportionately outnumbered everywhere from the world stage to high school chess clubs. As recently as 2018, just 14 percent of US Chess Federation players were women—which may seem a low number, but was in fact a record high. Jennifer Shahade, a two-time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion and the women’s program director at the U.S. Chess Federation, sees a bright future for women in chess, albeit one threatened by a familiar strain of sexism.
“There’s that combination of getting lots of positive attention and opportunities because you’re one of the few females in the game, whereas there’s also the negativity of trolls and scrutiny and overall questioning of whether girls and women belong,” Shahade said. “I think there are two parts to the world. [One] part is very excited to see girls and women play. And then there’s also some undercurrents of resentment. Especially as chess moves online, there are a lot of nasty comments written about girls and women.”
Though The Queen’s Gambit doesn’t pull punches in depicting Beth’s struggles to overcome the sport’s inherent sexism, it also posits that a female champion could be embraced around the world, with Beth beloved by passionate fans everywhere from Paris to Moscow. In writing the novel, Tevis envisioned a brighter future for chess, one where respect could be afforded to female players and equality could rule the day.
“I consider The Queen’s Gambit a tribute to brainy women,” Tevis said. “I like Beth for her bravery and intelligence. In the past, many women have had to hide their brains, but not today.»
Beth’s story may be a fiction, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t real women taking up her mandate to dominate the sport. In fact, there are currently 37 women ranked as Grandmasters, and there’s no telling how many more are in the making. Sure, there’s no “real Beth Harmon” now, but likely she’s out there—maybe even training in an orphanage basement with a janitor, just preparing to knock everyone out.
Fact 1: The History of Chess Extends Back Nearly 1500 Years
The game that we currently know as chess has experienced a truly fascinating history that extends back nearly 1500 years. The earliest version of chess developed in India in the 6th Century CE and was known as Chaturanga. From there, the game spread to Persia and soon became popular across the Islamic world. After this, chess spread into Europe and continued to develop. The game that we know today had finally evolved into what can more or less be called its current form by around the year 1500 CE.
Fact 2: The Second Book Printed in the English Language Was on the Subject of Chess
William Claxton’s 1476 book entitled The Game and Playe of Chesse holds the distinction of being the second work that was printed and published in the English language. Claxton was also the printer behind the release of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. This was the first book that was ever printed in English.
Given the fact that Gutenberg’s moveable type printing method only originated in 1439 in Germany, Claxton’s initial offerings in the English language take on a new level of significance. It is another one of those fascinating facts that is associated with the game of chess.
Fact 3: The Modern Chessboard Dates to 1090
Though the earliest form of chess dates back to 6th Century India, the game itself has undergone many transformations since that time. The game board itself has seen many different changes over the years as chess has passed through different cultures across the world.
One of the key elements that brought us closer to the game we know today is the arrival of what we can consider the first modern chessboard. This chessboard with light and dark squares that alternate made its first appearance in Europe in the year 1090.
Fact 4: It Took 269 Moves to Conclude the Longest Every Official Chess Game
In 1989, Ivan Nikolic and Goran Arsovic engaged in what became the longest ever chess game played in an officiated tournament. This game was played in Belgrade, Serbia. After 269 moves, the game finally ended in a draw.
Fact 5: Chess Playing Computers Have Defeated Some of the World’s Top Human Players
Chess-playing computers have made quite an impact on the game in recent decades. These computers, with names such as Deep Blue, Deep Fritz, and Hydra, have compiled wins over some of the world’s most respected Grandmasters such as Gary Kasparov, Veselin Topalov, and Alexander Khalifman, among others.
Fact 6: The Longest Possible Chess Game Is Nearly 8,850 Moves Long
The longest possible chess game involves thousands of potential moves. Though some sources claim that the longest possible game is 5,949 moves, others have calculated that it is as much as 8,848 moves. Regardless of which one of these calculations you choose to believe, the number of moves for the longest possible chess game is truly impressive.
Fact 7: The Total Number of Possible Chess Games Is Mind-Blowing
The number of possible chess games is truly mind-blowing. Famed American mathematician Claude Shannon came up with a figure, commonly referred to as the Shannon Number, of 10 to the power of 111 to as much as 10 to the power of 123. This number represents the total number of moves that are possible in chess. Perhaps even more shocking is the fact that this number is likely to be greater than the total number of atoms in the universe.
Fact 8: The Queen Was Not Always The Strongest Player on the Chess Board
Though it is a point of fact that the queen is the strongest player in the modern game of chess, this was not always the case. It was during the reign of Spain’s Queen Isabella that the queen on the chessboard took up her current position as the strongest player in the game.
Prior to this change in the late 15th century, when Isabella rose to become Europe’s most powerful woman, the queen was only able to move a single square at a time. It was Isabella’s rise to power that inspired the rule change that allowed for the queen to move in all directions!
Fact 9: There Are Some Chess Masters Who Can Successfully Play the Game Blindfolded
Blindfold chess might sound like a novelty but it is actually a skill that only high-level players can truly master. In blindfold chess, the players involved do not see the positions of the pieces. They are also not allowed to touch them. The moves are instead communicated using accepted chess terminology.
Blindfold chess is a practice that forces players to remember the positions of all the pieces by memory. Grandmasters such as Viswanathan Anand and Vladimir Kramnik are particularly notable for their skill in blindfold chess.
Fact 10: Russia Has Produced More Chess Grandmasters Than Any Other Country
It isn’t exactly a secret that chess is one of the most popular games in Russia. Beyond this, Russia has produced many of the world’s best players. The world chess rankings always include many players from Russia. The country has also produced more Chess Grandmasters than any other with a current total of 227.
Fact 11: The Concept of Checkmate Has Persian Origins
The concept of checkmate in chess stems from the game’s history in the Islamic world. It stems from the Persian term shh mt which translates to the king is helpless, the king is left unable to escape, or the king is frozen. It is this word that evolved into the current term of checkmate.
Fact 12: The Term Rookie Derives From the Game of Chess
The term rookie is used to describe a first-year player on a sports team. It is also used to describe pretty much anyone who is new whether it is a team, activity, or job. One of the fascinating facts about the term rookie is that it derives from the rook in chess. This is due to the fact that the rook is usually the last piece to go into action.
Fact 13: Playing Chess Can Help to Improve the Player’s Memory
Chess is certainly a lot of fun to play which is one of the primary benefits of Chess in and of itself. Beyond this, chess has also been shown to have the additional benefit of improving memory ability for those who play it. This is due to the fact that memory skills are such a key aspect of chess success.
Fact 14: Prior to 1561, Castling Required Two Moves
Though castling is one of the most important moves in chess, it did not start to evolve toward its current form until 1561. Before that year, castling in Chess was two separate moves as opposed to the single move that we know today.
Fact 15: The Longest Reigning World Chess Champion Held His Title for 27 Years
The longest reigning World Chess Champion in history was German chess player and mathematician Emanuel Lasker. He held the title of world champion for an incredible 27 years from 1894 until 1921.
Fact 16: Sandglasses Were Used Before the Invention of the Chess Clock
The world’s first chess clock was invented by England’s Thomas Bright Wilson in 1883. Prior to Wilson’s invention, the role of the chess clock was filled with sandglasses.
Fact 17: The Very First Folding Chess Board Dates to the 12th Century
Folding chessboards add a great deal of convenience when it comes to storing one’s game set between uses. Though it might come as a bit of a surprise, the first folding chessboard was invented by a priest in 1125 CE.
Fact 18: The First Chess Game Between Earth and Space Was Played in 1970
On the 9th of June in 1970, Russian cosmonauts Vitaly Sevastyanov and Andrian Nikolayev took some time away from their duties during a space flight. They did this so that they could play a chess game against players back on earth. Their opponents on earth were Nikolai Kamanin and Viktor Gorbatko.
Fact 19: The Youngest Ever World Chess Champion Was 17 Years Old
In 2021, Uzbek Chess Grandmaster Nodirbek Abdusattorov became the youngest ever Chess World Champion at the age of just 17. He accomplished this feat by winning the 2021 World Rapid Chess Championships.
Fact 20: The Sport of Chess Boxing Is a Real Thing
You might not normally associate the sport of boxing and the game of chess. Though this seems reasonable enough, the truth is that chess boxing is a real sport and it is gaining in popularity. It is a sport that includes alternating rounds of chess and boxing. There are even official sanctioning bodies for the sport such as Chess Boxing Global.
Berlin, Berlin, wie fahren nach Berlin! Die deutsche Hauptstadt ist für Besucher aus aller Welt so attraktiv wie nie zuvor. Im ersten Halbjahr 2013 reisten 5,3 Millionen Gäste an die Spree. Das ist ein Plus von fünf Prozent im Vergleich zum Vorjahreszeitraum, wie das Amt für Statistik und die Marketinggesellschaft Visit Berlin mitteilten.
Noch größer war der Zuwachs bei den Übernachtungen. Deren Zahl stieg um 9,2 Prozent auf 12,4 Millionen. Berlin schlägt München und Hamburg damit erneut ganz deutlich. In Europa liegt Berlin nach früheren Angaben an dritter Stelle hinter London und Paris.
München zählte nach jüngsten offiziellen Angaben im ersten Halbjahr mehr als 2,9 Millionen Gäste und über 5,9 Millionen Übernachtungen, in Hamburg waren es 2,76 Millionen Gäste und 5,34 Millionen Übernachtungen.
«In jeder einzelnen Minute kommen statistisch gesehen 20 Gäste in unsere Stadt», sagte Berlins Regierender Bürgermeister Klaus Wowereit (SPD) bei der Vorstellung der Halbjahresbilanz. In diesem Jahr werde es wieder einen Besucherrekord geben. «Wir rechnen mit 26 Millionen Übernachtungen.» Im vergangenen Jahr wurden 24,9 Millionen gezählt. Vor 20 Jahren – nicht lange nach dem Mauerfall – waren es erst 7,5 Millionen und vor 10 Jahren 11,4 Millionen.
Berlin belegte bereits zu den Mauerzeiten von 1961 bis 1989 einen gewissen Sonderstatus unter den deutschen Städten, und die Besichtigung des damaligen sog. „Antifaschistische Schutzwalls“ war – zumindest von West-Berlin aus gesehen – ein fester Programmpunkt für Schulklassen, Kegelvereine und ausländische Delegationen auf Berlin-Besuch. Den überragenden touristischen Stellenwert jedoch, den die Stadt mittlerweile inne hat, konnten nach dem Fall ihres wohl weltweit bekanntesten Bauwerks im November `89 weder deren Bewohner noch die Berliner Touristikbranche auch nur im Entferntesten erahnen.
Berlin heute gilt als „in, hip, angesagt, up to date, toll, spitze, amazing, exciting, mola mucho“, jedes Jahr zieht es mehr Besucher und Gäste in die fast schon global als Hort von Kreativität und Experimentierfreude gefeierte Stadt. Nicht wenige, die als Touristen kamen, bleiben länger als geplant oder auch gleich für immer bzw. für einige Jahre. Speziell jüngere Besucher schätzen die vielerorts noch vergleichsweise günstigen Preise in der deutschen Hauptstadt. Auch wenn sich immer mehr alteingesessene Berliner zunehmend und auch zu Recht über steigende Mieten beklagen, ist die sich langsam aber sicher wieder zur Metropole an der Spree entwickelnde Stadt gerade in Bezug auf Wohnkosten zumeist immer noch sehr viel erschwinglicher als etwa London, Paris oder auch New York. Nicht nur das tobende Leben in der Stadt macht den Reiz, sondern Berlin bietet auch ein attraktives Umland. Seen, Weiden und Wälder schaffen ein ansprechendes Ambiente um in eine Berlin Ferienwohnung einzukehren.
Rund 2,7 Mio. Menschen hatten zwischen 1949 und 1961 die DDR und Ost-Berlin verlassen: ein Flüchtlingsstrom, der etwa zur Hälfte aus jungen Leuten unter 25 Jahren bestand und die SED-Führung vor immer größere Schwierigkeiten stellte. Täglich passierten rund eine halbe Million Menschen in beide Richtungen die Sektorengrenzen in Berlin und konnten so die Lebensbedingungen vergleichen. Allein 1960 gingen etwa 200.000 Menschen dauerhaft in den Westen. Die DDR stand kurz vor dem gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Zusammenbruch.
Noch am 15. Juni 1961 erklärte der DDR-Staatsratsvorsitzende Walter Ulbricht, niemand habe die Absicht eine Mauer zu errichten [Film 0,81 MB]. Am 12. August 1961 gab der Ministerrat der DDR bekannt: «Zur Unterbindung der feindlichen Tätigkeit der revanchistischen und militaristischen Kräfte Westdeutschlands und West-Berlins wird eine solche Kontrolle an der Grenze der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik einschließlich der Grenze zu den Westsektoren von Groß-Berlin eingeführt, wie sie an den Grenzen jedes souveränen Staates üblich ist.» Dass sich diese Maßnahme in erster Linie gegen die eigene Bevölkerung richtete, der in Zukunft der Grenzübertritt untersagt war, erwähnte der Ministerrat nicht.
In den frühen Morgenstunden des 13. August 1961 [Film 5,80 MB] wurden an der Grenze des sowjetischen Sektors zu West-Berlin provisorische Absperrungen errichtet und an den Verbindungsstraßen das Pflaster aufgerissen. Einheiten der Volkspolizei, der Transportpolizei sowie der sogenannten Betriebskampfgruppen unterbanden jeglichen Verkehr an der Sektorengrenze. Wohl nicht ohne Hintersinn hatte die SED-Führung einen Ferien-Sonntag im Hochsommer für ihre Aktion ausgewählt.
In den nächsten Tagen und Wochen wurden die Stacheldrahtverhaue an der Grenze zu West-Berlin von Ost-Berliner Bauarbeitern unter scharfer Bewachung durch DDR-Grenzposten mit einer Mauer aus Betonplatten und Hohlblocksteinen ersetzt. Wohnhäusern, wie z.B. in der Bernauer Straße, in der die Gehwege zum Bezirk Wedding (West-Berlin), die südliche Häuserzeile aber zum Bezirk Mitte (Ost-Berlin) gehörten, wurden in die Grenzbefestigung einbezogen: Kurzerhand ließ die DDR-Regierung Hauseingänge und Erdgeschoss-Fenster zumauern. Die Bewohner konnten ihre Wohnungen nur noch von der Hofseite betreten, die in Ost-Berlin lag. Bereits im Jahr 1961 kam es zu zahlreichen Zwangsräumungen – nicht nur in der Bernauer Straße, sondern auch in anderen Grenzbereichen.
