We Turn Now To Movie News: Chaplin, Rawstock, Mumblecore

Monday the 10th, at 7pm, the Paramount Theatre presents Charlie Chaplin's 51st, 52nd, and 53rd films, all from 1916: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, and The Vagabond. They're all half-hour or so shorts from early on in his Mutual Films era, and feature Chaplin's genius for environmental comedy, with mishaps with escalators and fire poles.

In his autobiography, Chaplin wrote that his notion of humor was based on "the subtle discrepancy we discern in what appears to be normal behavior. In other words, through humor we see in what seems rational, the irrational; in what seems important, unimportant... Because of humor we are less overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of life. It activates our sense of proportion and reveals to us that in an overstatement of seriousness lurks the absurd." Raised in extreme poverty by a mother in and out of mental institutions, a serial impregnator of teen actresses, and hounded by Hoover's FBI, Chaplin knew from vicissitudes. However, he made $820,000 in 1916, he took four weeks to make each of these three films (an epic film schedule for comedies at the time), and he was beginning to be recognized not just for his popularity as an entertainer, but for the artist he was. Here's an excerpt from The Vagabond.

For a peek inside the shorts of today, there's the return of underground film festival Rawstock on September 14, at 8:45pm at ACT Theatre. At 20+ shorts for $15, that's less than a $1 per film. Having seen the press screener, we can admit to not wanting to gouge our eyes out -- always a danger with indie short films. Naturally there's one navel-gazer "satirizing" indie filmmakers, but overall there's a breadth of imagination and degrees of talent that makes for good contrast; one about the Tooth Fairy's terrifying backstory is the work of Liberty bartender and cinematic man-about-town Justin Freet who (full disclosure) did not buy us a free drink for mentioning him. (Seriously, he didn't.) The short with a teen in a ski mask reminded us a bit of the mumblecore contingent, but with a more anarchic spirit.

That's our segue to the mumblecore fest -- "Mumble Without A Cause" -- ongoing through October 3 at the Northwest Film Forum. The big news there is the Northwest premiere of Hannah Takes The Stairs, which opens September 28. Mumblecore, in its pursuit of a variety of verisimilitude, is as artificial as Brando's mumble and as polarizing -- some people flee from it while others hail it as a "fresh voice." If post-collegiate life's banality and hyper-closeups on social awkwardness don't amuse you, this may not be your scene. The favored setting is a hermetic, 20-something social world, and the films usually feature a protagonist trying to sort things out personally. The atmosphere is lo-fi DIY, but if you compare the results with the shorts in Rawstock, you'll see that the style has other, rigid constraints. If Chaplin's films represent (literally) his childhood's unmet emotional needs and call upon the audience to mother his Little Tramp, mumblecore is remarkable for parents who, if they exist at all, exist as obstacles or functional roles, not people. In relationship, confronting intimacy, the unstable little proto-adult protagonists keep retreating to the safety of their self-directed, self-controlled bubbles. They are charmingly frank about their social failings, but rarely leave an emotional response -- no matter how small -- unstigmatized as a freak-out.