Charlie Chaplin had many high-profile followers in his day, together with a few of the luminaries of the early twentieth century. We might maybe be forgiven for assuming that the author and activist Hellen Keller was not amongst them, given the constraints her situation of deafness and blindness — or “deafblindness” — would naturally place on the enjoyment of movie, even the silent movies by which Chaplin made his identify. However making that assumption can be to misconceive the driving drive of Keller’s life and profession. If the films have been supposedly unavailable to her, then she’d make some extent of not simply watching them, however befriending their largest star.
Keller met Chaplin in 1919 at his Hollywood studio, throughout the filming of Sunnyside. This, as biographers have revealed, was not one of many smoothest-going durations within the comedian-auteur’s life, however that didn’t cease him from having fun with his time with Keller, and even studying from her.
In her 1928 autobiography Midstream, she would keep in mind that he’d been “shy, virtually timid,” and that “his beautiful modesty lent a contact of romance to the event which may in any other case have appeared fairly abnormal.” The images which have circulated of the assembly, seen right here, embrace one in every of Keller instructing Chaplin the tactile sign-language alphabet she used to speak.
It was additionally the means by which, with the help of companion Anne Sullivan, she adopted the motion of Chaplin’s movies A Canine’s Life and Shoulder Arms after they have been screened for her that night. When Keller and Chaplin met once more almost thirty years later, he sought her suggestions on the script for his newest image, Monsieur Verdoux. “There isn’t any language for the terrifying energy of your message that sears with sarcasm or rends aside coverts of social hypocrisy,” Keller later wrote to Chaplin. A politically charged black comedy a couple of bigamist serial killer bearing little resemblance certainly to the beloved Little Tramp, Monsieur Verdoux met with vital and business failure upon its launch. The movie has since been re-evaluated as a subversive masterwork, however it was maybe Keller who first really noticed it.
Associated content material:
When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Grew to become Quick Well-known Pals (1930)
When Mahatma Gandhi Met Charlie Chaplin (1931)
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embrace the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the e book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Fb, or on Instagram.