guess who’s coming to dinner

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…

---Chaplin had filmed a silent movie and was unsure of how it would be received. Meanwhile Albert Einstein had arrived in town just a short time before and found himself surrounded by reporters who found him to be a new kind of celebrity. Einstein asked to meet Charlie Chaplin & Chaplin invited him to the premier of City Lights. As they posed together for the throng of photographers at the premier, Chaplin commented, "They cheer for me because they all understand me and they cheer for you because nobody understands you." ---Read More:http://unnaturaleye.blogspot.com/2010/02/albert-einstein-meets-charlie-chaplin.html

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….


--- “I said: “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you tell me what it is?” “He said: “I can’t tell you yet. I still have to work it out.” She told me he continued playing the piano and making notes for half an hour, then he went upstairs to his study, telling her that he did not want anyone to disturb him, and remained there for two weeks. “Each day I sent him up his meals,” she said, “and in the evening he walked a little for exercise , then returned to his work again.” “At last,” she said, “he appeared looking very pale and tired. In his hand he held two sheets of paper. “That’s it!” he told me, putting the sheets of paper on the table. And that was the theory of relativity”.--- Read More:http://www.ideachampions.com/heart/archives/2008/05/now_everything.shtml

…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….

---Some pieces develop lines of inquiry from the “Work of Art” essay, such as his posthumous notes on Charlie Chaplin, in which Benjamin suggests that the slapstick actor’s genius lies in his physical mimicry of the “dialectical structure of film”: just as film confers the illusion of continuity upon a sequence of discrete images, Chaplin’s body language synthesizes “a succession of staccato bits of movements”.--- Read More:http://www.rossmbenjamin.com/26.php image:http://www.doctormacro.com/Movie%20Summaries/C/City%20Lights.htm

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….

---His faith that a unified theory of all the fields exists went back to his childhood sense that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things,” a something that would evince itself in an encompassing theory of elegant simplicity. Isaacson tells us: “On one of the many occasions when Einstein declared that God would not play dice, it was Bohr”—the physicist Niels Bohr—“who countered with the famous rejoinder: Einstein, stop telling God what to do!” God, sometimes identified as “the Almighty” or “the Old One” (der Alte) frequently cropped up in Einstein’s utterances, although, after a brief period of “deep religiousness” at the age of twelve, he firmly distanced himself from organized religion. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/04/02/070402crbo_books_updike#ixzz1Z6g3yVVY image:http://www.myspace.com/toraichikono/photos/5038682

…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

---Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on art in the age of technological reproducibility makes one of its strongest points with the suggestion that within reproduction there is a loss of the “here and now” inherent in the original, yet, by coupling this reasoning with the artform that is film, there are fascinating disagreements to be had. While the machines in Chaplin’s Modern Times are all apparently created with the idea of assisting and forwarding human life in mind, they most often make things more difficult, or operate with very little concern to the user they have been designed to benefit. For Benjamin, the introduction of new forms of technology into the realm of art for the purpose of duplicating that art carries with it a similar kind of duality. Granted, reproduction presents art to a larger group of people, yet it is only the true original that holds the ultimate power of the piece.--- Read More:http://markzipan.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/charlie-chaplins-modern-times-walter-benjamins-the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-its-technological-reproducibility/

…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?…

---Consider Benjamin’s own examples: “American slapstick comedies and Disney films trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies. Their forerunner was the figure of the eccentric. He was the first to inhabit the new fields of action opened up by the film – the first occupant of the newly built house. This is the context in which Chaplin takes on historical significance” . The performing body of the “eccentric,” a Russian term for circus performer, becomes for Benjamin the inaugural player in the Spielraum of second technology, a squatter amidst the celluloid architecture of experience. His ontology is reproducibility. And his apotheosis is Chaplin, whose dislocated gestures “dissect the expressive movements of human beings into a series of minute innervations,” marking the internalization of fundamental discontinuity of both the production process of the assembly line and cinematic technology itself. A model of mediated human being, his significance for the masses “lies in the fact that, in his work, the human being is integrated into the film image by way of his gestures”; his performance “applies the law of the cinematic image sequence to human motorial functions” . As an eccentric body, Chaplin’s utopian function is twofold: he is an allegory of human being with technological organs, and his jerky movements, circulating in the public medium of film, provide emotional therapy for his audience, whose laughter is its means of coming to grips with its own experiential reorganization. Read More:http://www.js-modcult.bham.ac.uk/articles/issue4_nieland.pdf image:http://www.doctormacro.com/Movie%20Summaries/C/City%20Lights.htm

…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

Read More:http://www.socialismtoday.org/51/crucible.html

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