My trip to Chaplin

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My trip to Chaplin. An Encore is an autobiographical short story by Patrick Roth from 1997.

overview

The story, in the literary tradition of the artist novel, is about the inner connection of the protagonist, a film student, with Charles Chaplin and his art. The great fascination that the film genius exerts on the young man manifests itself in the "Journey to Chaplin" on New Year's Day 1976. It is reconstructed in retrospect with the aim of drawing knowledge from the effects of Chaplin on his own life.

content

Chapter 1

The story begins in medias res , the five-year-old's first encounter with Chaplin. The scratched black and white pictures that the feverish boy sees on TV show an incredibly fast, comical rascal who is constantly playing pranks - one with which the child can identify: "The little one [...] refused in his first public The strip shown, Kid Auto Races in Venice , avoiding the camera, vigorously scratched the glass behind which we sat and stared, saying, 'Yes, look! Come to me! How I scratch the curve! Bite your way through! Leave traces! '".

The second encounter takes place under the impression of the film Doctor Schiwago , which the thirteen-year-old sees in a Karlsruhe cinema. The next day he caught sight of a classmate who looked like Geraldine Chaplin : Chaplin's daughter played the abandoned wife in the film and had aroused the adolescent's sympathy. The image of her double in the school yard “pokes” the boy with power, who falls head over heels in love with the girl. The episode reminds the narrator of the American saying “she sends me”, which sums falling in love into the evocative image of the journey: “[...] the 'ambassador', this traveling lover, always serves. Serve - without knowing it - the God, Eros, to whom everything is to love, everything to ask. That is why all great journeys apply. He sends you. "

The third meeting takes place in Freiburg, at the beginning of the seventies. The high school student has matured into a student who happens to come across a Chaplin poster after a theater rehearsal in the apartment of his American English studies lecturer. Chaplin appears as a tramp sitting on a quai staircase with a flower in his hand. The poster is attached to the door behind which the application forms for the study abroad are located. They will be filled out and sent off that night.

Chapter 2

The action takes place in Los Angeles. The scholarship student takes courses at the university's film school. His main occupation is to make "silent movies" based on his own script. Story and characters are secondary; what counts is only the formal language, which is appropriated by directors such as Eisenstein, Welles, Hitchcock, Sternberg, Ray, Peckinpah and Kurosawa: “Everything was form. We were in a form frenzy. Camera angle, depth of field, lighting, image composition and section, movement of the camera to the actor, the actor to the camera. Otherwise we had no eyes for anything. "

The fourth encounter happens to the film-crazy student in a small art house called "Encore". In the “Revival House”, which specializes in old films, he sees the lights of the big city for the first time ( City Lights , 1931). In particular, the final sequence, which shows the recognition of the flower girl and Tramp, moves him to tears. “I […] didn't know how the film was made. Was happy to be so helpless. All search for form was blown away. The inimitable could only be marveled at. ”That same evening he went to Chaplin's places of work in Los Angeles and made the plan to visit him.

Chapter 3

On New Year's Day 1976, the young man sits on the train to Vevey and writes a letter to Chaplin during the journey, in which he reports on "City Lights". The film is a "shell of all emotions" for him, which has fundamentally changed his perception. A taxi takes the traveler to Chaplin's property above. The driver devoted to alcohol reminds the narrator of the type of drunkard, one of Chaplin's standard roles. The local church, dedicated to Saint Martin, the patron saint of drinkers, also contains a subliminal reference to the pagan Dionysus cult, the “ Vinalien ”, which were replaced by the feast day of Saint Martin in the Middle Ages. In Chaplin, who liked to stylize himself as Pan , the pagan legacy still seems to be alive.