Durch den Mauerbau wurden von einem Tag auf den anderen Straßen, Plätze und Wohnquartiere geteilt und der Nahverkehr unterbrochen. Am Abend des 13. August sagte der Regierende Bürgermeister Willy Brandt vor dem Abgeordnetenhaus: «(…) Der Senat von Berlin erhebt vor aller Welt Anklage gegen die widerrechtlichen und unmenschlichen Maßnahmen der Spalter Deutschlands, der Bedrücker Ost-Berlins und der Bedroher West-Berlins (…)».
Am 25. Oktober 1961 standen sich amerikanische und sowjetische Panzer am «Ausländerübergang» Friedrichstraße (CheckpointCharlie) gegenüber: DDR-Grenzposten hatten zuvor versucht, Repräsentanten der Westalliierten bei Einfahrt in den sowjetischen Sektor zu kontrollieren. Dieses Vorgehen verstieß in den Augen der Amerikaner gegen das alliierte Recht auf ungehinderte Bewegungsfreiheit in der ganzen Stadt. 16 Stunden standen sich so, nur wenige Meter voneinander entfernt, die beiden Atommächte direkt gegenüber. Für die Zeitgenossen ein Moment allerhöchster Kriegsgefahr. Einen Tag später erfolgt auf beiden Seiten der Rückzug. Durch eine diplomatische Initiative von US-Präsident Kennedy hatte der sowjetische Staats- und Parteichef Chruschtschow für diesmal den Vier-Mächte Status von ganz Berlin bestätigt.
In der Folgezeit wurden die Sperranlagen weiter aus- und umgebaut und das Kontrollsystem an der Grenze perfektioniert. Die innerstädtische Mauer, die Ost- von West-Berlin trennte, hatte eine Länge von 43,1 Kilometern. Der Teil der Sperranlagen, der die übrige DDR an der Grenze zu West-Berlin abriegelte, war 111,9 Kilometer lang. Weit über 100.000 Bürger der DDR versuchten zwischen 1961 und 1988 über die innerdeutsche Grenze oder über die Berliner Mauer zu fliehen. Weit mehr als 600 Menschen wurden von Grenzsoldaten der DDR erschossen oder starben bei Fluchtversuchen; allein an der Berliner Mauer gab es zwischen 1961 und 1989 mindestens 136 Tote.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder – Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)
Win Wenders – Der Himmel über Berlin (1987)
Tom Tykwer – Lola rennt (1998)
Wolfgang Becker – Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck – Das Leben der Anderen (2006)
Franziska Meyer Price – Berlin, Berlin – Der Film (2020)
Burhan Qurbani – Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020)
Lieder über Berlin:
Nina Hagen – Berlin (1992)
Liedtext:
Wir tanzen und verfuehren Wir singen und beruehren Wir herrschen und betruegen Wir kriechen und wir luegen We’re loving and romancing We’re singing and we’re dancing We beat it when we need it We’re lying and keep smiling Wir leben bis wir schweben Wir hoffen und wir beten Wir trinken und wir essen Wir lachen und vergessen Was die Leute reden ist wie der Wind Es rauscht and mir vorbei Wir brauchen Worte, die Verbindung schaffen Von vorurteilen frei Berlin!! Berlin!! Ich liebe die Stimmung L’atmosphere c’est tres bizarre Right over here Chez toi at the «Tempodrom» At the «Tunnel» and the «Q» Over here Avec un rendez-vous Toujour retour c’est la vie Ma oui oui oui oui oui oui oui C’est la vie! We all gotta choose If we gonna win or if we gonna lose We all gotta choose If we gonna win or if we gonna lose Berlin!! Berlin!! Osten, Westen werden hell, Ja die grosse Stadt ist schnell! Send me a postcard if you please C’est royale, c’est manifique Osten, Westen werden hell, Ja die grosse Stadt is schnell! Send me a postcard if you please C’est royale, c’est manifique Berlin!! Berlin!! We all gotta choose If we gonna win or if we gonna lose We all gotta choose If we gonna win or if we gonna lose
[Refrain] Wenn man sich schön macht auch wenns hässlich ist Berlin Berlin Berlin Und wenn Stefan plötzlich Steffi ist Berlin Berlin Berlin Wenn man nicht aus Deutschland kommt und trotzdem echt Berliner ist Das ist Berlin Berlin Berlin Berlin Berlin Berlin Oh oh oh oh oh Berlin Berlin Berlin Oh oh oh oh oh Berlin Berlin Berlin
[Refrain] Wenn man sich schön macht auch wenns hässlich ist Berlin Berlin Berlin Und wenn Stefan plötzlich Steffi ist Berlin Berlin Berlin Wenn es alles gibt und du dich fragst wie das zusammen passt Das ist Berlin Berlin Berlin Berlin Berlin Berlin Oh oh oh oh oh Berlin Berlin Berlin Oh oh oh oh oh das ist Berlin Berlin Berlin Wenn es alles gibt und du dich fragst wie das zusammen passt Das ist Berlin Berlin Berlin Berlin Berlin Berlin
Du bist der Hustle von New York, du bist Paris zur Renaissance Du wirkst so primitiv doch schmiedest kulturelles Gold Du bist randvoll mit Action die dich andauernd verändert Du urbanes Paradies – egal, wie man dich dreht und wendet In deinen Mauern steckt Geschichte von Weltkriegen und Ländern Jede noch so harte Krise hast du irgendwie gehandelt DDR-Nostalgie, gepaart mit Fashion Week und Haute Couture Herz der Rebellion, 1. Mai, verschließ die Tür Bist Widersprüchlichkeit – du demonstrierst, du streikst Du warst Kommune 1 – du warst stets am Puls der Zeit Und weil nichts bleibt wie es bleibt – Konvergenz von Politik Einst wich das Berliner Stadtschloss dem Palast der Republik Elektronische Kultur – Berlin Calling in die Welt Bist immer knapp bei Kasse – brauchst immer dringend Geld Ein Leben für den Punk, bist das Kreuzberger Raclette Bist der Darkroom aus’m Berghain im Quartier 206 Du duftest so speziell, dein Geruch macht leute witziger Friedrichshain riecht wie San Francisco in den 70ern Du bist wie du bist, die Stadt unter den Städten Du bist arty Peoples Mekka, Berlin Mitte ist Manhattan Wunderschöne Silhouette … des Sündenbabylons Kudamm ist der Broadway und Kreuzberg die Bronx Doch dich gibt es nicht umsonst, zollst ‘n hohen Preis Du saugst alles in dir auf, ob die Welt das je begreift? Max Schmelings Nummer 1 im Lunapark Halensee Warst Bar 25 Romantik an der Spree Karaokechor im Mauerpark Vergnügungskomitee Du bist Ost und West, du bist Drum’n’Base und Ingwertee Du bist der Herthakahn, der Fernsehturm dein Flaggenmast Hattest schon die Welt zu Gast – bei dir im Admiralspalast Bist die Weltstadt der Kultur und Sinfonie von Großstadt Deine Partitur – so legendär wie Mozart Bist die verlockende Botschaft in den Tiefen des Morasts Schere, Stein, Papier oder Oberbaumer Brückenschlacht Auch wenn du selten lachst – kommst mit jedem klar Der EasyJet-Tourismus – kommt bald auch aus Afrika Egal wo sie auch herkommen, hast sie alle hart gemacht X Generationen um Jahre um den Schlaf gebracht Hauptstadt – Regierungssitz – spielst politisch Schach Bist 24 Stunden wach, die Lichter tanzen in der Nacht Wer kann schon widerstehen, wenn Berlinskaya lacht Hast so vieles zu entdecken, Heimatkunde ist mein Lieblingsfach Egal, was ich schon weiß – du machst mich nur neugieriger Inhaliere stapelweise allerfeinste Berolinika Ich hab es akzeptiert, mein Herz schlägt immer hier Du bist die Liebe meines Lebens, ganz egal, was auch passiert Wie ein blinder Passagier, die Motte in das Licht Und für mich – gibt’s für immer nur noch dich Bin immer wieder überrascht, wie vielen Sprachen du sprichst Zeig dein wahres Gesicht heute Nacht im nackten Abendlicht Dein roughes Tempo – chaotischer als Bangkok Dein schäbiger Charme der sie weltweit alle anlockt Ach mensch Berlin, schon dein Name ist gewaltig Bist eine Blüte, die sich jede Nacht entfaltet Deine Häuser wie Kalligrafie – verwittert und gealtert Postmoderner Stil – historisch umgestaltet Vom Herz alternativ und mit Liebe kontrovers Bist Hauptstadt deutscher Ordnung, aber Ordnung is’ ein Scherz Bist niemals leicht erklärt, dermaßen konträr Du bist einerseits so hart, doch dein Logo ist ein Teddybär Bist das Kunstaushängeschild der ganzen Bundesrepublik Und jeder kleine Fleck der von mir unbesungen blieb Bist Boxhagener Platz, Monbijou und Mauerpark Sitzt mit abgefuckten Chucks im Metropolenaufsichtsrat Dein Ruf hallt um die Welt, irgendwie bist du das neue Rom Warst schon immer eigen, immer anders, immer unkonform Zirkusattraktionen, denkst in andren Dimensionen Anti aus Prinzip, schwimmst gegen, anstatt mit dem Strom Arabische Cafés und die Heimat deutscher Türken Deine schroffe Schönheit – verteilt auf 12 Bezirke Das alte Scheunenviertel wie Soho und Tribeca Kreuzberger Kneipen, verstreut an jeder Ecke Du bist Karl Marx-, Frankfurter- und Landsberger-Allee Hast das breit sein fast erfunden und im Sommer sogar Schnee Auch wenn du das hier hörst, heißt es nicht, dass du’s verstehst Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln – Berlin an der Spree
Ich steh an meiner Ecke und ich sing Mein kleines Liedchen über dich Berlin Noch einmal Ey watn los los der Berliner Dialekt […] wir von unserer Ecke haben großen Durst wir wollen flousen aufm […] kein Gepose auf unsrem Schoße hinten Hände aus den Taschen rein uns los wir essen Ferkel(?) und wir bleiben auf dem Kurs bei allen Frauen dieser Welt- da kein Sturz Wir machens kurz
Berlin! Du bist so wunderbar (3x)
Big up! Berliner Jungen gegen die Mauer im Kopf Berliner Jungen passen nicht in euern Kopf Köpf mich an und wir kommen in buzz [..] Potz blitz! Wir haben alles in der Stadt das ist kein Witz Die Berliner Luft entgeht so nicht Berliner Kids Passendes Stück. Dabei ist, wer vorne sitzt […] Ich frag: was ist der Unterschied von unsrer Art zu Leben und der der Community Es ist doch jeden Tag dasselbe Lied Wir checken Rythm für Beat Denn das ist, was uns liegt Ihr werdet sehn wie viel Wind wir säen Sagt bitte nicht ihr könnt es nicht verstehn Wir sind erwacht und wir werden uns sehn Was uns sowieso gehört, es werden Stürme wehen
Buster Keaton was something of an enigma to his own era. The silent-film star launched himself between rooftops, battled storms and sand dunes, boarded moving vehicles – and frequently trailed behind them, perfectly horizontal and as suspended as our disbelief – all in the name of comedy, and all while seeming unfazed. Film historian Peter Kramer, in his essay The Makings of a Comic Star, contends that Keaton’s «deadpan performance was seen as a highly inappropriate response to the task of creating characters which were rounded and believable». His unrelenting imperturbability was misinterpreted as a lack of emotional expression, or perhaps acting skill.
Nowadays we applaud performances that exhibit this level of restraint, wowed by microscopic gestures that hint at subtext, but refuse to spell it out. As Slate’s movie critic and author Dana Stevens points out in Camera Man, a new biography-meets-cultural-history about Buster Keaton and the birth of the 20th Century, «[Keaton] was ahead of his time in many ways». It is exactly this prescience and timelessness that makes Buster Keaton a figure ripe for reference in contemporary performance. His type of minimalism, stoicism and lyricism transcended the 20th Century, and can be seen on-screen now perhaps more than ever.
Stevens cites Keaton’s «self-contained stillness» as his «secret weapon», and we can see its weaponisation in the opening sequence of The Cameraman (1928) in which Buster aspires to be a newsreel cameraman in order to impress a girl. As an excited crowd gathers, yelling and gesticulating, to celebrate and capture the marriage of two famous individuals, Buster is caught in the melee and squashed against the woman who will claim his heart. He is a picture of enraptured calm amid the clamour.
That calmness or stoicism, despite deep inner turmoil, is something that can also be located in Oscar Isaac’s critically-acclaimed performance in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Speaking to Scott Feinberg on the Awards Chatter podcast, Isaac reveals that the starting point for his singer-songwriter character Llewyn in The Coen Brothers’ folk music odyssey was indeed Buster Keaton. «I thought that was a great inspiration for me», says Isaac, who wanted to tap into what he calls a «comedy of resilience» and to adopt a facial expression that «doesn’t really change but has a melancholy to it». And so Isaac subtracted smiling from his arsenal of expressions to birth a character who is frustrated with the world and everyone in it.
But stillness isn’t blankness. As both Keaton and Isaac convey, a limited palette can still paint many colours. There is one scene in Inside Llewyn Davis during which Isaac’s sardonic melancholia feels particularly Keatonesque – although the entire sequence where he carries a cat onto the subway, his face glazed in faint irritation, before having to lurch after said feline on a crowded carriage, could be a silent comedy – and that’s the car ride with John Goodman’s Roland Turner. Llewyn rides up front with beat poet and valet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund) and Goodman’s cocky, cane-toting jazz musician reclines in the backseat. Upon snoring himself awake he begins to prod Llewyn with both questions and cane. When he discovers that Llewyn is a Welsh name, and launches into a long and uninteresting story, Isaac’s face remains placid. But there is a perceptible smirk, a lick of the lips and a glance out the window that says: «this guy is unbelievable». Down the road and more deeply exasperated, Llewyn reveals that he’s a solo act «now» because his partner Mike «threw himself off the George Washington Bridge». There is barely a glimmer of grief, just a stony stare into the middle distance as Isaac’s big brown eyes concentrate on the road ahead, but still betray the sadness within.
