To celebrate the centenary of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, I will be hosting a screening for the Rye Arts Festival at the Kino. This will be my fifth movie screening and third for the annual festival, following last year’s celebration of Godzilla’s 70th anniversary.
It is always a joy to present these films that I admire so much, especially when audiences come up afterwards to express how they thoroughly enjoyed the film despite it being in black and white, subtitled, or a genre such as horror. For some audiences, these are barriers, especially in this age of algorithmic streaming services that cater to your specific tastes in film. The further into this cinema landscape we step, the easier it becomes for certain films to become lost to time. This is not to say that streaming services are inherently evil, they can be a great resource for film preservation. However, they instead become content farms, producing one 15 minutes of fame product after another. This is the joy of hosting these film screenings. By providing historical and production context to films such as King Kong or Nosferatu, audiences go into the film with an understanding, and things such as lack of colour, or subtitles, suddenly don’t seem to phase them.
The Gold Rush, being a silent film, is another such obstacle. It’s an art form that has become obsolete for almost a century. Ever since Al Jolson tapped onto stage to proclaim “You ain’t heard nothing yet,” movie studios rushed talkies into production at the moment silent cinema was reaching its peak. The Gold Rush was Chaplin’s big comeback for his beloved Tramp character after an absence in the critically praised, but financially disappointing A Woman of Paris. The Gold Rush almost plays as a greatest hits for Chaplin, with great slapstick, boorish bullies, a touching romance and the humanistic fight for survival in desperate circumstances.
On Monday, September 22, at 8 pm at the Kino, I will be presenting the 1945 release of the film, featuring a voice-over narration by Chaplin himself, so if you are new to the world of silent cinema, this will be a great place to start.
You can book tickets here.