Eighty years ago, Charlie Chaplin was engaged in the improbable business
of making people laugh in such a way as to remind us that every human, high and low, is
capable of wonder. How well he did this for our time is a matter of critical
quibbling now, but in his time there was no argument. In 1915 — before radio, TV, and
mass-market advertising — he’d shot to international fame in a matter of months, his
comedies awaited eagerly by the exalted and the humble alike, cinema’s first true
star. That decade saw the Mexican Revolution, the First World War, and the Russian
Revolution. Maps changed, millions were killed, social systems perished, new systems were
undergoing breach-births, humanity’s heart was bursting. Something in Charlie Chaplin’s
exquisitely graceful antics, something in his suddenly beatific smiles and his swift
devilish glances, made play of what was bursting. It all came out as laughter and
wonder for the space of a two-reel silent movie. Chaplin didn’t claim to know what he
was doing. He felt gripped by mystery. He often built sets without having the foggiest
notion of what he intended to shoot. “Put that staircase over there,” he’d
command. “No, over there. That’s not right, tear it down. Put it —
there.” He said: “You create a labyrinth, and then you work your way
out.”
Another great artist of that era was the Russian dancer Vaslov Nijinsky.
The accounts are clear, corroborated by many: It wasn’t that Nijinsky leapt higher than
others — it was that he stayed aloft longer. He jumped, and then there seemed to be
a moment of floating. As he put it: “I go into the air, and when I want to, I
come down.” This was an exaggeration. Nevertheless, many had seen him hover.
Nijinsky went insane in 1919, never performed again. Not long before being
hospitalized, he visited Los Angeles and asked to watch Chaplin work. The clown was
delighted. As a boy, very poor, Chaplin danced for pennies in the street. Those memories
never left him, and all his life he sought the approbation of “high
culture,” as though to prove to himself that he wasn’t merely dancing in the street
anymore. To be admired by the likes of Nijinsky was his dream.
So one day Nijinsky arrived at Chaplin’s studio. Nijinsky watched for
hours as Chaplin cavorted in front of the camera — Nijinsky watched, but never
smiled. Chaplin spoke later of doubling and tripling his efforts to make the dancer laugh,
pulling out all the stops. But Nijinsky’s face was impassive, the dancer didn’t seem
aware of anything, seemed lost in his own dream. Chaplin was crushed. And, a
furiously proud man, he was mortified before his crew. We can imagine his surprise when
Nijinsky approached with a humble expression and through an interpreter told Chaplin
how deeply he’d enjoyed the day, and could he return tomorrow?
Chaplin was a difficult man, to put it mildly. The center and ultimate
authority of a self-created world. Or so they say. Be that as it may, he couldn’t
dishonor or embarrass the great dancer. He said he would be delighted if Nijinsky
returned, Nijinsky could come as often as he liked.
When Chaplin looked at the rushes of that day’s work, he saw they were
unusable. So he decided that on Nijinsky’s visits there was no point in putting film in
the cameras. He instructed his people to pretend they were making a movie.
Everything would proceed as usual, everyone would do their work, but the cameras would
be empty, and Chaplin would play for Nijinsky alone.
It’s too bad, in a way, about the empty cameras. What footage that would
have been! Chaplin freed from all limits, freed even from making us laugh, freeing
the lights and darks of his nature to move for the delight of a mad master of
movement. What absurdity, what audacity, and what poetry.
Nijinsky returned for two or three days. The empty cameras recorded it all
not for posterity (for us), but for eternity. That footage exists in the world of
dreams.
The clown and dancer exchanged roles, didn’t they? The dancer became a mad
clown, re-calibrating the world to the demands of his madness (as Chaplin’s Tramp
did in his films); while the clown, unconcerned now with laughter, danced for an
audience of one. And it’s a little like a Buster Keaton movie, isn’t it? The
stone-faced soul stands there with something immeasurable going on deep beneath his
expression, while around him cavorts an imp of furious grace — and a crew of rough-faced techs
trying to hide their bewilderment. (I would love to have heard the comments around
their lunch tables.)