Once in front of the property, the question of access arises. Chaplin's house is surrounded by tall hedges behind a wrought-iron gate. There is no mailbox that could hold the young man's white envelope. On the threshold of Chaplin's realm, the traveler surrenders to his fantasies and reflections. The motif of the "tear-stained letter" comes to mind; it is still familiar from Latin lessons and was present in the “Stowasser” in the line “Littera lituras habet”. Awakening from his thoughts on the words of the letter writer Ovid's "visibly invisible" made by tears , the traveler suddenly sees the gate to Chaplin open. Past the chained, barking dog, his path leads in a large arc to the main portal. The letter is handed in at the delivery entrance. Chaplin's servant dismisses the "messenger" with the promise to hand over the envelope personally and promises to receive the young man again and to inform him of Chaplin's answer.

Chapter 4

Knowing the letter from its addressee, the world no longer seems strange. To bridge the waiting time, the young man goes to the nearby forest. At the center of his reflection is the question of the reason for the “excessive” enthusiasm for Chaplin. A mind game in the style of a spiritual exercise arises. Insofar as one takes the perspective of the hour of death and sees everything “from the end”, the important can be distinguished from the unimportant. In the young man's imagination, Chaplin is lying on his death bed and reminiscing about his life. Not a single film stands up to his harsh judgment. When City Lights also obeyed the instruction "Burn!", The young man intervenes, fights for the beloved film and saves it from certain destruction.

The insight that of all things Chaplin has ever produced, City Lights is the most valuable, is the occasion for a detailed analysis with the result that the last sequence, the re-encounter of the formerly blind flower seller with the tramp, contains the “essence”. How Chaplin creates recognition with the means of film, therein lies his position as a great artist. While the young man is walking through the forest, he recalls the final scene. The narrator translates what has been seen into poetic language in such a way that “poetry becomes film and the reader begins to see the text in his mind's eye”.

Chaplin, according to the narrator's fundamental insight, pushes cinematic means to the limit in City Lights and “denies” his own medium: he lets something that cannot be seen become visible. This “something” is something greater that transcends visible reality. Chaplin is in possession of the secret of making the invisible visible; with that scene he created the “most sacred moment in film history”. The recognition of the flower seller is not a 'seeing seeing' but a 'feeling seeing' - it comes from the depth of instinct. She only realizes who she has in front of her when her hand touches his and (as in a state of blindness) feels the sleeve of the jacket up to the lapel into which she once braided the flower.

“Here is something. Hands. That we cannot 'feel'. The "feeling" that we cannot see - and yet it came from seeing. / We “saw”: something jumped over. Invisible. That's the moment. This: of holding, of being held, of knowing. / And what do we see in holding, holding hands? The other. Recognize what couldn't be seen. Not even in the film. Because that is the art: At the highest moment it denies its own means, gives up - and thus goes over the top. The film then says: I am blind. As if the girl's blindness to her inability to see her had jumped over to us for split seconds. As if this moment of blindness had made seeing. "

Chapter 5

On the way back to the property, the young man notices a white car leaving the property and sees himself at the end of all his hopes. At this moment of "free" he recognizes the gate wing open again and shortly afterwards crosses the threshold into the house. He learns that Oona Chaplin read the letter to her husband and that he cried with emotion. The letter writer imagines how his words, enlivened by the woman's voice, penetrate into Chaplin's ear and further into the brain and evoke an idea of ​​him. The goal of the journey, “to be at the same time with him” has been achieved, but the story is not over yet. An envelope is on the table, inside is a private photograph of Chaplin with a handwritten note of thanks.

One last fantasy emerges, in which the young man enters Chaplin's room. The old man sleeps in an armchair by the window, his girl's unwrapped wings on his knees, an allusion to Chaplin's last film project. The peaceful sleeper appears to the young man as the forefather and " Artifex " with Pan's horns. The last picture in the story shows the traveler "unworthily happy" at the side of the butler in Chaplin's car on the way back to the train station. In Chaplin's seat he holds his picture on his knee.

shape

Narrative situation

My Journey to Chaplin is an autobiographical first-person story in five chapters. According to the subtitle "Ein Encore" (French: once more; English: encore), the story of the film student is told in retrospect and in the epic past tense . The events unfold chronologically in stations. The chronology is broken in two places by means of flashbacks: in the memory of reading Chaplin's autobiography (pp. 27–28), and in the memory of the report of Chaplin's death two years after the visit to Vevey (pp. 29–30 ). The structure of the narrative sections in chapters 1 and 2 is based on the age of the protagonist (the five-year-old, the thirteen-year-old, the student); in chapters 3 to 5 on the spatial approach of the film student to his idol: in front of the gate, at the delivery entrance, in the nearby forest, in Chaplin's house, in the laundry room, in Chaplin's car.