That stare undeniably shares heritage with Keaton. In the book The Look of Buster Keaton, French film critic Robert Benayoun offers a series of insightful essays alongside strikingly rendered images of Keaton’s face, in which his solemnity is on full display. Benayoun posits that «the aim of every close-up» in a Keaton film was to «confront us with [his] gaze. When Buster stares at some unexpected obstacle, in the offscreen space overhead, his gaze makes that obstacle, surprise or danger, or marvel visible… Keaton was the comedian of deliberate attention, intense and dynamic reflection; we can see him thinking» – just as we can see Llewyn contemplating Mike in that car.
Isaac isn’t alone in exhibiting this trend towards minimalist acting, or what Shonni Enelow, an academic and author called «recessive aesthetics» in a 2016 article for Film Comment. Compared to Method performances, which functioned within a framework of «tension and release» and generated performances that were «feverish, agitated [and] on the edge of eruption», a remote performance is marked by tiny expressions, contained intensity and «a refusal of big reactions or loud moments». Enelow points to Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, Rooney Mara in Carol and Michael B Jordan in Fruitvale Station, and offers up a reading of their «emotional withdrawal in these performances as a response to a violent or chaotic environment».
Keaton might have done it for laughs more than integrity, but he too saw the value in responding to unpredictable and dangerous events with a stoic shrug or exhalation. This minimalism is also surely part of the reason he’s endured. Critic and film historian Imogen Sara Smith points out that «the coolness and subtlety of his style [is] very cinematic in terms of recognising that the camera can pick up very, very small effects». That contemporary acting has become much more internalised and naturalised could be «the reason why he translates more [than other stars of his era] in terms of style of performance», posits Smith.
This recessive melancholy is equally visible in Awkwafina’s performance in Lulu Wang’s 2019 tragicomedy The Farewell. As The New Yorker observed, «[Awkwafina] gives a master class in hangdoggery«, as Chinese-born, US-raised Billi, who returns to Changchun after discovering that her grandma Nai-Nai has weeks to live. After Billi’s family decide not to tell Nai-Nai she’s dying, she is forced into a mode of repression. The contrivance of that composure can be seen in the fact that prior to and upon learning of Nai-Nai’s fate she is humorous, sassy and indignant. The shock of this news is etched all over her face, which doesn’t go unnoticed by her mother: «Look at you, you can’t hide your emotions». For the sake of her grandma, she learns how. As such, it differs from Keaton and Isaac’s mode of performance which is grounded in immutability.
However, Billi’s alienation in a culture that is both hers and not hers chimes with the way Keaton is often seen to be performing social conventions. Billi’s Uncle Haibin explains, «We’re not telling Nai-Nai because it’s our duty to carry this emotional burden for her», and he chastises Billi and her father’s westernised desire to tell the truth. Billi finds herself having to adapt to eastern values, no matter how uncomfortable they make her. Likewise, Keaton frequently played into the «innocent abroad» archetype; naive in the ways of life and love. In Sherlock Jr (1924) he studies a manual How To Be a Detective, shadows a man and in doing so replicates his walk, and finally, when he gets a moment alone with his love interest in the projection room of a cinema, must look towards the actors on screen to figure out how to kiss her. There is an awareness of performance in Keaton’s persona and Sherlock Jr is just one instance where you see him modifying it according to what might be expected of him.
Similarly, Awkwafina moves between performance styles according to what is required of Billi, and there are moments of emotional release where she pivots into Method acting, as when Billi admits to her mother that as a child she was often «confused and scared because [her parents] never told [her] what was going on». But then she recedes and gives herself over to «hangdoggery». Keaton too gave a masterclass in that.
A less disputed element of Keaton’s performance style was his sheer athleticism or what Stevens describes as his «signature kineticism». Which brings me on to Adam Driver. I could point to his thoughtful repose in Paterson, his slapstick humour in Marriage Story or his deadpan delivery in The Dead Don’t Die as indicative of a Keaton-ness. However it was in last year’s macabre rock opera Annette, directed by Leos Carax, that Driver demonstrated a «full-bodied enthusiasm and physicality», as Little White Lies’ Hannah Strong put it, that more forcefully summoned the spirit of Keaton.
That skittish, unpredictable physicality is first apparent in Driver’s Henry McHenry, an aggressively macho comedian with a reputation for «mildly offensive» jokes, when he stalks on to stage (having just eaten a banana) to rapturous applause. Before long he has burst into song and is leaping and frolicking about with what IndieWire called «balletic precision», in a manner that resembles both Denis Lavant in Mauvais Sang (1986) and Keaton in Grand Slam Opera (a low-budget short he co-wrote and starred in for Educational Pictures in 1936).
Lucidity and precision
«The other thing that’s really distinctive about [Keaton],» explains Smith, «is this lucidity and precision». Although he was not a formally trained dancer, his acrobatics are full of the kind of rigour, lyricism and rhythm that any dancer would kill for. «Every little movement that he makes with his face or his body is very clear, but in a way that doesn’t feel mechanical,» continues Smith. «He had incredible control over everything he did.» It is unsurprising then, that there are several actor-dancers (including Lavant) who also simulate Keaton with their level of control.
The first person who comes to mind is Miranda July, who The New Yorker once described as having «the steely fragility of Buster Keaton», and who performs an abstract dance sequence in her 2011 sophomore feature The Future. The performance – made up of precise and sometimes melancholic bodily contortions – shares a lineage with the American dance company Pilobolus (I cannot claim to be the first to notice this) who take their name from a fungus that «propels itself with extraordinary strength, speed and accuracy».
The second person is Ariane Labed, a Greek-French actress for whom dance is a recurring feature: she was cast as a synchronised swimmer in the 2020 TV series Trigonometry, had the best moves in The Lobster’s silent disco, and schools us in the art of synchronised gesture during Attenberg’s semi-dance sequences. The director of the latter film, Athina Rachel Tsangari, unsurprisingly singled Keaton out, in an interview with Culture Whisper, as an inspiring «composer of human movement».
In Annette, there is a pivotal scene onboard a ship in which the narrative reaches an emotional crescendo. There is a storm brewing, and a drunken Henry (Driver) attempts to waltz with his wife Ann (played by Marion Cotillard) across the stern. Driver’s body now mirrors Keaton’s in its perpetual motion. Despite their difference in stature they are both industrious and powerful, and more than just the specificity of their movement, its effect is such that you are never quite sure what will happen next, or what they’re capable of. Moreover, they exert their physicality in a way that displays a tendency towards possessiveness and machismo. In The Cameraman (1928), Keaton kicks another man into a swimming pool for talking to his date. This anticipates a scene in which Henry wrestles a man known only as The Accompanist into his pool, having had suspicions that he posed a threat to the titular baby Annette.
The other aspect of physicality that Keaton and Driver share is their sex appeal. Returning to the words of Benayoun, he observes a sense of «the sublime in Keaton… He’s glamorous. He’s gorgeous. [He has a] sculptural sexiness». Not to gush too freely, but Driver is another such sublime specimen; a figure of extreme masculinity and muscularity. And what could be more glamorous than Henry McHenry riding his motorcycle, before kissing Ann with his helmet still on? Keaton and Driver have a commanding presence in common, and when they are on screen, you simply cannot take your eyes off them.
Keaton’s performance style is known for its deadpan execution. No matter the ridiculousness of the gag – he liked a banana skin as much as any comedian – his face remains a picture of steadfast seriousness. As Smith points out, it is this contrast between his «deadpan serenity [and] his body constantly [being] subjected to all these indignities [that is] the essence of him as a performer».
Filmmaker and comedian Richard Ayoade frequently channels Keatons deadpan-ness, and often cites him as a point of reference when working with actors. In a 2014 interview, Ayoade reveals that he had Jesse Eisenberg watch Buster Keaton’s films before starring in his sophomore feature The Double, feeling that they could demonstrate a «sense of someone acknowledging that everything bad that happens to them shouldn’t come as a surprise».
Deadpan delivery and that lack of surprise are also notable in Donald Glover’s acting. In Atlanta, the Emmy-winning comedy TV series about two cousins trying to work their way up in Georgia’s music industry, Glover (who created and co-writes the show) stars as Earn Marks, an aspiring talent manager who approaches life with a stone-cold sobriety. «Van’s dating other people, she’s going to kick me out of the house [and] I’m also broke,» sighs Earn in the pilot episode, as he explains his current situation with his baby’s mother to a colleague, with a subdued weariness.
Earn’s expressionlessness doesn’t mean that he’s devoid of emotion; when he hears his cousin Paper Boi’s new track on the radio – having got it into the hands of a producer – he breaks out into a genuine smile. Rather, it serves to underscore the absurdity of modern existence. He is no longer outraged or surprised when setbacks come his way. In the pilot, the biggest reaction he can muster when a white acquaintance drops «the n word» twice in conversation is mild offence. No matter what happens, be it a man on a bus feeding Earn a nutella sandwich or a pet alligator strolling out of his Uncle Willy’s house, there is a level of apathy to Earn’s deadpan response because on some level, he’s seen it all before. And like Keaton, he’s just trying to survive.
Keaton’s films have likewise been considered a response to the absurdity of modern existence. His characters endlessly invite and contend with calamity, existing in a world where structures – both mechanical and architectural – are in a constant state of precarity, and where the elements themselves (he is perpetually battling wind and rain) have turned against him. In the 1920 two-reel comedy One Week, Keaton and his new wife attempt to build a DIY house. They fail miserably. As Dana Stevens notes in Camera Man, «the resulting structure makes the cabinet of Dr Caligari look Grecian in its symmetry». After a freight train crashes through the building, they stick a «For Sale» sign in the rubble, and head for new pastures. You could just as easily see Keaton describing this character as homeless but «not real homeless» as when Earn defends his peripatetic living situation.
That said, there are of course other authors of this deadpan mode of expression who may well have influenced performers such as Glover. As Tina Post – an assistant professor at the University of Chicago specialising in racial performativity and deadpan aesthetics – asserts «the term [deadpan] precedes Buster Keaton or is coterminous with his rise». Post also points out that «the way that Keaton couples a blank expression with a bodily endurability is very much in line with American constructions of blackness.» Post is quick to point out that expanding the definition or lineage of deadpan isn’t a condemnation of Keaton himself, but rather a consideration of «the ways performatives move through American culture». Much as in the way the 20th Century’s benighted use of blackface has evolved to allow for its memorable subversion, or rather inversion, in the Teddy Perkins episode of Atlanta.
This chimes with the way Keaton himself has migrated through screen culture, ever accessible and influential, with aspects of his performance style being adopted, reacted to and modified in order to suit a range of bodies, genres and purposes. There is still no-one quite like Keaton: the tension and contradiction in his comedy is as unique now as it was in the 1920s. However, it feels safe to say that the restraint as well as the commitment present in these acclaimed, 21st-Century performances owe a debt to a filmmaker and performer who figured out not just how to take a camera apart and put it back together again, but what it was capable of capturing and expressing.
Critics like to create causes. If a pair of new Grover Cleveland biographies appears, we say that, with the prospect of a President returning to win a second term after having been defeated at the end of his first, who else would interest us more than the only President who has? In reality, the biographers started their work back when, and now is when the biographies just happen to be ready. And so it is with the appearance of two significant new books about the silent-film comedian Buster Keaton. We start to search for his contemporary relevance—the influence of silent-comedy short subjects on TikTok?—when the reason is that two good writers began writing on the subject a while ago, and now their books are here.
The truth is that Keaton’s prominence has receded, probably irretrievably, from where it stood half a century ago—a time when, if you were passionate about movies, you wore either the white rose of Keaton or the red rose of Chaplin and quarrelled fiercely with anyone on the other side. In Bertolucci’s wonderful movie about the Paris revolt of May, 1968, “The Dreamers,” two student radicals, French and American, nearly come to blows over the relative merits of Charlie and Buster: “Keaton is a real filmmaker. Chaplin, all he cares about is his own performance, his own ego!” “That’s bullshit!” “That’s not bullshit!” Meanwhile, Janis Joplin growls on the stereo behind them.
In a weird way, the terms of the quarrel derived from the German Enlightenment philosopher Gotthold Lessing’s search for the “essence” of each art form: poetry does time, sculpture does space, and so on. To the Keaton lovers, Chaplin was staginess, and therefore sentimentality, while Keaton was cinema—he moved like the moving pictures. Chaplin’s set pieces could easily fit onto a music-hall stage: the dance of the dinner rolls in “The Gold Rush” and the boxing match in “City Lights” were both born there imaginatively, and could have been transposed there. But Keaton’s set pieces could be made only with a camera. When he employs a vast and empty Yankee Stadium as a background for the private pantomime of a ballgame, in “The Cameraman,” or when he plays every part in a vaudeville theatre (including the testy society wives, the orchestra members, and the stagehands), in “The Play House,” these things could not even be imagined without the movies to imagine them in. The Keaton who created the shipboard bits in “The Navigator” or the dream scene in “Sherlock Jr.” was a true filmmaker rather than a film-taker, a molder of moving sequences rather than someone who pointed the camera at a stage set. (One could make similar claims for the superior cinematic instincts of Harold Lloyd, who tended to get dragged into these arguments in much the same way that the Kinks get dragged into arguments about the Beatles and the Stones—though Lloyd, like Ray Davies, was such a specialized taste that he could only extend, not end, an argument over the virtues of the other two.)
Take the long sequence toward the end of “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” (1928), in which Keaton, playing an effete, Boston-educated heir who rejoins his father, a short-tempered Southern steamboat captain, gets caught in a cyclone that pulverizes a small town. The episode is breathtaking in its audacity and poetry, an unexampled work of pure special-effects ballet. The houses explode, in a thousand shards of wood, as Keaton wanders among them. The moment when the façade of a house falls on Keaton, who is saved by a well-placed attic window, has been “memed” as the very image of a narrow escape. But it is merely an incident in a longer sequence that begins when the roof and walls of a hospital building are whisked away like a magician’s napkin; then a much bigger house falls on Keaton, who, accepting it neutrally, grabs a tree trunk and holds tight as it flies across town and into the river. Nothing like it had ever been seen in a theatre, or even imagined in a book, so specific are its syntax and realization to moving pictures.
