The Circus
January 17, 2008
Here’s a quick post about Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus, a brilliant example of the expressive power of silent cinema.
After the credit sequence, overlaid with the song Sing, Little Girl (composed and sung by Chaplin), a flat circular image of a dark star on a white background is suddenly burst open by a horse-rider jumping through a ring, and we are plunged straight into the world of the circus.
The tramp stumbles into this world by accident rather than design, an aribtrary sequence of misunderstandings and wrong turns driving him into the cirus tent with the relentless inevitability of fate. These opening scenes are some of the best in any Chaplin film, and demand more appreciation than I will give them here.
Once in the circus, the situation is a familiar one. The tramp falls in love with a girl (Merna) living in abject circumstances, only to be doubly frustrated as she falls for someone else and the tramp realises that it is this other suitor who can offer her a different life. This situation and its narrative unfold in a cinematic space created in and around the circus tent, passing through unnoticed adulation, unexpected success, farcical paralysis, and failure across different registers.
But it is the final sequence that I am interested in here. The tramp realises that Rex, the tight-rope walker, can remove Merna from her abusive father, and nobly organises their wedding. At first they form an unorthodox family, Merna clasping the tramp’s arm as she leaves the wedding ceremony with her new husband, the faint promise of an inclusive and open future that might disregard the comfortable insularity (and drearily predictable narrative closure) promised by the figure of the couple.
Once they return to the circus, however, the truth of the situation emerges. The newly-weds are assigned sleeping quarters in the first wagon of the circus train, while the tramp is told to find room at its tail. Merna and Rex beckon him into their new home, but he realises that there is no place for him, and assures them that he wil gladly make his way to the last wagons. At this point the horses are stirred into motion and the train begins to move. For a moment we worry that the tramp won’t board in time, but as the last wagon passes unnoticed we realise he never intended to. And here we come to the most beautiful images of the whole film. The tramp sits dejectedly on some object, in the middle of another circle (recall the opening image – though circles reoccur throughout), this time the outline of the now departed circus tent. This is all that remains of the world that sprung up around the events of the film, marking the outline of the cinematic space that Chaplin created and the world in which the tramp immersed himself. But time has passed and only these traces remain. The tramp reaches down to fumble with a crumpled fragment of the white paper circle with its dark star, overcome by nostalgia and sadness.
But only momentarliy. He realises that there’s nothing to be done, or not much anyway, crumples up the fragment, rises to his feet and adopts his usual jolting walk towards the horizon, stepping out of this final circle and the world it remembers towards something new.
I don’t want to labour points already made in my brief summary, but the economy of expression, what Chaplin gets across with a few simple images, as well as the resonances of this final sequence, are remarkable. For me it comes down to those closing moments, the circle, the tramp solitary and still in the middle of it, buried in the past, but then, on a moment’s resolution, up on his feet and ready to go on.
