Customer Reviews

Chaplin at Essanay: A Film Artist in Transition, 1915-1916

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Chaplin at Essanay: A Film Artist in Transition 1915-16 is the work of film historian Jim Neibaur, who has been writing about silent and sound comedy for a quarter century. Like all his books, this one combines solid historical research with insightful analysis. Any historian working on the Essanay period has a limited set of resources to draw from beyond the films themselves. Chaplin himself rarely spoke or wrote about his Essanay period and his professional colleagues are now long gone. Rather than simply quoting other Chaplin authors from the last 50 years, Neibaur goes back to original publicity material issued by Essanay, contemporary news reports, interviews and reviews.

Framing the bulk of the book between chapters on "Keystone" and "Mutual and After", Neibaur takes each Essanay short in chronological order and presents a plot summary and full analysis as to the importance of the picture in Chaplin's development as a performer and director. Rather than seeing Chaplin's Essanay films as a series of rough drafts for better work to come, he makes a convincing case that each short can stand its own merit and urges the reader to look at the surviving films with new eyes. Neibaur looks at the progressively complex structures of the films as Chaplin took his art to new heights with each passing month. Even such overlooked films as "By the Sea" and "Shanghaied" show Chaplin pushing his mastery of slapstick to new heights. Best of all, Chaplin at Essanay is blessedly free of the academic jargon that curses many a doctoral thesis posing as a film history text. It presents itself as history and the author's interpretation of that history, nothing more or less.

Chaplin at Essanay should be on the bookshelf of all Chaplin buffs and anyone interested in our comic heritage.

An excellent and long overdue appreciation of Chaplin's transitional year at Essanay. Neibaur succeeds wonderfully in presenting CC's work at Essanay with the historical importance and excellence in film making development that it has always deserved. The connections from film to film showing the progress of acting, characterization, directing, plotting etc. are solid and well made. The reviews and other contemporary articles are interesting and enlightening. A must-read for Chaplin fans and film history students.

When I was growing up, I sought out the short films of Charlie Chaplin, and watched them repeatedly. I loved the Mutual series (and still do), but I simply did not appreciate the films he made for Essanay; they were simply poor, I thought. Of course, this was before they had the benefit of David Shepard's restoration. Now we can see these bright, inventive one- and two-reelers for what they are: a major step in Chaplin's great career. An indispensable companion to these films is James L. Neibaur's book, Chaplin at Essanay: A Film Artist in Transition, 1915-1916. Instead of racing through it (like time usually forces me to do with books these days), I savored each chapter, then watched the film that had just been discussed. I was struck by the insightfulness of Mr. Neibaur's observations, and impressed by the amount of fresh information he offers. That in itself is no mean feat. After all, how many books have been written on Chaplin and his films, anyway? For that matter, how many do we need? I'm not sure exactly, but I do know this book is one of them.