How are we to share these glories in 2022? Fortunately, Cohen Films has produced mint-quality restorations of all the great movies, and Peter Bogdanovich’s last work, the 2018 documentary “The Great Buster,” is a terrific anthology of highlights. Even more fortunately, those two new books, each excellent in its way, are weirdly complementary in their completeness. James Curtis’s “Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life” (Knopf) is an immense year-by-year, sometimes week-by-week, account of Keaton as an artist and a man. Every detail of his life and work is here, starting with his birth, in 1895, as Curtis painstakingly clarifies which of two potential midwives attended to the matter. (Mrs. Theresa Ullrich rather than Mrs. Barbara Haen, for the record.) His perpetually touring and performing parents, Joe and Myra, had been on the road when it happened, in the one-horse town of Piqua, Kansas. Curtis takes us through the progress of the brutal comedy act that Joe Keaton raised his son to star in; things were so hard at the turn of the century that at one point Harry Houdini, with whom the three Keatons shared a show, had to pretend to be the kind of psychic he despised in order to draw the rubes into the theatre. We even hear about gags that Buster Keaton helped invent for Abbott and Costello in his later, seemingly fallow, years.
Dana Stevens, in “Camera Man” (Atria), takes an original and, in a way, more distanced approach to Keaton. In place of a standard social history of silent comedy, much less a standard biography, Stevens offers a series of pas de deux between Keaton and other personages of his time, who shared one or another of his preoccupations or projects. It’s a new kind of history, making more of overlapping horizontal “frames” than of direct chronological history, and Stevens does it extraordinarily well.
Some of these pairings, to be sure, are more graceful than others. The comedienne Mabel Normand appears for the somewhat remote reason that Chaplin refused, early in his career, to be directed by her, a fact that’s taken as an index of the misogyny that reigned in the world of silent comedy. (The truth is that Chaplin, a once-in-a-century talent, routinely bullied anyone who tried to tell him what to do.) On the other hand, a chapter on Robert Sherwood and Keaton is genuinely illuminating. Sherwood, now forgotten despite four Pulitzers and an Oscar, was one of those writers whose lives reveal more about their time than do the lives of those writers gifted enough to exist outside their time. The author of well-made, well-meaning plays advancing progressive causes—he ended up as one of F.D.R.’s chief speechwriters—he championed Keaton, notably in the pages of Life, with acute discernment, a reminder that the categories of popular culture and serious art were remarkably permeable in the twenties. Just as Hart Crane was writing poetry about Chaplin when Chaplin was still only very partly formed, Sherwood recognized Keaton’s greatness almost before it seemed completely manifest. Writing about Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton in the early twenties, he maintained that their efforts “approximate art more closely than anything else that the movies have offered.” Sherwood even wrote a feature for Keaton, which, like James Agee’s attempt at writing a movie for Chaplin, proved unmakeable. Sherwood’s script got Keaton marooned high up in a skyscraper but couldn’t find a way of getting him down. When Keaton and Sherwood saw each other in later years, Sherwood promised to get him down, but never did.
Keaton seems to have been one of those comic geniuses who, when not working, never felt entirely alive. He fulfilled the Flaubertian idea of the artist as someone whose whole existence is poured into his art: the word “dull” crops up often as people remember him. Curtis is particularly good on the early years. Joseph Frank Keaton spent his youth in his parents’ knockabout vaudeville act; by the time he was eight, it basically consisted of his father, Joe, picking him up and throwing him against the set wall. Joe would announce, “It just breaks a father’s heart to be rough,” and he’d hurl Buster—already called this because of his stoicism—across the stage. “Once, during a matinee performance,” Curtis recounts, “he innocently slammed the boy into scenery that had a brick wall directly behind it.” That “innocently” is doing a lot of work, but all this brutality certainly conveyed a basic tenet of comedy: treating raw physical acts, like a kick in the pants, in a cerebral way is funny. “I wait five seconds—count up to ten slow—grab the seat of my pants, holler bloody murder, and the audience is rolling in the aisles,” Keaton later recalled. “It was The Slow Thinker. Audiences love The Slow Thinker.”
A quick mind impersonating the Slow Thinker: that was key to his comic invention. The slowness was a sign of a cautious, calculating inner life. Detachment in the face of disorder remained his touchstone. Of course, stoicism is one of the easier virtues to aspire to when your father has actually put a handle on your pants in order to ease the act of throwing you across a vaudeville proscenium, and it’s easy to see the brutality as the wound that drew the bow of art. But in this case the wound was the art; Keaton minded less the rough play than his increasingly drunken father’s refusal to let him out of the act long enough to go to school. He seems to have had exactly one day of public education.
In New York, the Keatons found themselves at war with city reformers who were evidently more passionate about keeping children off the vaudeville stage than about keeping them out of the sweatshop; arrests and court appearances ensued. After that, the family largely avoided New York, often retreating to the backwoods resort town of Muskegon, Michigan, the nearest thing young Buster ever had to a home. It was only when Joe started drinking too hard and got sloppy onstage that, in 1917, the fastidious Buster left him and went out on his own. It was the abuse of the art form that seemed to offend him.
In those days, young comedians were being swept off the stage and into the movies more or less the same way that garage bands were swept out of high-school gyms and into recording studios in the nineteen-sixties. Keaton fell in with Joseph Schenck, then a novice movie producer, who paired him with Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle in the equivalent of the John Belushi–Dan Aykroyd teaming, a “natural” comedian with a technical one. The partnership was an immediate success, starting with the two-reel short “The Butcher Boy” (1917), and was only briefly interrupted when Keaton was drafted and spent part of 1918 in France, having a good time serving in the Great War.
Keaton often credited Arbuckle with showing him how movies worked. But Schenck’s role was just as important. Anita Loos recalled him as someone who brings “forth the aroma of a special sort of smoked sturgeon that came from Barney Greengrass’s delicatessen”; and he and his brother, Nick, who later ran M-G-M, were cynosures among the generation of Russian Jews who dominated Hollywood for the next half century. Joseph Schenck was married to the film star Norma Talmadge; many dry-eyed observers thought that he was the trophy, and that Talmadge married him to keep the producer in her pocket.
Keaton’s early entry into the movies, after his almost complete isolation from a normal childhood, meant that he was really at home only within the world of his own invention. One gets the impression that he mainly lived for the choreography of movie moments, or “gags,” as they were unpretentiously called, though they were rather like Balanchine’s work, with scene and movement and story pressed together in one swoop of action. Keaton was not a reader, unlike Chaplin, who fell on Roget’s Thesaurus with the appetite of his own Tramp eating the shoe. Sex was of absent-minded importance for Keaton; his marriage to Norma Talmadge’s sister Natalie, in 1921, was apparently ceremonial and, after two children were born, celibate, at her mother’s insistence. Nor was he a family man; after they divorced, he hated losing custody of his kids, but it isn’t clear if he saw them much when he had them.
Around 1921, when false charges of rape and murder devastated Arbuckle’s career, Keaton was sympathetic, and then smoothly moved on, making solo movies. “He lives inside the camera,” as Arbuckle observed. Being anti-sentimental to the point of seeming coldhearted was at the core of his art. “In our early successes, we had to get sympathy to make any story stand up,” he said once, in a rare moment of reflection. “But the one thing that I made sure—that I didn’t ask for it. If the audience wanted to feel sorry for me, that was up to them. I didn’t ask for it in action.” Life dished it out, and Keaton’s character just had to take it.
Critics have drawn a connection between the Arbuckle scandal and Keaton’s short comedy “Cops” (1922), made between Arbuckle’s trials, in which Keaton, having been caught accidentally tossing an anarchist bomb, is chased across Los Angeles by hundreds of police officers. This is the kind of conjecture that shows little understanding of the way that artists work, rather like the belief that Picasso’s barbed-wire portraits of Dora Maar, in the nineteen-forties, are protests against the Occupation, rather than a product of his own obsessive imagery. “Cops” is not about false accusation; it’s about the massed comic power of regimented men in motion, uniform action in every sense. Pure artists like Keaton work from their own obsessions, with editorials attached awkwardly afterward.
His first feature, no surprise, was a movie about a movie, an ambitious parody of D. W. Griffith’s legendary epic “Intolerance” (1916), in which Keaton’s sister-in-law Constance Talmadge had appeared. His “Three Ages,” seven years later, stowed together three parallel stories—one Stone Age, one Roman, and one modern—and mocked both Griffith’s cosmic ambitions and his cross-century editing scheme. The caveman comedy is the same as all caveman comedies (Keaton has a calling card inscribed on a stone, etc.), but the Roman sequences are done with even more panache than Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part I.” Soon, Keaton was earning a thousand dollars a week, and becoming so rich that he, the boy who never had a home, built his wife a wildly extravagant faux Italian villa.
Dana Stevens takes up the really big question: What made Keaton’s solo work seem so modern? Just as “Cops” can be fairly called Kafkaesque in its juxtaposition of the unfairly pursued hero and the implacable faceless forces of authority, there are moments throughout “Sherlock Jr.” (1924) when Keaton achieves the Surrealist ambition to realize dreams as living action. Sequences like the one in which Keaton seems to step directly into the movie-house screen, and leaps from scene to scene within the projection in perfectly edited non sequiturs, make the Surrealist cinema of Buñuel and Maya Deren seem studied and gelatinous.
Stevens argues that Keaton’s art was informed by the same social revolutions as the European avant-garde: “The pervasive sense of anxiety and dislocation, of the need to reinvent the world from the ground up, that groups like the Surrealists or the Bloomsbury authors sought to express in images and words, the human mop-turned-filmmaker expressed in the comic movement of his body.” But Keaton also looks surreal because the Surrealists were feeding off the same sources as Keaton was, in circus and vaudeville and the music hall and stage magic. The Cubists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists all had the sense that, as bourgeois pieties had grown increasingly meaningless, the only grammar from which one could construct a credible art was that of farce. So those clowns and comic artists who held down the tradition of burlesque and nonsense comedy were, willy-nilly, the modernist’s dream brothers.
And then, in a modernist way, Keaton’s movies very often are about the movies, which was a natural outgrowth of his single-minded absorption in his chosen medium. In “Sherlock Jr.,” he plays a dreamy projectionist who falls into his own films, and in “The Cameraman” (1928) the joke is that Keaton’s character accidentally makes newsreels filled with camera tricks, double exposures, speeded-up time, and backward movement. Even that great cyclone scene in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” is meant not to provide an illusion of reality but to show off the possibilities of artifice.
Keaton’s subject, in a larger sense, is the growth of technology and the American effort to tame it. There is scarcely a classic Keaton film of the twenties that doesn’t involve his facing, with affection or respect more often than terror, one or another modern machine: the movie camera, the submarine, the open roadster. Throughout “The Navigator” (1924), he looks uncannily like Wilbur Wright in the Lartigue portrait. Keaton seems, in the combined integrity and opportunism of his persona, to explain how those alarming machines emerge from an older American culture of tinkerers and bicycle repairmen.
Keaton’s greatest work was made in the five years between “Three Ages” (1923) and “The Cameraman.” “The General” (1926), the first of Keaton’s features to enter the National Film Registry, was—surprisingly, to those who think of it as Keaton’s acknowledged masterpiece—a critical flop. A carefully plotted Civil War tale, more adventure story than comic spoof, it shared the typical fate of such passion projects: at first a baffling failure, for which everyone blames the artist, and which does him or her immense professional damage, it then gets rediscovered when the passion is all that’s evident and the financial perils of the project don’t matter anymore. Nobody questioned Keaton’s decision to make it, since the movies he had made in the same system had all been profitable. But businessmen, understandably, hate trusting artists and waiting for the product, and are always looking for an excuse to impose a discipline the artists lack. It takes only one bomb to bring the accountants down on the head of the comedian. Stevens, comparing the film to Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” writes, “The General was less a cause than a symptom of the end of a certain way of making movies. The independent production model that for ten years had allowed Buster the freedom to make exactly the movies he wanted . . . was collapsing under its own weight.” The thing that baffled its detractors (even Sherwood didn’t like it) and, at first, repelled audiences was the thing that seems to us now daring and audacious: the seamless mixture of Keaton’s comedy with its soberly realistic rendering of the period. No American movie gives such a memorable evocation of the Civil War landscape, all smoky Southern mornings and austere encampments—a real triumph of art, since it was shot in Oregon. Many of the images, like one of a short-barrelled cannon rolling alone on the railroad, put one in mind of Winslow Homer.
Two years later, in a studio sleight of hand so sneaky that Curtis spends a page and a half figuring out what the hell happened, Keaton became the subject of a baseball-style trade, in which Joe Schenck had Keaton transferred from United Artists to his brother Nick, at M-G-M. That gave M-G-M a cleanup-hitter comedian—United Artists already had Chaplin—while making sure that, post-“General,” Keaton would be more closely supervised by M-G-M’s boy genius, Irving Thalberg. Chaplin tried to warn Keaton off M-G-M. “Don’t let them do it to you, Buster,” he said. “It’s not that they haven’t smart showmen there. They have some of the country’s best. But there are too many of them, and they’ll all try to tell you how to make your comedies.” Keaton’s passivity made him reluctant to heed the warning, and off he went, Schenck to Schenck.
The mostly disastrous years that Keaton spent at M-G-M are the real subject of Stevens’s chapter on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thalberg will always have his defenders, but once one gets past the “quality” films he sponsored, it becomes clear what a con artist he was. He sold one observer after another—including Fitzgerald, who took him as the model for his idealized “last tycoon,” Monroe Stahr—on the subtlety of his intellect, while everything he did revealed him to be the most ruthless kind of commercial-minded cynic. Thalberg robbed the Marx Brothers of their anarchy and Keaton of his elegance, turning him, as Stevens complains, into a mere stock rube figure. The Thalberg system tended to work well for an artist just once—as in both the Marxes’ and Keaton’s first films for M-G-M, “A Night at the Opera” and “The Cameraman.” But Thalberg didn’t grasp what had actually worked: the expensive style of the production, pitting the Marxes against the pomposity of opera, and placing Keaton against a full-scale location shoot in New York City. What Thalberg thought worked was schlock imposed on genius: big production numbers for the Marxes and unrequited-love rube comedy for Keaton. In many subsequent movies, at M-G-M and elsewhere, his character was named Elmer (and once even Elmer Gantry), to typify him as a backwoods yokel.
