The world had changed. To draw similarities with today is hazardous- the situation is more complex today- but some of the contexts bear semblance, the same family genes so to speak. When Chaplin met Einstein in January 1931, the financial markets were in tatters, the global economy was deflationary, unemployment was high and stubborn and the ideological chasm between left and right showed was acrimonious, and displayed little good faith and empathy. Finger pointing was the norm.
Although Keynes general theory of employment and money had been kicking around in various iterations for almost twenty years, global leaders had chosen to muddle along, out of their depth with the magnitude of the issues. So, not surprisingly, The concerns of Chaplin’s time – of a failed free market, self-serving and absurd economics, hopelessness and mass unemployment, and nations holding weapons of mass destruction , have become our legacy which we are reluctant to part with. Both Chaplin and Einstein were grappling with technology; Chaplin opening up the vast world of the industrial entertainment complex and Einstein the military industrial complex. Chaplin’s battles with technology and authority revealed that cinema had the potential to generate a critical, politically-based culture in which negotiations of the crucial ,technological and social class forces in our lives are tackled. And on a compelling human level, both defied the values of bourgeois violence and its reactionary models of personality…
By all accounts, the dinner party went splendidly. Einstein was awed by Chaplin’s manor—a far cry from his own humble flat in Berlin. Mrs. Einstein regaled the guests with an amusing, but rather far-fetched story about how her husband developed the theory of relativity there while playing on his piano and jotting down notes between musical interludes.
Then it was Reynolds’ turn to join in. The theatrical neurosurgeon asked Einstein if he had read a recent book, An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne. Dunne’s bestselling treatise speculated on connections between Einsteinian relativity and prognostication. Einstein shook his head, so Reynolds proceeded to elucidate it to him. It involved “an extension of a dimension,” Reynolds explained.
“What’s that?” the bemused professor whispered to Chaplin. Failing to generate the learned scientific discussion he sought, Reynolds switched to a new topic. He asked Einstein if he believed in ghosts. Einstein responded that he’d believe only if a dozen independent witnesses confirmed that they saw one. Otherwise not. What about levitation, psychic communication and other mystical phenomena? No, Einstein responded, smiling politely….
…Reynolds choice of topics reflected a popular association between higher dimensions and mysticism that dated back to the late-19th century. In 1869, James J. Sylvester, president of the Mathematical and Physical Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, published a influential article in Nature calling for a recognition of the reality of the fourth dimension. Then in 1873, British mathematician William Clifford translated and published German geometrist Bernard Riemann’s treatise on higher-dimensional non-Euclidean spaces. These pieces introduced mathematically literate segments of the English-speaking public to the notion of hyperspace. Riemann’s work would later form the basis of Einstein’s general theory of relativity….
Unfortunately, in 1877, a sensational trial in London raised a far different vision of higher dimensions, one that cemented its connection in the public mind with the world of the supernatural. That year, American magician and proclaimed psychic Henry Slade was charged with using “subtle crafts and devices, by palmistry and otherwise,” to mislead his zealous followers. Slade’s tricks included linking solid wooden rings and removing objects from sealed containers. …
…Yet perhaps because of incidents such as his dinner party with Chaplin and Reynolds, Einstein
sistently pointed out in his writings that higher dimensions had nothing whatsoever to do with mysticism. He wanted no ghosts-or quantum daemons—to haunt the clockwork mechanisms of his universal theories. Read More:http://www.pachs.net/blogs/comments/the_tramp_the_professor_and_frankensteins_brain_surgeon/
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ADDENDUM:
By the 1940s, Chaplin had chalked up gem after gem, all anti-establishment and humanist works, as well as flack for daring to show left wing sympathies. Being pally with HG Wells and US writer and socialist Max Eastman surely gave this away.
He also questioned the use of the atom bomb, making him doubly unpopular when Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunts began to brew up their ridiculous rhetoric….