The narrator and protagonist are identical due to the autobiographical foundation of the narrated; they are at the same time differentiated insofar as they are told in retrospect. The text has two time levels: 1.) the time in which the story mainly takes place, the year 1976; and 2.) the time in which the story was written, the year 1997. The times can be deduced from the text. For example, the narrator says of his first time in Los Angeles: "It was twenty-two years ago." (P. 21)

The narrative illusion is repeatedly broken, e.g. B. "If the story was told orally now, I would get up at this point at the latest" (p. 31). The presence of the narrator becomes particularly noticeable in Chapter 4, when an episode from everyday life in Los Angeles completes the explanations on “City Lights” (pp. 64–66). Insofar as the story is told from the inside, the experiencing and narrating I overlap - with the effect that the perspective of the mature man and that of the film student (and vice versa) can hardly be separated from one another.

Autobiographical references

Many details from the life of the 22-year-old film student correspond with the author's biography:

  • studying English at the University of Freiburg
  • the two-semester scholarship abroad (DAAD) in Los Angeles (University of Southern California)
  • the film studies at the "Cinema Department" of the USC and the practical film work
  • the cinematic models Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Charlie Chaplin
  • life as a German writer in Los Angeles
  • the photograph of Chaplin shown on the last page of the book with the handwritten addition “Thank your letter”; it is evidence of the factual character of the narrative
  • The ticket shown on the back of the envelope, issued for a journey from Gstaad to Vevey and back with the date January 1, 1976, is further proof of the factual truth of the story

Mythological references

The structural model of the narrative is formed by the romantic topos of the student's journey to the revered master. The underlying narrative principle of the quest implies individuation, the awareness of one's own mission. In accordance with the basic mythological scheme, the story shows typical fairytale motifs: the threshold, the gate, the guard, the letter, the impassable forest. They belong to the image field of initiation . Furthermore, mythological motifs structure the narrative and give it a universal, archetypal dimension:

Is played u. a. on

  • Syrinx , the flute-playing nymph pursued by Pan. It is called in the quintan, with whom the thirteen-year-old falls in love when she plays Debussy's piece "Syrinx" on her flute
  • the cult of Dionysus Bacchus . He is alive in the taxi driver who, as a drunkard, indulges the god of wine and intoxication.
  • Saint Martin, patron saint of travelers and the poor, bringer of gifts and rider, who sympathetically shares his cloak with a beggar. Via the French derivation of his name "chaplain", Chaplin is associated with the "Capellani", the guardians of the "capa", the saint's cloak.
  • Kerberos , the three-headed "hellhound" at the entrance to the underworld. He appears as an aggressive German shepherd that the traveler has to pass by on the way to the house. The narrator names the jumping animal after the protagonist of Chaplin's film “The Circus” as “Rex, King of the Air”.
  • Pan , the god of the forest and nature, who loved to play jokes and frighten people, half human, half billy goat. Chaplin appears in the young man's phantasy as a divine Pan, peacefully asleep in an armchair, marked with the typical attribute of the horns.

Film covers

The narrative is full of film references, alludes in particular to Chaplin's films from his entire creative period: "Kid Auto Races in Venice" (1914), "The Immigrant" (1917), "The Pilgrim" (1923), "The Circus" ( 1928), "The Police" (1916), "The Kid" (1921), "The Goldrush" (1925), "Modern Times" (1936), "The Great Dictator" (1940), "Monsieur Verdoux" (1947 ), "Limelight" (1952).