The M-G-M comedies did decently at the box office, but Keaton, an artist injured by the persistent insults to his artistic intelligence, started to drink hard, and soon the drinking drowned out that intelligence. The actress Louise Brooks recalls him driving drunk to the studio, where he silently destroyed a room full of glass bookshelves with a baseball bat. She sensed his message: “I am ruined, I am trapped.” In 1933, he was fired by Louis B. Mayer, essentially for being too smashed, on and off the set, to work. Keaton’s M-G-M experience, despite various efforts by Thalberg and others to keep his career alive as a gag writer, ruined his art. The next decades are truly painful to read about, as Keaton went in and out of hospitals and clinics, falling off the wagon and then sobering up again. His brother-in-law, the cartoonist Walt Kelly, recalls that “nobody really wanted to put him under control because he was a lot of fun.” What we perhaps miss, in accounts of the boozers of yore, is an adequate sense of how much fun they all thought they were having. Drunks of that period could not be shaken from the conviction that they were having a good time until they were hauled off to the hospital.
As Curtis establishes, when Keaton did dry out, by the nineteen-fifties, he had much better later years than the public image suggests. That image persists; a recent, impassioned French documentary titled “Buster Keaton: The Genius Destroyed by Hollywood” maintains that “in just a few years he went from being a worldwide star to a washed-up artist with no future.” Curtis makes it clear that this assertion is wildly exaggerated. Keaton did as well as could have been hoped. But the notion that sound killed off the silent comedians is one of those ideas which, seeming too simple to be true, are simply true. Chaplin endured because he had money and independence, but even he made only two more comedies in the thirties; Harry Langdon was ruined and Harold Lloyd kept his money and withdrew.
Keaton did have to undergo a certain amount of whatever-happened-to humiliation; he is one of Gloria Swanson’s bridge party of silent has-beens in “Sunset Boulevard.” In tribute after tribute, he was condescendingly associated with custard-pie-throwing comedies of a kind he had almost never made. But he was properly valued in France, had successful seasons at the Medrano Circus, and worked ceaselessly as a gag man, even inventing an entire routine for Lucille Ball that became part of the pilot for “I Love Lucy.”
His most famous late appearance was alongside Chaplin in “Limelight” (1952), Chaplin’s last interesting movie, in which they play two down-on-their-luck vaudevillians. Claire Bloom, who played the ingénue, recalls that, in twenty-one days of shooting, Keaton spoke to her exactly once, when showing her a tourist-type photograph of a beautiful Beverly Hills house. He told her that it had once been his home, then fell silent. This seems sad, but Curtis also evokes him watching the camerawork and helping direct Chaplin: “It’s okay, Charlie. You’re right in the center of the shot. Yeah, you’re fine, Charlie. It’s perfect.” Even when he was too frail to run or move much, as in the 1966 film “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” made a year before his death, and directed by his idolater Richard Lester, his face was a beacon not merely of endurance but of a kind of lost American integrity, the integrity of the engineer and the artisan and the old-style vaudeville performer.
Two kinds of American comedy made themselves felt in the first half of the twentieth century: the comedy of invasion and the comedy of resistance. The first was the immigrant comedy of energy, enterprise, mischief, and mayhem. The Marx Brothers are supreme here, but Chaplin, who, although an immigrant of the Cockney rather than the Cossacks-fleeing variety, could play the Jewish arrival brilliantly, and the immigrant-comedy vein runs right up to Phil Silvers’s Sergeant Bilko, swindling the simpleton officers at the Army base. In response comes the comedy of old-American resistance to all that explosive energy, struggling to hold on to order and decency and gallantry. It’s exemplified by W. C. Fields’s efforts to sleep on his sleeping porch in “It’s a Gift,” while the neighborhood around him refuses to quiet down. The division extends even to the written humor of the period, with S. J. Perelman the cynical navigator and commercial participant in the endless ocean of American vulgarity, and James Thurber wistfully watching from Manhattan as the old values of the republic pass away in Columbus.
Keaton is the stoical hero of the comedy of resistance, the uncomplaining man of character who sees the world of order dissolving around him and endures it as best he can. (In “Steamboat Bill, Jr.,” it’s the nostalgic world of the river steamboat; in “The General,” it is, for good or ill, the Old South.) Keaton’s characters have character. They never do anything remotely conniving. And the one thing Keaton never does is mug. There are moments in all his best features, in fact, that anticipate the kind of Method acting that didn’t come into fashion for another generation, as when he impassively slips to the ground beside the girl in the beginning of “The Cameraman,” registering the act of falling in love by the tiniest of increments. The best thing in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” might be a bit of acting so subtle that one wonders whether people got it at the time. Under suspicion of sexual instability—“If you say what you’re thinking I’ll strangle you!” the title card has the captain saying bluntly to a friend, after watching his son caper with his ukulele—Bill, Jr., is compelled by his father to throw away his Frenchified beret, and try on a sequence of American hats. Keaton doesn’t attempt, as Chaplin might have, to adopt a distinct persona in each hat but actually does what we do in front of a clothing-store mirror: he wears his trying-on face, testing a daring expression, sampling the aesthetic effect of each hat for the sake of his vanity while trying not to offend his father by seeming too much the hat aesthete. Somehow he is both preening and hiding. It’s an amazing moment of pure performance, and every bit as “cinematic”—showing what extreme closeups can do—as the big special-effects sequences.
“Though there is a hurricane eternally raging about him, and though he is often fully caught up in it, Keaton’s constant drift is toward the quiet at the hurricane’s eye,” the critic Walter Kerr observed of Keaton. What remains most in one’s memory after an immersion in Keaton are the quiet, uncanny shots of him in seclusion, his sensitive face registering his own inwardness. In this way, maybe there is some relevance in a Keaton revival today. Critics may invent their causes, but sometimes a good critical book, or two, can create a cause that counts. Chaplin is a theatrical master and needs a theatre to make his mark. His movies play much, much better with an audience present. Keaton can be a solitary entertainment, seen with as much delight on a computer screen as in a movie palace—rather as our taste for the great humanist sacrament of the symphony depends in some part on having open concert halls, while chamber music has whispered right throughout the pandemic. Keaton is the chamber-music master of comedy, with the counterpoint clear and unmuddied by extraneous emotion. It may be that our new claustrophobia is mirrored in his old comedy. The hospital has blown away, and that house has fallen on us all.
Best known for his tragicomic character «The Little Tramp,» Charlie Chaplin revolutionized cinema, both during the silent era and the talkies. Almost a century later, The Gold Rush, Modern Times, The Kid, and The Great Dictator are still considered essential cinematic works. His writing, producing, directing, acting, and scoring of his own films received just as much attention as his controversial personal life. The London-born Chaplin had a penchant for marrying teenage women, and ended up fathering 11 children. Though his outspoken political views would eventually force him out of America for good in 1952, Chaplin’s Hollywood legacy still burns brightly. Here are 10 facts about the legendary filmmaker, who was born on this day in 1889.
1. HE COLLABORATED WITH A FEMALE FILMMAKER (WHICH WAS A RARITY IN THOSE DAYS).
Mabel Normand was a silent film actress as well as a writer, producer, and director—which was unusual for the mid-1900s. She starred in 12 films with Charlie Chaplin, including 1914’s Mabel’s Strange Predicament, which marked the onscreen debut of Chaplin’s The Tramp character (though Mabel’s Strange Predicament was filmed first and technically was his first Tramp appearance, it was released two days after Kid Auto Races at Venice, the actual film debut of the character). She also directed Chaplin in 1914’s Caught in a Cabaret and the pair co-directed and starred in Her Friend the Bandit, which was released the same year.
2. HE CO-FOUNDED A BIG-TIME MOVIE STUDIO.
In 1919, Chaplin and fellow filmmakers Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith formed United Artists as a means to finance their own movies so that they could retain creative control. The first film released under the new studio was 1919’s His Majesty, the American, starring Fairbanks. The studio took off and eventually branched out to build a chain of movie theaters. But in 1955, with movie attendance at a new low, Chaplin sold his shares. UA released the first James Bond movie in 1963. Today, MGM is UA’s parent company.
3. HE COMPOSED THE MUSIC FOR MANY OF HIS FILMS.
Beginning with 1931’s City Lights, Chaplin composed scores for his films’ soundtracks. His song “Smile,” used in Modern Times, became a classic. In 1954, Nat King Cole’s version—now with lyrics—peaked at number 10 on the Billboard charts. Michael Jackson also recorded a cover. Chaplin won his only competitive Oscar in 1973 for composing the theme to his 1952 film Limelight(the film wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1972).
4. HE WAS A PERFECTIONIST.
There was a reason Chaplin did everything himself: perfectionism. When he worked on his short film The Immigrant, Chaplin shot 40,000 feet of film, which was a lot for a 20-minute short. Chaplin cast actress Virginia Cherrill in City Lights to say just two words, “Flower, sir,” but he forced her to repeat them for 342 takes. “He knew exactly what he wanted and he would have preferred not to have any other actors in his films—he even tried making a film once where he was the only person in it,” Hooman Mehran, author of Chaplin’s Limelight and the Music Hall Tradition, told CNN.
5. HE WAS EMBROILED IN A NASTY—AND GROUNDBREAKING—PATERNITY SUIT.
In the 1940s, actress Joan Berry was allegedly having an affair with Chaplin. At one point, he invited Berry to travel from L.A. to New York City. While in New York, she spent time with Chaplin and claimed that the director “made her available to other individuals for immoral purposes.” This violated the Mann Act, in which a person isn’t allowed to cross state lines for depraved behavior.
When, in 1943, Berry gave birth to a daughter, she stated that Chaplin was the father—a charge he adamantly denied. Though blood tests confirmed that Chaplin was not the father, because the tests weren’t admissible in California courts, he had to endure two separate trials. Despite the blood evidence saying otherwise, the jury concluded that Chaplin was the father. Not only was his reputation ruined, but he also had to pay child support. On the bright side, the ruling helped reform state paternity laws.
6. HE ACCEPTED HIS 1972 HONORARY OSCAR IN PERSON.
In 1952, because of his alleged Communist politics, the U.S. denied Chaplin re-entry to the United States after he traveled to London for the premiere of his film Limelight. Incensed, he moved his family to Switzerland and vowed he’d never return to Hollywood. But 20 years later, possibly to make up for his exile, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored the 82-year-old Chaplin with an honorary Oscar (his second of three). Chaplin attended the ceremony and received an enthusiastic standing ovation. When he finally spoke, he said, “Thank you for the honor of inviting me here. You’re all wonderful, sweet people.”
7. A RUSSIAN NAMED A MINOR PLANET AFTER HIM.
In 1981, Russian astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina, who has discovered more than 100 minor planets, named one of them after the legendary director: 3623 Chaplin.
8. THERE’S AN ANNUAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN FILM FESTIVAL.
In the 1960s, Chaplin and his family enjoyed spending summers in the village of Waterville, located on the Ring of Kerry in Ireland. In 2011 the town founded the Charlie Chaplin Comedy Film Festival, which is held each August. (A bronze statue of him resides in town.) The festival features a short film competition with categories like Chaplins of the Future. Last year the fest tried to break the Guinness World Record of the largest gathering of people dressed as Chaplin.
9. HIS FORMER HOME IN SWITZERLAND WAS CONVERTED INTO A MUSEUM.
On April 16, 2016—what would’ve been his 127th birthday—Chaplin’s World, a museum dedicated to the filmmaker’s life and work, opened in his former home in Switzerland. The museum has welcomed around 300,000 visitors in its first year. Visitors can see his home, the Manoir de Ban, at Corsier-sur-Vevey, by Lake Geneva. The estate also houses a studio where his movies are screened, wax figures, recreations of some of his film set pieces, and a restaurant named The Tramp.
10. THIEVES GRAVE-ROBBED CHAPLIN’S BODY AND HELD IT FOR RANSOM.
Even in death, Chaplin created controversy. Chaplin died on Christmas Day 1977 and was interred near his home in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. Almost three months after his death, on March 2, 1978, his widow, Oona Chaplin, received a call from the police saying, “somebody dug up the grave and he’s gone,” Eugene Chaplin told The Independent.
The thieves demanded $600,000 to return the body. Oona tapped the phone lines, which led authorities to the two men, Roman Wardas and Gantscho Ganev. They confessed to the crime and showed the police Chaplin’s body, which they buried in a cornfield near his original gravesite. The men went to jail, but not before writing “I’m sorry” letters to Oona, who forgave them.
It’s hardly surprising that Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator was banned in Germany, and in every country occupied by Germany, in 1940. A film that mocked Adolf Hitler was never going to be the Nazi High Command’s first choice of Friday night entertainment. The more surprising thing, from today’s perspective, is that Chaplin was warned that it might not be shown in Britain or the US, either. Britain’s appeasement policy kept going until March 1939, and the US didn’t enter World War Two until December 1941, a year after The Great Dictator was released, so when Chaplin was scripting and shooting the film – his first proper talkie – colleagues at the studio he co-owned were afraid that no government would let it be seen.
«I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists,» he wrote in his autobiography. «They had been advised… that I would run into censorship trouble. Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain. More worrying letters came from the New York office imploring me not to make the film, declaring it would never be shown in England or America.»
But Chaplin wouldn’t be dissuaded. He knew that The Great Dictator was worth making, and, sure enough, it was a box office smash: 1941’s second biggest hit in the US. On the 80th anniversary of the film’s release, Chaplin’s prescience is even more startling. The Great Dictator is a masterpiece that isn’t just a delightful comedy and a grim agitprop drama, but a spookily accurate insight into Hitler’s psychology. «He was a visionary,» said Costa-Gavras, the Greek-French doyen of political cinema, in a making-of documentary. «He saw the future while the leaders of the world couldn’t see it, and remained on Hitler’s side.»
What’s even more remarkable is that Chaplin didn’t just capture Hitler, but every dictator who has followed in his goose steps. «It resonated at the time, and it continues to resonate,» says Simon Louvish, the author of Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey. If you want to see a crystalline reflection of the 21st Century’s despots, you’ll find it in a film that came out 80 years ago.