…In My Autobiography Chaplin notes his prodigious sin “was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.” He did admit to being a pacifist and internationalist, less concerned with boundaries, false identity and patriotism and more with humanism and humility. “We think too much and feel too little,” he once said. How we could do with Charlie now. Read More:http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=17248 …
…Einstein and women are a complicated story, and Isaacson doesn’t attempt to tell it all. There were a number of extramarital relationships; how many of them tipped from companionship into sex is, like the electron, difficult to measure. (One startling fact, according to Isaacson: beginning in 1941, Einstein was sleeping with an alleged Soviet spy, the multilingual Margarita Konenkova, though the F.B.I., which was keeping close tabs on him, never twigged.) Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/0 /02/070402crbo_books_updike#ixzz1Z6h1PKd3
…A century later, art, science and the press converged when Charlie Chaplin threw a dinner party for Albert Einstein, to introduce to, among others, William Randolph Hearst the newspaper magnate. It wasn’t a success: Einstein wasn’t disposed to explain his theories to the uninitiated, the boffin and the mogul failed to hit it off. Things might have frozen up completely had not Hearst’s girlfriend twined her fingers through Einstein’s barnet and cooed: “Albert, why don’t you get your hair cut?” Read More:http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/what-happened-when-albert-einstein-met-charlie-chaplin-1956020.html
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“Walter Benjamin’s understanding of modern experience is neurological”, Susan Buck-Morss tells us. “It centres on shock” (10). For Benjamin, “shock is the very essence of modern experience” . The Cure (1917), another of Chaplin’s Mutual films, is set in a holiday spa – a place offering an opportunity to recover from the relentlessness of everyday modern life and nervous exhaustion. Benjamin demanded a similar function for art against this relentless modern life of the industrialised cities – “to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium” . Can Chaplin’s films themselves be seen as a healthy antidote to modern life – “The Cure” sought by Benjamin for the industrialised era?…
…I would like to propose that Chaplin functions as what Buck-Morss describes as a “mimetic shock absorber” through his ability to transform what surrounds him so successfully . How does he do it? Chaplin brings the discipline of his virtuoso, athletic, slapstick-trained body into direct collision with the discipline required of him as a waiter in The Rink. Part of this virtuosity seems to be that Chaplin learns from, and is animated by, his objects, as much as he controls them. He almost wrestles them. It is in this wrestling with objects that the slapstick moment arises. In Philosophy of New Music, Adorno describes a composer not as a creator but as one who “mimetically realises” the possibility of materials “during the process of consumption” . We only have to think of Chaplin’s ability to hide from the head-waiter in The Rink by syncopating the rhythm of the “IN” and “OUT” doors of the kitchen to comprehend how successfully Chaplin can re-animate regular, functional objects.
Such wrestling moments in The Rink are moments of “mimetic play”, a concept Benjamin discusses in his essay “On the Mimetic Faculty” . Benjamin identifies mimesis as “the compulsion to become or behave like something else” . Read More:http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/the_rink/
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Leftist German intellectuals like Benjamin and Kracauer would go even further. Chaplin’s anarchic personality exploded bourgeois models of personality; its “negative expressionism” set him drifting from the demands of bourgeois sociality – moral propriety, consistency of character, domestication. If Benjamin’s Chaplin is a cyborg, with his organs in the new technology, Kracauer’s is a man without content, an antisocial unmensch: “Other people have an ego consciousness and exist in human relationships; he has lost the ego; thus he is unable to take part in what is usually called life. He is a hole into which everything falls; what is otherwise connected bursts into fragments as soon as it comes into contact with him.”
Chaplin’s mutability in the modern imagination follows from modernism’s own dissatisfaction with humanist notions of personality and character, abetting its efforts to fashion alternative forms of personhood and publicness. But this changeability was also central to Chaplin’s Tramp persona, as Thomas Burke, a friend of Chaplin’s, remarked in 1932: “At no stage can one make a firm model and say ‘This is Charles Chaplin’; for by the time it has done the model has moved. One can only say, ‘This is Charles Chaplin, wasn’t it?’” Read More:http://www.js-modcult.bham.ac.uk/articles/issue4_nieland.pdf