On this occasion, I don't have much time to develop an extensive lost and with which I can open up on topics freely... It's not that something is holding me back or holding me back, nothing like that. What does happen is that today is my daughter's birthday, and also many things are being decided socially and politically in my country; and although I went to bed yesterday at 11 o'clock at night, baking cakes and desserts for the children who will come to my daughter's birthday party, anxiety overcomes me and wins the game...
But getting to the heart of the matter, I think one of the conversations (brief, like many shocking things in this life) that I remember most from my university days is undoubtedly related to the Jazz life that Charles Chaplin lived. Abandoned as a child, in a poor, cruel, indifferent and exploitative London, and having lived through two World Wars.
He could easily have been a thug or a hoodlum. Society had failed him monumentally but he did not succumb.... He grew up to become one of the two most important artists in cinema and one of the most transcendental figures in the history of modern and post-modern Hunanid culture. This guy did everything he did at a time when even dialogue did not exist in cinema. He was iconic with his gestures and his ability to make us relate to each other through music and gestures.
Laughs, of course, but also a lot of art and virtue. In ‘Modern Times’, ‘The Kid’ and ‘The Great Dictator’, three cultural masterpieces, we can see his influence linked to incidental music and how it accompanied every aspect of his time as an artist and actor. There is no decent way to avoid being moved by the humanism and closeness we see in Chaplin throughout his career. And for those of you who did notice when I mentioned it a few lines earlier; I said: ‘that Chaplin had lived a life of Jazz’. And I did not exaggerate...
Hardship, extreme poverty, marginalisation because of his social class and his origin (Jewish) and yet the arts and, of course, music accompanied him until the last of his days. He was a magnificent violinist and composer. He figures as the main musical co-creator in several of his films throughout his admirable fantastic filmography. Two days ago, on my way home from work, I saw a poster of Chaplin on the bus taking me home.... It amazed me as well as brightened up my afternoon and my life. It fills me with joy to know that a genius like him is still respected and remembered. Today, with insomnia and anxiety, I turn on the TV to distract myself; and I see him dancing and singing, while the sonority of the music in ‘The Kid’ plays. I couldn't ignore him. This is significant...