A serious message
By the time Chaplin made The Great Dictator, he had long despised the Nazis, and vice versa. A German propaganda film denounced him as one of «the foreign Jews who come to Germany» – never mind that he wasn’t Jewish – while the US press nicknamed him «The 20th-Century Moses» because he funded the escape of thousands of Jewish refugees. When he started work on the film initially titled «The Dictator», he was «a man on a mission», says Louvish. «Some of his contemporaries, like Laurel and Hardy, just wanted to make funny movies and make money. But Chaplin was very serious about what he wanted to say. The Great Dictator wasn’t just a film. It really was something that was required.»
Still, Chaplin was motivated by more than humanitarianism. He was also fascinated by his uncanny connections to Hitler, who was born in the same week as he was in April 1889. A comic song about the Führer, recorded by Tommy Handley in 1939, was entitled «Who Is That Man…? (Who Looks Like Charlie Chaplin)». An editorial in The Spectator magazine, marking the men’s 50th birthdays, explored the theme in more depth: «Providence was in an ironical mood when… it was ordained that Charles Chaplin and Adolf Hitler should make their entry into the world within four days of each other… The date of their birth and the identical little moustache (grotesque intentionally in Mr Chaplin) they wear might have been fixed by nature to betray the common origin of their genius. For genius each of them undeniably possesses. Each has mirrored the same reality – the predicament of the ‘little man’ in modern society. Each is a distorting mirror, the one for good, the other for untold evil.»
It was Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born British producer, who suggested that Chaplin should capitalise on the similarity, but it was obvious that an entire film of the former «Little Tramp» as a frothing tyrant would be too much for audiences to take, and so Chaplin opted to play two roles. He would be Adenoid Hynkel, the autocratic ruler of Tomainia, and he would be a humble, amnesiac, unnamed «Jewish Barber». An opening caption announces: «Any Resemblance Between Hynkel the Dictator and the Jewish Barber is Purely Co-Incidental.»
Inevitably, this coincidental resemblance results in the two men being mistaken for one another, but not until the film’s climax. The Barber is hustled onto a stage where his doppelganger was due to make a speech, and Chaplin delivers a sincere five-minute plea for decency and brotherhood that either spoils the film (in the view of the Pulitzer-winning critic Roger Ebert) or elevates it further still: «More than machinery, we need humanity! More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness!» For most of the running time, though, Chaplin cuts between the two characters’ separate storylines, so that we can never forget either the victims of Nazi persecution or the man responsible for it. In the ghetto, the gentle Barber romances a defiant washerwoman, Hannah, who is played by Chaplin’s wife at the time, Paulette Godard. (The scene in which Storm Troopers pelt Hannah with the tomatoes they have just stolen from a grocer’s shop is the most infuriating portrait of cowardly bullying imaginable.) Meanwhile, in his palace, Hynkel – aka the Phooey rather than the Führer – frets about how to outmanoeuvre his Mussolini-like rival, Benzino Napaloni.
Both strands are so bold that they make most big-screen satire seem feeble in comparison. In Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, which came out in 1942, the word «Jew» is never spoken. Chaplin isn’t so coy. Central to the ghetto scenes is the fact that «Jew» has been daubed on all of the windows in capital letters. When the Barber tries to wipe off the paint, he is chased by Storm Troopers in sequences that recall Buster Keaton dodging crowds of policemen in Cops. But in this case, one such sequence concludes with the Storm Troopers throwing a noose around the Barber’s neck and hanging him from a lamp post. He is saved at the last second, but still, the speed with which Chaplin flips between slapstick and horror is breathtaking. It’s also worth noting that the Storm Troopers don’t have German accents – or even upper-crust English accents, as so many Nazis would in later Hollywood films. Most of them sound American.
In Hynkel’s palace, the comedy is lighter and more farcical. Chaplin sketches a caricature of European political shenanigans in the zany tradition of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. (Jack Oakie’s Napaloni is the kind of hearty Italian wise guy played by Chico Marx.) The dictator’s crimes aren’t ignored: on a whim, Hynkel orders 3000 protesters to be executed. But Chaplin concentrates on the character’s vanity, stupidity and childishness. In one throwaway visual gag, the towering filing cabinet behind his desk is shown to have no drawers at all, but several concealed mirrors instead. When Napaloni pays a state visit from the neighbouring country of Bacteria, the two men compete to have the higher chair while they are being shaved, and to have the more flattering position when they are being photographed.
The message is that Hynkel is not a brilliant strategist or a mighty leader. He is an overgrown adolescent – as demonstrated in the sublime set piece in which he dances with an inflatable globe, dreaming of being «emperor of the world». He is an insecure buffoon who bluffs, cheats, obsesses over his public image, manhandles his secretaries, revels in the luxury of his extravagant quarters, and reverses his own key policies in order to buy himself more time in power. «To me, the funniest thing in the world is to ridicule impostors,» wrote Chaplin in his autobiography, «and it would be hard to find a bigger impostor than Hitler.»
Hynkel’s anti-Semitic rants (consisting of cod-German punctuated by shouts of «Juden») are terrifying, but there is no conviction behind them, just a desperate need to distract the Tomainians from his economic failures. As his urbane sidekick and Goebbels substitute, Garbitsch (Henry Daniell), says: «Violence against the Jews might take the public’s mind off its stomach.»
The film has been accused of trivialising Nazi atrocities. Chaplin himself said, in his autobiography, «Had I known the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.» But he isn’t just making fun of Hitler – as Mel Brooks did in The Producers in 1967 – he is making an astute point about the fragile egos of male world leaders.
Think of today’s dictators and would-be dictators, in any country, and you can spot all the juvenile qualities that Chaplin identified: the fetish for photo opportunities, the lavish lifestyles, the policy flip-flops and the crackpot schemes, the self-aggrandising parades and the chests full of medals: Billy Gilbert’s Herring, ie. Göring, has so many medals pinned to his uniform that Hynkel has to turn him sideways to find room for the latest addition. Hitler was at the peak of his power when The Great Dictator was being made, but Chaplin had already recognised that, as with every subsequent dictator, his villainy was bound up with his immaturity.
According to biographer Jürgen Trimborn, much of the film was inspired by a screening of Leni Riefenstahl’s pro-Hitler documentary, Triumph of the Will, at the New York Museum of Modern Art. While other viewers were appalled, Chaplin roared with laughter at the ridiculous spectacle. This attitude sustained him when he was urged to abandon The Great Dictator. «I was determined to go ahead,» he wrote in his autobiography, «for Hitler must be laughed at.»
What Charlie Chaplin Got Right About Satirizing Hitler
The Great Dictator—Charlie Chaplin’s masterful satire of Adolf Hitler—began filming in September 1939, right at the start of World War II. By the time it was released in 1940, the Axis had been formed, and Nazis were already occupying much of France. The threat was not at all abstract: critic Michael Wood notes that the movie premiered that December, in London, amid German air raids. The following December, of 1941, would yield its own devastating threats from the air—this time on American soil, which would clarify for Americans the realness of this war by bringing it home.
It was, in other words, a strange moment to be making a comedy about Adolf Hitler—even a satire holding him to account, and even one in which Chaplin himself, who was at that point one of the most famous movie stars in the world, famous for playing the ambling, lovable Little Tramp, took on the role of Hitler. In 1940, Germany and the US had yet to become enemies; feathers, it was worried, would be ruffled by a movie like this. But Chaplin was already unwittingly bound up in the era’s iconographies of evil. His likeness, the Little Tramp, with that curt mustache and oddly compact face of his, had already become a visual reference for cartoonists lampooning Hitler in the press. And he was already on the Nazis’ radar: the 1934 Nazi volume The Jews Are Looking At You referred to him as «a disgusting Jewish acrobat.» Chaplin wasn’t Jewish. But he was frequently rumored to be. And when he visited Berlin in 1931, he was mobbed by German fans, proving that his popularity could surpass even the growing ideological boundaries of a nascent Nazi Germany—hence their hatred.
Chaplin was aware of all of this—and of the fact that he and Hitler were born only four days apart, in April of 1889, that they had both risen out of poverty, and that they had enough points of biographical comparison, overall, to spook any sane person. Let’s not overstate their similarities: One of these men would go on to make the world laugh, and the other would go on to start a world war and facilitate the Holocaust. Humorously, that split would come to be echoed in The Great Dictator. Chaplin does double duty, playing the movie’s two central roles. One, the character of Adenoid Hynkel, is a Hitler spoof by way of a short-tempered and preposterously powerful personality, a dictator of the fictional country Tomainia. And in the opposing corner, Chaplin offers us a variation on his classic Little Tramp, a Jewish barber who saves a high-ranking officer’s life in World War I and, after a plane accident and years of recovery in the hospital, wakes up to the seeds of World War II being sewn in his country.
The Great Dictator is a classic for a reason. It’s startling in its depictions of violence, which stand out less for their outright brutality than for how memorably they depict the Nazis’ betrayal of everyday humanity. And it’s renowned as well as for its resourceful and original humor, which combines Chaplin at his most incisive and balletic with raucous displays of verbal wit. This was Chaplin’s first sound film; his previous feature, the 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, was by the time of its release considered almost anachronistic for being a silent film in a sound era. Dictator avails itself of this technological progress, making perhaps its most successful bit out of the way Hitler speaks, the melange of rough sounds and brutish insinuations that have long made footage from his rallies as fascinating as they are frightening.
The Great Dictator understands Hitler as a performer, as an orator wielding language like the unifying, galvanizing power that it is. But it also understands him as a psyche. This of course means it’s full of what feel like sophomoric jokes, gags in which Hitler’s insecurities, his thirst for influence, his ideological inconsistencies (an Aryan revolution led by a brunette?) and zealous dependency on loyalty come under fire. It isn’t a psychological portrait, but nor is it so simple as a funhouse treatment of the coming war, all punchline and distortion.
It’s all a bit richer than that, which might be why The Great Dictator is on my mind this week, as we greet the release of Taiki Waititi’sJojo Rabbit, a movie in which Waititi himself plays Adolf Hitler, not quite in the flesh, but rather as imagined by a little Nazi boy who’s fashioned him into an imaginary friend. I’m not crazy about Waititi’s movie, which is less a satire than a vehicle for unchallenged moral goodness in the face of only barely-confronted evil. But it does, like Chaplin’s film, nosedive into the same problems of representation and comedy that have plagued movies since early in Hitler’s reign. Should we satirize genocidal maniacs? Can we laugh at that? And if so, can the line we usually toe between comedic pleasure and moral outrage—a mix that comes easily to comedy, in the best of cases—withstand something so inconceivable a mass atrocity?
That Chaplin’s movie succeeds where Waititi’s fails is a fair enough point, but comparing most comedians’ work to Chaplin’s more often than not results in an unfair fight. What matters are the things we can all still learn from Chaplin’s work, down to the fact that it so completely and unabashedly honors and toys with the public’s sense of who he is. This wouldn’t be nearly as interesting a movie if the Jewish barber hadn’t so readily recalled the Little Tramp. But because of this familiarity, The Great Dictator feels much the way movies like Modern Times did: like a story about the travails of an every-man who’s suddenly, with no preparation, launched headlong into machinery too great, too complex, too utterly beyond him, for it not to result in comic hi-jinks.
That’s the how barber’s first scenes out of the hospital, as beautifully staged and timed by Chaplin, feel: like watching the Little Tramp turn a corner and walk, completely unaware, into a world war. He sees «Jew» written on his barbershop, for example, but because he’s an amnesiac just released from the hospital, he has no idea why it’s there, and starts to wash it away. This is illegal, of course, and when the Nazis try to tell them so, he, thinking they’re run-of-the-mill brutish anti-Semites, douses them with paint and runs away. Much of the humor, at least in the clearly-marked «Ghetto,» where the Barber lives, plays out this way: a terrifying game of comic irony in which what the Barber doesn’t know both empowers and threatens to kill him.
The Hitler scenes, by contrast, are a ballet—at times almost literally—of alliances and petty tasks. The highlight must of course be a scene of Hitler alone, having just renewed his faith in his plan to take over the world, dancing with an inflated globe of the planet, bouncing it off his bum, posing like a pin-up on his desk as the globe floats airlessly skyward. You can’t help but laugh. But that laughter doesn’t mute the brooding danger of it. You see the globe, the ease with which he lifts it up, manipulates it, makes a game of it, and realize that this is precisely what a dictator wants. It’s a guileless and child-like vision, from his perspective, of his own power.
The Great Dictator’s famous climax finds these two men merging, somewhat, into one. It’s a rousing speech ostensibly delivered by the Jewish barber, who (for reasons best left to the movie to explain) has been confused for Hynkel by the Nazis and is called upon to speak to the masses. And then he opens his mouth—and the man that emerges is Chaplin himself, creeping beyond the boundaries of character, satire, or even the artificial construct of a «movie,» as such.
The speech makes a case for humanity in the face of grave evil. «We think too much and feel too little,» Chaplin says. «More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.» You’ll recognize this theme—»more than machinery we need humanity»—throughout Chaplin’s work, and it rings especially true here. Chaplin emerges, fully human, as himself, breaking free of the film’s satirical trappings, to deliver one from the heart.
It’s a scene that plays well on its own, as a standalone speech. For a long while, it was hard to find a version online that hadn’t been modified with dramatic «movie speech» music by way of Hans Zimmer. Youtube comments imply a recent upswing in activity, of people finding the speech anew in the Trump era, and that makes sense. But the scene plays even more strangely, more powerfully, in context, where it’s less easily lent to meme-able political messaging, where it has to brush up against everything else in the movie that’s come before.
It’s startling, frankly. The Great Dictator’s tone to this point never feels so earnest. How could it, what with its balletic Hitler and its foreign dictatorships with names like Bacteria. From the vantage of 1940, Chaplin couldn’t quite see where the war would take us, and it remains the case that some of the film plays oddly—but all the more insightfully for it—today. What’s clear from its final moments, to say nothing of much of the rest, is the power in this tension. Insofar as it can sense but not see the future, you could say that The Great Dictator is a film made in a cloud of relative ignorance. Yet look at how much it says, how far it goes. It makes it hard to make excuses for films made since, which often have the benefit of hindsight yet little of substance to say about what they see in the rear view. We know more, much more, about Hitler today than we did in 1940. Why should we let anyone get away with saying less?
I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…
Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
Is Cast Away by Robert Zemeckis Based On A True Story?
