THE ART OF THE FILM
Parker Tyler's book, a series of free associations revolving around
the word "Chaplin," hardly falls within the realm of film criticism at
all. Mr. Tyler puts the films to peculiarly personal uses that often lead
him to brilliant flashes of insight, but in the present case he is handi–
capped by the independent brilliance of Chaplin himself, whose domin–
ating presence makes Mr. Tyler's disorderly observations _appear com–
monplace when not irrelevant.
Mr. Tyler's free-floating application of psychoanalysis has the ef–
fect of reducing the complexity of Chaplin's art to a mechanical struct–
ure in which every element can be translated into some simple "mean–
ing." Thus the machine that swallows Chaplin in
Modern Times
be–
comes a womb; an incident in
The Gold Rush,
when a starving pros–
pector imagines Chaplin is a chicken and chases him with a knife, be–
comes a "paradigm of the child's fear of the father-devourer"; in
Shoulder Arms,
when Chaplin pantomimes the stars and stripes in order
to identify himself as American to a French girl, the stars and stripes
together represent a bed, the star alone represents a vulva, the "straight–
shooting stripe" represents a penis;
a
photograph of Chaplin imperson–
ating a woman is labelled "identification with the love-object." And so
on, until psychoanalysis in Mr. Tyler's hands ceases to be a method of
investigating and describing a man's relations with reality but becomes
a kind of "system" in itself, an arbitrary code of correspondences that
one can
choose
to employ; the penis might just as well be a symbol for
the stripe, and "identification with the love-object" is only a way of
saying "Chaplin impersonating a woman."
Robert Warshow
THE BODLEY PRESS HAS THE PRIVILEGE TO ANNOUNCE PUBLICATION OF
THE CASE OF EZRA POUND
·BY CHARLES NORMAN
with opinions
by:
Conrad Aiken, E. E. Cummings, F. 0. MaHhiessen,
William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky
available today at all bookstores or
THE BODLEY PRESS,
104
5th Ave., New York City II
price $1.50
1141
