Chaplin's Eyes

Charlie Chaplin's eyes were blue but no one remembers that.For moviegoers since the 1910s, they have been dark and deep, lined in black wax, and captured by a black-and-white movie camera.Chaplin's eyes are not merely striking; they defined cinema and the modern subject.In an emerging culture of movie voyeurs they created a new grammar of looking, one brought into being by cinema's technological developments between the transition period of the mid-1910s and early talkies in the 1930s.All cinema was experimental cinema in this period.Boundaries between mainstream popular movies and arthouse films were undefined even in Hollywood.In a tumult of quick productions and innovation on the hoof the first facial close-up, featured in the closing moments of Griffith's Friends (1912), was of Mary Pickford's face.By the late 1910s, the movie camera began to swivel and track, no longer bounded either by the technology that made it static or the outmoded concept that cinema would record two-dimensional performances as though these were in a theatre.Photographers innovated with cuts, tracking, and close-ups.In the short film Crossed Wires (1915) these new techniques were used for the first time to create the pace and excitement of a thrilling adventure story.Chaplin's A Woman of Paris (1923) and, following it, Ernst Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle (1924) were definitive turns toward more subtle nuances of facial expression made possible by close-up techniques. 1 However, eyes deserve a special mention.In the years between 1912 and 1936, Chaplin developed close-up techniques to make his eyes do the talking.With them as a weapon he played, seduced, and made audiences weep.It wasn't only acting; it was the creation of an intimate connection between the actors onscreen and cinema audiences, which reached out from the culture industry.D.W. Griffith termed silent pictures 'the Esperanto of the eyes'. 2 It was utopian thinking, a dream of the world in which moving pictures could create an alternative, universally understood language.Like Griffith, with whom he founded United Artists, Chaplin had serious artistic ambitious for cinema at a time when most thought it a novelty