It might be a work of fiction, but real-life events and survival stories inspired the Tom Hanks survival drama Cast Away – so, is Cast Away a true story adaptation? While it may not be inspired by one particular individual, the film is based on many real-life experiences. The movie was written by William Boyles Jr., and directed by Back To The Future‘s Robert Zemeckis. It follows a FedEx executive, Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), after he’s stranded on a deserted island in the middle of the South Pacific by a plane crash. Isolated for four years, Noland struggles to survive and stay sane, with his only company being Wilson, a volleyball that was part of the plane’s cargo that has a face painted using Noland’s own bloody handprint.
Noland braved the elements and managed to survive for years, eventually being able to return home. While researching and writing the script for Cast Away, Broyles consulted professional survival experts before taking the significant step of deliberately isolating himself on an island in the Gulf of California, intending to put himself in the shoes of his main character. Broyles’ experiences on the island informed many of the critical moments portrayed in Cast Away.
Broyles discussed his time in isolation and how it later inspired the screenplay in an interview with The Austin Chronicle. Broyles speared and ate stingrays on the island, drank coconut juice, built a tent out of bamboo and palm leaves, and struggled to make his own fire. Recalling his loneliness during his days on the island, Broyles explained how the experience gave him an understanding of “what it means to be truly alone.” When Broyles found a deserted volleyball on the beach one day, he named it Wilson, which served as inspiration for Noland’s only friend during his four years on the island. While the experiences were forged from reality, is Cast Away a true story in the wider narrative sense?
Is Cast Away Based On A True Story?
Cast Away was initially inspired by Robinson Crusoe, and Elvis actor Tom Hanks had the idea to do a modern-day version of Daniel Defoe’s classic adventure story. Hanks told The Hollywood Reporter that he was inspired by a news article about FedEx. “I realized that 747s filled with packages fly across the Pacific three times a day,” said Hanks. He wondered, “what happens if (the plane) goes down?” This question sparked the idea that would evolve into Cast Away. Like Defoe’s historical fiction, Cast Away was inspired by the lives of real-world explorers. Alexander Selkirk is thought to have been the biggest inspiration behind Defoe’s novel, and he was a Scottish castaway who spent four years on a Pacific island in the early 1700s. After being rescued by an English expedition in 1709, Edward Cooke, who was part of the rescue team, wrote about Selkirk in his book, A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World.
So, technically speaking, is Cast Away a true story? Sort of. A range of other real-life castaways inspired some of literature’s most famous stories, including Spanish sailor Pedro Serrano, who was reportedly shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Nicaragua in the first half of the 16th century. Ada Blackjack was another, sometimes referred to as a «female Crusoe» – she was a seamstress who became stranded on an island near Siberia in 1921 but was only rescued two years later. These explorers and others like them helped to inspire Tom Hanks’ Chuck Noland and his experiences in his island location in Cast Away.
Is Cast Away a true story? The real-life tales of survival that inspired the Tom Hanks movie
What is Cast Away about?
Tom Hanks stars in the movie as a FedEx worker Chuck Noland, who washes up on a desert island after his plane crash lands.
As he adapts to life alone in the uninhabited spot, he uses what he has around him to stay alive for the next four years.
Key moments include him turning a volleyball into a “friend” he calls Wilson, which becomes the only thing Hanks’ character can talk to.
While the film is primarily centred on Hanks, whose performance won him a Golden Globe award, other cast members include Helen Hunt, Paul Sanchez and Nick Searcy.
It was directed by Robert Zemeckis.
How did the film’s makers research Cast Away?
In the creation of the film, screenwriter William Broyles Jr spent a few days alone on an isolated beach near Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, to get an idea of what it was like.
According to reports in The Austin Chronicle from 2000, the experience taught Broyles more about what it really means to be lonely.
“I realized it wasn’t just a physical challenge. It was going to be an emotional, spiritual one as well,” he told the publication
While there, he made himself find his own food, water, which included breaking open coconuts and eating speared stingrays, and building shelter made of bamboo and palm leaves.
It was during this time, that he also came up with the idea for Wilson the volleyball companion, as a ball washed up on the beach he was staying on and he began to talk to it. The name was Wilson was simply the brand of the ball.
Is is based on a true story?
While the exact story of Cast Away is not thought to be a true story, there are several real-life accounts of people who spent time on uninhabited lands that may have provided inspiration.
Among the most famous is the story of Alexander Selkirk, who is known by some as a real-life Robinson Crusoe, inspiring the Daniel Defoe novel.
Selkirk travelled around the South Pacific in the early 1700s, taking part in buccaneering pursuits.
He chose to be left on the uninhabited Juan Fernández archipelago near Chile, as he feared the ship he had travelled on was too dangerous to continue the journey.
He took a few items with him from the ship, including a knife, bedding and a Bible, and was left to hunt for his own food which included lobsters and feral goats.
The story goes, that he was forced from the shores of the island further inland after masses of sea lions came to the beaches for mating season.
It was not an easy existence, and his time on the deserted land was full of loneliness and remorse, as well as physical challenges such as attacks from rats – though feral cats proved useful in keeping the rodents at bay.
He built huts out of materials he found on the islands, made his own clothes from animal skins and chased prey.
He was eventually rescued in 1709, four years after his arrival, when a ship came by and took him aboard.
He later spent more time at sea, continuing his privateering voyages and returned to London for some time, where his story became well known.
Accounts of Selkirk’s experiences were later published in newspaper articles of the times and in books by his former shipmate Edward Cooke and the leader of the expedition on the ship that had rescued him, Woodes Rogers.
What other real life castaways were there?
There were several more real life castaways over the years, some of whom had ended up in isolation by force, and others of their own accord.
They include Ada Blackjack who was stranded on Wrangel Island near Siberia in 1921 after a mission aboard a ship where she was a seamstress, went wrong.
Unlike Tom Hanks in the film, she was left trying to survive in cold climates, with just a cat who had been aboard the ship for company.
The animals in the area included seals, arctic foxes and polar bears, which would have been all she had to hunt after rations from the ship ran out.
She was eventually rescued in 1923 and became known in some accounts as the female Robinson Crusoe.
Another castaway was a French woman Marguerite de La Rocque, who in 1542 was made to stay on an island near Quebec, Île des Démons, after her uncle caught her sleeping with a man aboard their ship and left them both on the uninhabited land.
According to The Mirror,their time on the island was not a happy one, as while there, the young woman became pregnant but both her child and her partner died.
She was eventually rescued by a boat and returned to France, after roughly two years.
Other people who experienced life as castaways in various ways and may have provided some inspiration for the film, include Tom Neale, a New Zealand bushcraft and survival enthusiast who spent much of his life in the Cook Islands, and a total of 16 years – in three sessions – living alone on the island of Anchorage in the Suwarrow atoll, which was the basis of his popular autobiography An Island To Oneself; Leendert Hasenbosch who was an employee of the Dutch East India Company marooned on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean as a punishment for sodomy and Narcisse Pelletier, born in Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie in the Vendée who was a French sailor. Pelletier was abandoned in 1858 at the age of 14 on the Cape York Peninsula, in Australia, during the dry season.
Golden leaves falling from the trees Covering the streets I’m walking with my restless feet Empty seats, fancy deficiency There’s so much I need
Fucking wish to being overseas Wish your head is lying on my knees Remembering a summer breeze Fucking wish to being overseas Wish your head is lying on my knees Like it used to be
And then I dream about Being Robinson Crusoe I hide away on my single raft And then I dream about It will be exactly the same thing that you do And we could stay on a lonely island As long as our love will last And our love will last And then I dream about Being Robinson Crusoe I hide away on my single raft And then I dream about It will be exactly the same thing that you do And we could stay on a lonely island As long as our love will last And our love will last And our love will last
Like the storms and the spray of the sea Like the roots of the highest trees Like apologies and it will grow Like the strongest of all the seeds And it will feed our mouth And breath in a summer breeze Our hearts in a steady beat ‘Cause how could I sleep While the storm chops down all the trees Tell me, what are you doing to me? Tell me, what are you doing to me?
And then I dream about Being Robinson Crusoe I hide away on my single raft And then I dream about It will be exactly the same thing that you do And we could stay on a lonely island As long as our love will last And our love will last And then I dream about Being Robinson Crusoe I hide away on my single raft And then I dream about It will be exactly the same thing that you do And we could stay on a lonely island As long as our love will last And our love will last And our love will last
Like Robinson Crusoe I hide away on my single raft And then I dream about It will be exactly the same thing that you do And we could stay on a lonely island As long as our love will last And our love will last And then I dream about Being Robinson Crusoe I hide away on my single raft And then I dream about It will be exactly the same thing that you do And we could stay on a lonely island As long as our love will last
Message in a Bottle by The Police
Message in a Bottle by The Police
ust a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh Another lonely day, with no one here but me, oh More loneliness than any man could bear Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh
I’ll send an S.O.S to the world I’ll send an S.O.S to the world I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my Message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, yeah
A year has passed since I wrote my note I should have known this right from the start Only hope can keep me together Love can mend your life Or love can break your heart
I’ll send an S.O.S to the world I’ll send an S.O.S to the world I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my Message in a bottle, yeah
Message in a bottle, yeah Oh, message in a bottle, yeah Message in a bottle, yeah
Walked out this morning, I don’t believe what I saw Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore Seems I’m not alone at being alone Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home
I’ll send an S.O.S to the world I’ll send an S.O.S to the world I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my Message in a bottle, yeah Message in a bottle, yeah Message in a bottle, oh Message in a bottle, yeah
Sending out an S.O.S Sending out an S.O.S Sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S Sending out an S.O.S Sending out an S.O.S Sending out an S.O.S Sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S
I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S I’m sending out an S.O.S
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in English literature, was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was a chronic alcoholic, while his mother, Mary, passed her gift for storytelling to her son. Arthur recalled his mother’s habit of “sinking her voice to a horror-stricken whisper” as she reached the climax of a tale. Her stories overshadowed the hardships of a home with little money and an erratic father. “In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all,” Arthur said, “the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life.”
Any innocence that was salvaged from that childhood ended during Arthur’s early education. Beginning at age nine, wealthier Doyle family members paid his way through the Jesuit boarding school Hodder Place, where he spent seven unhappy years in Stonyhurst, England, plagued by bigotry in academic subjects and the brutal corporal punishment common to such schools of the period. His only relief came in corresponding with his mother and practicing sports, mainly cricket, at which he excelled. He also discovered his own aptitude for storytelling during these years, drawing upon his innate sense of humor to delight younger students, who would crowd around to listen.
After graduating in 1876, Arthur returned to Scotland, determined not to follow in his father’s footsteps. “Perhaps it was good for me that the times were hard, for I was wild, full blooded and a trifle reckless. But the situation called for energy and application so that one was bound to try to meet it. My mother had been so splendid that I could not fail her,” he wrote years later. The first necessary action was to co-sign the committal papers of his father, who was by then seriously demented, to a lunatic asylum.
Aside from Charles, the Doyle family held a prominent position in the world of art, and it would have been natural for Arthur to have immediately carried on in that tradition. But he chose medicine instead, attending the University of Edinburgh to complete his training. At the university he met several fellow students who would later become major British authors, including James Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson. But the man with the greatest influence over seventeen-year-old Arthur was a teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, who ultimately inspired the character of Sherlock Holmes. One can clearly see the qualities Arthur most admired in Dr. Bell in the detective. “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes,” he wrote the doctor. “…[R]ound the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man.”
Holmes would not appear for several years, but it was during medical school that Arthur began to write short stories. The first piece, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley, was reminiscent of his favorite authors, Edgar Alan Poe and Bret Harte, and was accepted for publication in Chamber’s Journal, an Edinburgh magazine. The next story, The American Tale, was published the same year in London Society. “It was in this year,” he wrote later, “that I first learned that shillings might be earned in other ways than by filling phials.”
At the age of twenty and in his third year of medical school, Arthur boarded the whaling boat Hope as the ship’s surgeon, traveling to the shores of Greenland for the crew’s seal and whale hunts. “I went on board the whaler a big straggling youth. I came off a powerful well-grown man,” he reflected. The trip had “awakened the soul of a born wanderer.” He returned to school in 1880, and while he struggled with his medical studies after his Arctic adventure, he nevertheless completed his Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degree a year later, officially becoming Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle.
The new doctor opened his first private practice in Portsmouth. Although it is said he only had £10 to his name when he began, by the end of three years he was starting to make a living for himself. In 1885 he married Louisa Hawkins, a “gentle and amiable” young woman. In the midst of his medical practice and new marriage, he also spent time developing his writing career. In 1886 he began A Tangled Skein, a novel featuring characters named Sheridan Hope and Ormond Stacker. When it was published two years later in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, he had changed the title to A Study in Scarlet and now introduced readers to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.
Sherlock Holmes quickly became world famous, and so began a dichotomy in Conan Doyle’s life. He struggled between the commercial success of the Holmes stories and his preference for writing historical novels, poems, and plays, which he believed would bring him recognition as a serious author. Another disparity arose between Conan Doyle’s brilliant use of logic and deduction, on one hand, and his fascination with the paranormal and spiritualism, a practice to which he became devoted later in life, on the other.
By the late 1880s, Conan Doyle was better known in the United States than in England. But in 1889 the publisher of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in Philadelphia came to London to create a British edition of the magazine. He arranged a dinner with Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. The two writers got along famously. (“It was indeed a golden evening for me,” Conan Doyle wrote), and the publisher commissioned a short novel from Conan Doyle, which was published in 1890 in both England and the U.S. This story, The Sign of Four, played a significant role in elevating the profile of Sherlock Holmes and his creator in literary history.
In order to write The Sign of the Four, however, the young author had to put aside an historical novel on which he had been working, The White Company. As this was the type of literature he most enjoyed writing, he felt he would never find as much satisfaction in or accomplishment in the Holmes series. “I was young and full of the first joy of life and action,” he remarked about writing The White Company, “and I think I got some of it into my pages. When I wrote the last line, I remember that I cried: ‘Well, I’ll never beat that’ and threw the inky pen at the opposite wall.”
After a brief move to Austria, Conan Doyle relocated to London, opening an ophthalmology practice in Upper Wimpole Street. Lacking any patients, however, he had plenty of time to contemplate the next step in his career. He decided to write a series of short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. It turned out to be the most profitable decision of his life. His agent made a deal with The Strand Magazine to publish the stories, and the visual likeness of Holmes was immortalized by illustrator Sidney Paget, who used his brother Walter as a model. The artistic collaboration between Conan Doyle and Paget would last for many decades, branding both the persona and the image of Sherlock Holmes worldwide.
