A timeless entertainer with timely ideas is the subject of an historic film festival ...

From THE ECONOMIST online

CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN BERLIN

On July 15th, a chilly evening in Berlin, around 3,000 people flocked to the Brandenburg Gate to watch a free open-air screening of Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film “The Great Dictator” (pictured). It was the first night of “Chaplin Complete”, a festival run by the city’s Babylon cinema, which is showing all 80 Chaplin films in 24 days. But the crowds also came to see Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie’s eldest daughter, who opened proceedings.   

“This is an historic moment,” she said to me at the Adlon hotel, a short walk from the Brandenburg Gate, the day before the opening. “My father walked through history and he became history and now his film is shown here.”

Her father also stayed at the Adlon on a visit to Berlin in 1931, on a promotional trip for his last and most successful silent film, “City Lights”. Although he missed the premiere—a pro-Nazi media campaign defaming Chaplin as an “anti-German warmonger” and an “American film-Jew” forced him to abscond to Vienna ahead of time—Geraldine is convinced the visit left a mark on her father. The Nazis didn’t come to power until 1933, but she says that Chaplin’s visit “was the moment he started to be fascinated with Hitler”.

 Geraldine recounts an interview Chaplin gave to Life magazine in the 1970s, when he was asked what he thought of Hitler’s acting style. “Well, it was very oratory,” he said, “and a little bit over the top. The gestures were maybe just a little bit too big, which made me think, ‘This man does not have much confidence in himself.’ He must have had someone back there behind the scenes saying to him, ‘You are doing good. You are doing great, guy.’” Geraldine suggests that these views of Hitler informed her father's parodic performance in "The Great Dictator”, his first talking picture and one of his most successful.

 The only time Geraldine heard her father speak about Berlin was through a closed door. “I did a lot of eavesdropping,” she says. She remembers hearing Chaplin telling a German friend, “In Berlin I fell in love”, and then she “heard this name which wasn’t my mother’s.” Shocked, she ran to the kitchen, where her mother was cooking, but she didn’t dare tell her what she had heard. She then chuckles, adding: “Of course, it was Nefertiti that he’d fallen in love with.” He was talking about the famous bust of the wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, which sits in Berlin’s Neues Museum.

 “Chaplin Complete” is the second silent film season organised by the Babylon. Ten of the screenings will be accompanied by the Chamber Orchestra Potsdam. Timothy Brock, who is conducting the performances, has been working since 2000 to restore all the original scores from Chaplin’s silent films. Geraldine is certain her father would approve. “He loved big audiences,” she says. “He also liked to watch his own films.” So do Berliners—recent screenings of “City Lights” and “The Gold Rush” both earned rapturous standing ovations. Timothy Grossman, head of the festival, is cheered. “The audiences’ response and enthusiasm tell me that Charlie Chaplin is reaching people’s hearts to this day.” 

 Chaplin Complete runs until August 7th at the Babylon cinema in Berlin

(Via Prospero)