Thus the madman made everyone around him beautifully and generously mad.
Made them, in effect, float. And Chaplin could not resist such a call. What true
clown could?
I count it one of the greatest moments of cinema.
Let what I mean be illuminated by a moment akin to it — a moment nearly
half a century later, on a Friday afternoon. The coming Monday, John Cassavetes
was to start shooting what many consider his masterpiece, A Woman Under the
Influence. Since his death in 1989, Cassavetes is spoken of as a great and legendary
director. In life, however, he was sniped at and/or dismissed by most “name”
film reviewers, and his films were ignored by most moviegoers. He, his family, and
his friends painstakingly raised their own money for his bare budgets (his home
was always being mortgaged anew). In the face of what many would consider failure after
failure, he made one profoundly original, disturbing film after another. Even as he
was dying he wrote scripts, as though daring Death itself to stop him. (His son Nick
recently directed one of Cassavetes’ deathbed scripts, She’s So Lovely, soon to
be released.)
So: It was a Friday; they were to begin A Woman Under the Influence the following Monday. Cassavetes had the script, the set, the actors, the
bare-minimum crew. What he didn’t have was film. It would cost, I was told, $10,000 to buy
enough for shooting; but John Cassavetes was out of money. He’d tried to raise the
money for days, with no success. Cassavetes worked with a savvy rough-and-tumble
bunch, a gang more than a crew. They knew their jobs, labored for next to nothing,
usually knew how to deal with him (an art in itself, sometimes) — and they spoke
their minds. That Friday they told him even he couldn’t shoot on Monday if there
was no film. To which he replied:
“We have the actors. We have the script. We have the
cameras. We’re going to make this picture, starting Monday, whether we
have any goddamn film or not.”
Cassavetes was perfectly capable of making good on those words, and his
people knew it. (I have no doubt they would have gone along with it, at least for a
little while: That’s the kind of loyalty he inspired.) Several of that crew —
including his wife, the master actress Gena Rowlands — told me virtually the same
sentence: “You never know what to expect from John. Never.”
Well, one way or another, the money materialized. I was convinced that it
wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been willing, without apologies and without let-up, to roll
those cameras without film. When he told me this story, and I expressed that
opinion, Cassavetes gave me that more-than-slightly demonic smile which was one of his few looks
of unqualified approval. It faded into a look that could mean anything. He said nothing
further about it. Changed the subject.
Such audacity has been sentimentalized by the pleasant treacle of Field
of Dreams: “If you build it, they will come.” Well, they might —
but they usually don’t. More applicable, in these two instances, are lines from a
love poem by Boris Pasternak, written in his late Fifties: “The root of
beauty is audacity/And that is what draws us to each other.”
Chaplin rolling empty cameras for Nijinsky… John daring the fates by
swearing he’d shoot his script without film… these were artists connected to the
root of beauty, joined to that root at the deepest recesses of their natures.
Chaplin’s objective was a laughter that illuminated pain; Cassavetes’ was to bring what he called
“inner life” to the surface of our troubled common acts, so that we’d be
exposed to the psyche not as an abstraction but as raw behavior. Yet behind both motives
was a passion for, a connection to, a refusal to give up on: beauty. This gave
them a power, implemented through their boundless audacity, to transform the most
impossible dead-end situation into moments that were almost fearfully alive and pulsing
with wonder.
(People incapable of such behavior sometimes call it “romantic”
— a phrase by which they’re usually advertising how they themselves have given up
on beauty.)
Chaplin’s dance and Cassavetes’ dare — these were great moments of cinema
because they revealed that the power of the camera has little to do with the film
inside it, but is rather a power of focusing. An assistant calls for quiet on the
set. There is stillness. Then the cry: “Action!” Something must happen, even
if it’s only a look or a brief change of expression. That is the command of the
camera: Something must happen, right now. It concentrates life, focuses it. And it is this,
even more than the fact that something is filmed, that inspires the greatest artists.
Their full attention is brought to bear upon the living moment. Which is the only
means toward wonder.
This article appears in August 1 • 1997 and August 1 • 1997 (Cover).