Conan Doyle’s medical career came to an end after a near-death bout of influenza in 1891, which helped to clarify his priorities. “With a rush of joy” he chose to step away from his medical career. “I remember in my delight taking the handkerchief which lay upon the coverlet in my enfeebled hand, and tossing it up to the ceiling in my exultation,” he recalled. “I should at last be my own master.”
Being his own master, however, involved making artistic choices that did not always meet with public approval. Conan Doyle felt burdened by Sherlock Holmes. In November 1891 he wrote to his mother,
“I think of slaying Holmes…and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.” In December 1893 he did the deed, killing off Sherlock Holmes in The Final Problem by sending the detective and his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, plummeting to their deaths at the Reichenbach Falls. The author was now free of the character that had eclipsed what he considered his better work. But his mother had warned him, “You may do what you deem fit, but the crowds will not take this lightheartedly,” and indeed, twenty thousand readers expressed their disapproval by cancelling their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine.
The Hound of Baskervilles, serialized in The Strand Magazine beginning in 1901, was inspired by a stay on the Devonshire moors in southwest England. The real-life Fox Tor Mires were supposedly the inspiration for the novel’s great Grimpen Mire, the prison at Dartmoor contributed to the idea of an escaped convict – Slasher Seldon – on the loose, and folklore lent the spectral hound to the story. At some point, however, Conan Doyle realized his tale lacked a hero. He’s quoted as having said, “Why should I invent such a character, when I already have him in the form of Sherlock Holmes?” Since he had killed off Sherlock in The Final Problem, he wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles as if it was a previously untold Holmes caper. In subsequent Holmes stories Conan Doyle brought the detective back, explaining that he had not actually died along with Professor Moriarty but had arranged to be temporarily “dead” to evade his other dangerous enemies.
In his personal life, Conan Doyle was dealing with weighty issues. Louisa had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in the 1890s. The prognosis was dire, but Conan Doyle was able to nurse her years beyond her doctors’ expectations. He also, however, fell in love with another woman during that time. When Louisa died in his arms in 1906, he had been involved in a clandestine, although platonic, courtship with Jean Elizabeth Leckie for nine years. Conan Doyle fought a deep depression for several months after Louisa’s death, but roused himself by helping to exonerate a young man who had been accused of vicious crimes that the former doctor realized the man wasn’t capable of committing. The next year, Jean Leckie became Lady Conan Doyle.
The young man was the first of several individuals on whose behalf Conan Doyle intervened in the courts. He was deeply committed to justice and public service and used his instincts and training to further those causes. Turned down for military service in both the Boer War and World War I due to his age, he nevertheless volunteered as a medical doctor in South Africa during the Boer War. In 1902 he was knighted by King Edward VII for his service to the Crown. He also twice ran for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist, earning respectable votes but neither time winning the election.
Conan Doyle had five children – a daughter and a son with Louisa and two sons and a daughter with Jean – and lost five men in his family – his first son, brother, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews – in World War I. After his marriage to Jean, the pace of his writing subsided considerably. He did, however, give playwriting further attention. 1912’s The Speckled Band, was based on a well-known Holmes story. It proved both a critical and commercial success on the stage, unlike some of his earlier plays. Before too long, though, Conan Doyle decided to retire from theatrical work, “Not because it doesn’t interest me, but because it interests me too much.”
He may be best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger series, which began with The Lost World in 1912, was also highly successful and made a profound mark on the as-yet-unnamed “science fiction” genre. Increasingly, the celebrated author retreated into this world of science fiction, and also into spiritualism. He and his family traveled to three continents on psychic crusades. He spent over £250,000 on his religious pursuits and wrote primarily about spiritualism for a period, until the financial toll drove him back to writing fiction. First came three more Professor Challenger books, followed by a compilation of Sherlock Holmes adventures in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in 1927.
Near the end of his life, Conan Doyle was diagnosed with angina pectoris, commonly caused by coronary heart disease. Pushing himself to the end, he took one final psychic tour of northern Europe in late 1929, after which he was bedridden for the rest of his days. He died on July 7, 1930, surrounded by his family, whispering his last words to Jean: “You are wonderful.” The epitaph on his gravestone in the churchyard at Minstead in the New Forest, Hampshire, reads, “Steel True/Blade Straight/Arthur Conan Doyle/Knight/Patriot, Physician & Man of Letters.” A statue honors him in Crowborough, East Sussex, England. And back in Edinburgh, close to the house in which the beloved writer was born, stands a statue of Sherlock Holmes.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes, led a robust life worthy of the pages of his fiction. He embarked on daring journeys to the Arctic and the Alps, investigated crimes and—though his most famous character is the paragon of rational thinking—staunchly believed in fairies and spirits. Here are 11 facts about this fascinating, complicated author.
1. Arthur Conan Doyle grew up in poverty.
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1859, Conan Doyle was the second of seven surviving children. His father, the artist Charles Doyle, struggled with alcoholism and even stole from his children’s money boxes to fund his addiction. The family’s finances were chronically strained: “We lived in the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty,” Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography. Charles was ultimately committed to an asylum due to his erratic behavior [PDF].
Throughout this domestic turbulence, the author’s mother, Mary Foley Doyle, was a stabilizing force. Conan Doyle credited her with kindling his imagination and flair for storytelling. «In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories which she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life,” he recalled. “I am sure, looking back, that it was in attempting to emulate these stories of my childhood that I first began weaving dreams myself.»
2. Arthur Conan Doyle trained as a medical doctor.
When he was 17 years old, Conan Doyle began his studies at the University of Edinburgh’s medical school, graduating with Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degrees in 1881. Four years later, he completed his thesis on tabes dorsalis, a degenerative neurological disease, and earned his M.D. He later traveled to Vienna to study ophthalmology [PDF].
Conan Doyle established a medical practice in the English city of Portsmouth, where he also wrote his first two Sherlock Holmes novels: A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four. Holmes was based in part on one of his professors at medical school, Dr. Joseph Bell, known for his ability to deduce facts about his patients through close observation.
In 1891, Conan Doyle relocated to London to work as an ophthalmologist. The venture was not a resounding success; he would later joke that his rented offices had two waiting rooms: “I waited in the consulting room, and no one waited in the waiting room.” But that left Conan Doyle with ample time to devote to his budding literary career. He soon gave up medicine in favor of writing—a decision that he called “one of the great moments of exultation” in his life.
3. Arthur Conan Doyle traveled to the Arctic on a whaling expedition.
While in the midst of his medical studies, Conan Doyle accepted a position as a ship’s surgeon on a whaler headed to the Arctic Circle. A hardy young man with an adventurous spirit, he joined his shipmates in hunting seals, not at all deterred by his lack of experience on the ice and frequent tumbles into the freezing waters. Conan Doyle did have some qualms about the slaughter, writing that “those glaring crimson pools upon the dazzling white of the ice fields … did seem a horrible intrusion.” Nevertheless, he found the journey—particularly the whale hunts—exhilarating. “No man who has not experienced it,” Conan Doyle opined, “can imagine the intense excitement of whale fishing.”
4. Arthur Conan Doyle got sick of Sherlock Holmes.
The popularity of Sherlock Holmes skyrocketed after Conan Doyle struck a deal with the Strand Magazine to publish a series of short stories featuring the mastermind detective. Readers would line up at newsagents on the days that new issues dropped, and Conan Doyle eventually became one of the highest-paid writers of his day. But he grew exasperated by the public’s love for Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle also wrote historical novels, plays, and poetry, and he felt that his detective fiction overshadowed these other, more serious works. “I have had such an overdose of [Holmes] that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day,» the author quipped.
In the 1893 story “The Final Problem,” Conan Doyle killed off Holmes, sending him plunging to his death over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Fans were devastated; more than 20,000 of them canceled their subscriptions to the Strand in protest. Conan Doyle did not publish another Holmes story for eight years, ending his strike with The Hound of the Baskervilles, which takes place before Holmes’s death. In 1903, prompted by a tremendous offer from British and American publishers, Conan Doyle decided to resurrect his much-loved sleuth. Over the course of his career, he featured Holmes in 56 stories and four novels—now known to fans as the “Canon.”
5. Arthur Conan Doyle helped popularize Switzerland as a skiing destination.
In 1893, Conan Doyle’s first wife, Louisa, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The couple decided to head to Davos, in the Swiss Alps, hoping that the crisp, clear air would be beneficial to Louisa. Her health did improve, for a time, and Conan Doyle decided to take up skiing, a Norwegian sport that was new to Switzerland and virtually unknown in Britain. He wrote a humorous article in the Strand about his attempts to master skiing and his daring journey over the Furka Pass, which soars 8000 feet above sea level. The article was republished multiple times and drew attention to the Swiss Alps as a skiing destination. Today, a plaque in Davos honors Conan Doyle for “bringing this new sport and the attractions of the Swiss Alps in winter to the world.”
6. Arthur Conan Doyle believed it was possible to communicate with the dead.
Conan Doyle began exploring mystical ideas about spirits and the afterlife as a young doctor. In later life, he became one of the world’s most prominent advocates of Spiritualism, a movement rooted in the belief that the souls of the dead can communicate with the living, usually through a medium. Spiritualism took root in Britain during the Victorian era and continued to flourish in the years after WWI, when many families were eager to connect with lost loved ones. Conan Doyle’s own brother and son died during the influenza pandemic that swept the world in the wake of the Great War, and the author believed that they reached out to him during séances.
He wrote books on Spiritualism, debated the subject with skeptics and traveled the world delivering lectures on the Spiritualist cause, which he described as the “most important thing in the world, and the particular thing which the human race in its present state of development needs more than anything else.”
7. Arthur Conan Doyle also believed in fairies.
In 1920, a pair of startling photographs came to Conan Doyle’s attention. The images appeared to show two schoolgirls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, posing with fairies by a stream in the English village of Cottingley. After conducting what he believed to be a thorough investigation, Conan Doyle became convinced that the photographs were genuine, and wrote two articles and a book on the “Cottingley Fairies.” With a renowned author championing them, the photos became a sensation. Conan Doyle was widely ridiculed by those who believed the images were fake, but he remained steadfast; he hoped that the photographs would propel an incredulous public to “admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life” and, by extension, to accept the “spiritual message” that he worked tirelessly to promote.
In 1983, Wright and Griffiths finally confessed that the photographs were a hoax. The “fairies” were simply paper cutouts, copied from a children’s book, and propped up with hat pins. They had only meant to trick their parents; Wright later said that she and Griffiths were too embarrassed to admit the truth once their story was believed by the famous Conan Doyle.
8. Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle had a fraught friendship.
Conan Doyle met Harry Houdini in 1920, while the famed magician was visiting England. They bonded over Spiritualism; Houdini, though fairly certain that mediums were tricksters and frauds, was at that time willing to be convinced otherwise. For his part, Conan Doyle believed that Houdini possessed psychic powers.
When Conan Doyle traveled to America in 1922, the friends met up in Atlantic City. Houdini agreed to participate in a séance with Conan Doyle and his second wife, Jean, who claimed she could channel the spirits of the dead. But Houdini quickly came to suspect that the séance was a sham. Jean filled multiple pages with automatic writing that she said came from Houdini’s deceased mother—though his mother could barely speak English. Houdini also found it curious that Jean’s automatic writing included the sign of a cross, considering that his mother was Jewish. The episode caused a rift between the friends, and they argued both privately and publicly over the legitimacy of medium cases.
9. Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted for his support of the Boer War.
Fueled by a sense of patriotism after the outbreak of the Second Boer War, Conan Doyle traveled to Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1900 to volunteer as a doctor in a field hospital. There he encountered a grim scene; Bloemfontein was in the grips of a typhoid epidemic, the hospital was overwhelmed with sick and dying patients, and sanitary conditions were abysmal [PDF]. But his conviction in the war did not flag, even as the conflict dragged on, became increasingly brutal, and began to lose support in Britain and beyond. Indignant over reports of British atrocities, Conan Doyle published a pamphlet defending his country’s actions in South Africa. He was knighted by King Edward VII in 1902, largely in honor of this influential work.
10. Arthur Conan Doyle came to the defense of two wrongfully accused men.
In 1903, a solicitor named George Edalji was found guilty of mutilating a horse and writing a series of menacing anonymous letters in a rural parish. The evidence against him was unconvincing—the letters had been sent to his own family, for one thing—and three years later he was released from prison, without a pardon. Edalji wrote to Conan Doyle, hoping the creator of Sherlock Holmes would help clear his name. Conan Doyle visited the scene of the crimes, met with Edalji, and was certain of his innocence.
He noted, among other things, that Edalji was so near-sighted that it would have been impossible for him to sneak across the countryside, attacking livestock in the dead of night. And he recognized that racial prejudice was likely at play; Edalji, whose father was of Parsee origin, “must assuredly have [seemed] a very queer man to the eyes of an English village,” the author wrote in an article arguing that Edalji had been wrongfully accused. Conan Doyle also sent a barrage of letters to the chief constable in charge of the case, proffering new evidence and theories of other suspects. Edalji was ultimately pardoned, but was not given financial compensation for the miscarriage of justice against him.
Conan Doyle also campaigned on behalf of Oscar Slater, a German-Jewish bookmaker who was convicted of murdering a wealthy woman in Glasgow. Though Slater had an alibi, police homed in on him as the culprit, and it would later emerge that key evidence was withheld during the trial. Conan Doyle was a vocal participant in the campaign advocating for Slater’s release from prison; in 1912, he published The Case of Oscar Slater, which highlighted grave flaws in the investigation and prosecution. His plea failed to sway the authorities, but Conan Doyle continued to pressure politicians and even pay for Slater’s legal fees. Slater was set free in 1927, having served more than 18 years in prison.
11. Family members celebrated at Arthur Conan Doyle’s funeral.
Conan Doyle died of a heart attack on July 7, 1930, at the age of 71. Three hundred people attended the funeral at his country home, and the atmosphere was uplifting, rather than somber. The mourners did not wear black and the blinds of the house were not drawn. “We know that it is only the natural body that we are committing to the ground,” his wife Jean told friends. On July 13, thousands of people packed into the Royal Albert Hall in London for a memorial service. During the ceremony, Estelle Roberts, one of Conan Doyle’s favorite mediums, gazed at a chair reserved for the writer and proclaimed: “He is here.”
Idiomas RalFer 