The Kid

“A picture with a smile – and perhaps, a tear.” This warning to the unwary viewer opens Charlie Chaplin’s first feature-length film, and this “perhaps” betrays neither note of intent nor mere conjecture. In Chaplin’s films, tears replace smiles (and laughter) in an astounding, necessary dialectic: the spectator cries because he laughed himself to tears; he cries, ultimately defeated by the silence of an image – one of an orphan and a vagabond taking his father’s place.

The Kid’s plot is well-known: a vagabond, as ridiculous as he is generous, takes an abandoned child into in his care. A mutual empathy strikes between them which ends up defining both of their lives. Things get tricky, of course, as soon as the child’s biological mother returns, filled with regret. The rest is cinema at its most just and poetic.

The Kid represents an ambitious leap forward in its author’s career, who, at the time, was already an international celebrity thanks to his comical short films. Not only that, it’s first and foremost an inaugural moment for a more human way of understanding cinema. In the absence of this film, it isn’t just Chaplin’s oeuvre that becomes incomprehensible; all the cinematographic “realisms” that followed would be missing one of their ideal models, because The Kid, and by extension Chaplin himself, truly constitute an unrepeatable feat in the history of cinema, reminding us of the dead stars whose light we receive to this day.