Most of the films are interspersed in an associative manner, while “City Lights” (1931) becomes the occasion and object of the story. Seeing "City Lights" triggers the "Journey to Chaplin". At the climax of the story, the narrator evokes the film's finale for in-depth analysis. The interpretation of the scene contains the key to the young man's fascination with Chaplin.

In addition to the films by Chaplin, other works by distinguished directors are mentioned: “Dr. Zhivago ”(1965, David Lean) and“ Citizen Kane ”(1941, Orson Welles); The role models of the film student also include Sergei Eisenstein, Joseph Sternberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Sam Peckinpah.

Language and style

My trip to Chaplin is considered to be one of the first texts in which Roth develops the specifically cinematic narrative style that is a characteristic of his writing. The visual and scenic narration, which aims at immediacy and intensity, is exemplarily expressed in the "City Lights" passage:

But now - from
your point of view behind the shop window, we see it: Does the rag man start… to
turn around.
He looks still humiliated.
Still turning.
And since!
Does he see her?
Does he see her and ...?
Does he stand still?
He looks at her standing still.
And all time stands still. (P.56)

Roth works with the lyrical means of line style, enjambment , anaphor and alliteration , as well as interjection . Statements are often formulated as questions with the effect of letting the intended image emerge in the reader's mind. Roth himself traces his method back to screenwriting techniques used in silent films, in particular to the work of the scenarioist of the expressionist cinema Carl Mayer , whose style he consciously “copied”. Each short line of Mayer corresponds to a picture, a camera position or a detail to be emphasized by acting: “It had something of the film strip itself, which - like when editing an upright Moviola - is pulled past the eye from top to bottom. Each line corresponds to an image, a shot or a dramatically significant change in the image. I use this way of seeing when I want to sharpen or reorient the reader's senses: to certain details. Such focusing acts like a slowdown. What starts there is a different perspective on the world and what is happening in it: it is as if a layer breaks through that has - always - been under everyday events and now allows me to see differently: more intensely, more closely, more deeply. For me it is the moment when two realities become intertwined and intertwined, it is a 'dissolve'. I translated this into a narrative text for the first time in a sequence from My Journey to Chaplin. "

The story works with the leitmotif technique of classic narrative literature. It begins with a phrase that recurs in significant places: "Everything begins in the dark" is the introductory sentence; the last scene opens with the comment: “When we drove off into the dark” The young man's journey unfolds between the two darks. The image of the beginning in the dark always returns when a new section of the path is reached. In this sense, the moment of entering Chaplin's house is perceived as a transition: “The door, now wide open… The threshold into the house, through which I step in slow motion. / Everything starts in the dark. In a dark corridor. ”Patrick Roth explored the meaning of the beginning in the dark as the beginning of awareness in his Heidelberg poetics lectures (2004):“ But everything begins in the dark. The alchemists called this phase of their work, their opus alchemicum , the beginning. The beginning, that is the blackness or blackening: the nigredo - of which the alchemist says: 'When you see that your matter becomes black, be happy because that is the beginning of the work.' "

reception

My trip to Chaplin was well received when it first appeared. However, there were some reservations about the emotionality of the narrative. The programmatic consideration of feelings in the presentation of events, as well as the tendency to break through the given everyday reality towards a higher, transcendent reality, caused irritation among the critics. The "Süddeutsche Zeitung" noted a "solemn tone" and "occasionally hymn-like enthusiasm". Roth envisions "an art that leads us to the threshold of the numinous, only to be contradicted by it: an art that bows before that which is more powerful than it."

The “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” pointed out: “Patrick Roth, who has lived in the United States for at least 20 years, is a German pathetic”, his story was “moved by itself”. After all, the final sentence "brought tears to the eyes" of the reviewer himself.

