Opening the Gotham hotel press conference for Monsieur Verdoux in 1947, Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) told journalists to “proceed with the butchery”. I’d read that comment before, but in this expansive documentary the original audiotape is dramatised in the verbatim theatre style of Clio Barnard’s The Arbor, enabling us to see and hear it – sort of. As with their wonderful previous work Notes on Blindness (2016), co-directors James Spinney and Peter Middleton make adventurous use of lip-synced recreations, bringing old audio recordings to new cinematic life as they wrestle with the contradictory spectre of one of cinema’s true pioneers.
It’s a technique that proves particularly powerful when applied to the tape-recorded recollections of Effie Wisdom, a childhood friend of Chaplin’s who was interviewed by Kevin Brownlow in the early 80s, and who is here embodied on screen by Anne Rosenfeld. There’s something genuinely uncanny about the result, as if the film were conjuring ghosts to retell their stories – a feeling brought full circle thanks to a late-life meeting between the pair (“I said: ‘Well, Charlie, we’re all getting on, darling, aren’t we?’”). Affecting too is a wide-ranging interview Chaplin gave for Life magazine in 1966 – recorded for the page but here leaping from the screen.