The judgment of “time” is more differentiated. My trip to Chaplin is linked to Chaplin's aesthetics in many ways: “How the narrator approaches the property, moves forward to the manorial house, shrinks from the 'flying' dog, how he flees, returns dirty, how he associates with the servants instead of the master, how he shame to brisk mischief change, courage to fix: the entire choreography of approach and escape, inwardly as well as physically real, all this is due to the Chaplin, it is offered, received from him: he sends him "Especially in the" enthusiasm. ”And in“ offensive metaphysics ”Roth was close to Chaplin and his“ unconditionality of feeling ”.

In their discussion on the occasion of the new edition at Wallstein in 2013, the "Salzburger Nachrichten" took up the reservations from 1997 and explained them with a general prohibition of feelings within contemporary German literature:

“Literature has delegated feelings to other art forms, to opera and cinema. […] It is permitted to show yourself touched by a film. In the literature, however, there is an iron ban on vibrations. So deep are the reservations about ingratiating oneself with a reactionary premodern, even guilty of a fascist lulling aesthetic, that feelings are even made to disappear. [...] For Patrick Roth, feelings count everything. They connect people to the unadulterated life, they give an idea of ​​how deep the crevices of the soul are, in which something like healing - even if it is only temporary - may be hidden. It is true that this is dangerous terrain on which Roth operates. He sets himself apart from the aesthetics of the hard-boiled, to whom nothing comes close. The boldness of exposing oneself in this way is based on the rest of Roth's work. Undaunted, he takes up biblical themes, brings the Old Testament into our present, seeks the unassailable sublime today. The bible motifs overwhelm the contemporary with such force that he does not have to be religious to be emotionally overwhelmed. Chaplin's film 'City Lights', an aid to getting out of the normal world like everything else that inspires spirituality. Roth's story puts an end to the mediocrity of experience [...] "

expenditure

literature

  • Michaela Kopp-Marx : Eye poetics: "Yes, I Can See Now" . In: Between Petrarch and Madonna. The postmodern novel . CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52968-2 , p. 59-67 .
  • Oliver Jahraus: Epiphany as a media event. Patrick Roth's “Letter to Chaplin” and his media poetics. In: Michaela Kopp-Marx (Ed.): The living myth. The letter from Patrick Roth. Würzburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8260-3972-0 , pp. 241-254.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patrick Roth: My trip to Chaplin. Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, p. 10.
  2. ↑ Patrick Roth: My trip to Chaplin. 2013, p. 13.
  3. ↑ a b Patrick Roth: My trip to Chaplin. 2013, p. 17.
  4. ↑ This technique of gaining knowledge is derived from Ignatius von Loyola . See: Patrick Roth: Into the valley of shadows. Frankfurt poetics lectures. Frankfurt 2002, pp. 72-76.
  5. ↑ Michaela Kopp-Marx: Eye poetics. "Yes, I Can See Now". In: dies .: Between Petrarch and Madonna. The postmodern novel. Munich 2005, p. 67.
  6. ↑ Patrick Roth: My trip to Chaplin. 2013, pp. 61–62.
  7. ↑ Patrick Roth: My trip to Chaplin. 2013, p. 36.
  8. ^ "Visitation". A conversation with the writer Patrick Roth. In: Cargo. Film / media / culture. No. 15 2012, p. 26.
  9. ↑ Patrick Roth: My trip to Chaplin. 2013, p. 7.
  10. ↑ Patrick Roth: My trip to Chaplin. 2013, p. 86.
  11. ↑ Patrick Roth: My trip to Chaplin. 2013, p. 73.
  12. ↑ Patrick Roth: To the city by the sea. Heidelberg poetics lectures . Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 25-26.
  13. ↑ Christoph Bartmann: Closer, closer, my Charlie, to you. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. November 4th 1997.
  14. ↑ Andreas Nentwich: “Thank your letter. Patrick Roth's 'Journey to Chaplin' ”. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. December 30, 1997.
  15. ↑ Hubert Winkels: The most sacred moment. Patrick Roth's wonderful autobiographical miniature about Chaplin. In: The time. January 29, 1998.
  16. ^ Anton Thuswaldner: Visiting Chaplin. In: Salzburger Nachrichten. August 24, 2013.

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