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Early Popular Visual Culture

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The automatic chance of the modern

tramp: Chaplin and the Parisian
avantgarde
Jennifer Wild

Department of Cinema and Media Studies , The University of

Chicago , Chicago, Illinois, USA
Published online: 12 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Jennifer Wild (2010) The automatic chance of the modern tramp:
Chaplin and the Parisian avantgarde, Early Popular Visual Culture, 8:3, 263-283, DOI:
10.1080/17460654.2010.498165
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Early Popular Visual Culture

Vol. 8, No. 3, August 2010, 263283

The automatic chance of the modern tramp: Chaplin and the

Parisian avant-garde
Jennifer Wild*
Department of Cinema and Media Studies, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

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Early
10.1080/17460654.2010.498165
REPV_A_498165.sgm
1746-0654
Original
Taylor
8302010
jenniferwild@uchicago.edu
JenniferWild
00000August
Popular
&
and
Article
Francis
(print)/1746-0662
Francis
Visual
2010 Culture (online)

Charlie Chaplins nimble ascension into the forefront of international stardom is

also the popular cultural context for the rise and international proliferation of the
Dada movement in Europe. In this essay, I argue that by drawing upon early
cinema stardoms signifying practices, and the attributes of the cinematographic
image itself, Parisian Dadaists radicalized their concept of identity to express the
simultaneously recognizable and unknowable aspects of the modern self. I suggest
that by 1920 cinematographic stardom presents itself as a succinct model for the
Dadaists transformation of artistic identity into a set of radical art practices. By
pilfering mass popular techniques of cinema stardom, they re-routed the economy
of individual production and reception. Parisian Dadaists drew upon the same
operations that transformed Chaplins uniquely expressive style into an
internationally identifiable semantics that made the most oblique gesture a
powerfully articulate statement capable of mobilizing the masses.
Keywords: Charles Chaplin; Charlot; historical avant-garde; Dada; stardom;
French cinema
True thinkers cannot hope to be glorified, at least in their lifetime, in the manner of
Charlot
Francis Picabia
Dada kicks you in the behind and you like it!
Berlin Dada slogan

The examination of identitys function in the art of Parisian Dada first requires an
exploration of names, signatures, portraits, and performative appropriations of the
mass media. It also requires a sustained look at a field of logic in which the sign
operates as an independent circuit simultaneously attached to and liberated from its
referent a logic I will suggest is succinctly defined by early twentieth-century
cinematic stardom, and the film industrys deft elaboration and distribution of it in an
orchestrated media performance comprised of names, signatures, and portraits.
In now classic theories of the avant-garde, the signature and other identity
signifiers are conceived as powerful loci demonstrating the Dada movements critique
of the bourgeois art market, individual production, as well as the totalizing category
of individual reception (Brger 1984). In more recent studies, such loci are also
*Email: jenniferwild@uchicago.edu
ISSN 1746-0654 print/ISSN 1746-0662 online
2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2010.498165
http://www.informaworld.com

264

J. Wild

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newly about the logic of the sign, about the full infiltration of the space of painting
by a procession of deracinated signs (Baker 2001, 53). Art historian George Baker
(2001, 503) describes Francis Picabias 1921 painting LOeil Cacodylate:
And so here is Picabia. He is staring at us, smiling, a face without a body, or rather, a
face that has lost its body, a portrait of the artist under the knife. Decimated. Decapitated.
Here we dont have the body without a head, but heads without bodies, for there is
more than one. Picabia may be the only face that meets our gaze, but there is also
Metzinger And there, just below him, is Cocteau. And there is Gabrielle. And there is
Marcel. All so many heads floating free of their bodies, they roll through the space of
this painting, turning now this way and now that backward, forward, sideways, and
upside-down. These heads, however had companions. For the heads were joined, not
to bodies, but to words. To signatures. So that along with Picabia, there is Germaine.
And there is Tristan, and Man Ray, and Georges. And there is Isadora, and Pierre, and
Marthe, and Clment, and Suzanne, and Marguerite, and Benjamin. And there is Jean,
and Hania, and Renata, and Lo, and Michel, and Ren, and Paul, and Alice, and Marie,
and Roland, and Serge, and Cline, and Vanentine, and Franois.

Bakers enumerated, first-name panoply of personages and signs performs not only
his own adoration and identification of these Dada figures. It also encapsulates
how Picabias Dada tactics deracinate the marks of individual identity in order to
formulate a radical operation of avant-garde logic: I find myself very Tristan Tzara
(Je me trouve trs Tristan Tzara) reads the inscription in the lower right hand corner
of LOeil Cacodylate. Here, Tzara fuses spectatorial and semantic recognition with
self-proclamation and promotion. In doing so, he launches a signifying circuit that
moves between his human identity as index and the paintings field where selfreference iconically performs his location relative to other artists names and faces
whether authentic or not.1 Combining [s]elf-celebration, idiotic subjectivism, a
schizophrenic and despotic Moi a solipsism lauding moral disengagement and a
veritable activism of the ego, mixing psychoanalysis and publicity into an orchestrated
cacophony, as art historian Aurlie Verdier (2004, 55) puts it, Dada artists used a
language paralleled only by the newly wrought language of cinema stardom: the
celebratory semantics of the sign of the star that makes its meaning by way of a simultaneous attachment to and liberation from its human referent, and also by way of the
circuitous relay within the mass medias particularly dense field of deracinated faces,
names, gestures, and images.
My aim in this essay is to examine the rise of both cinema stardom in the French
context and Parisian Dadas tactical, highly orchestrated appropriation of, and conversation with, cinema stardoms methods and achievements. As it was generated
through the international network of mass popular media (aspects that should recall
important features of the Dada movement itself), early twentieth-century stardom was
a modern language built upon specific yet liberated identity signifiers that find their
earliest and most successful example in Charles Chaplin, or, to give him his French
moniker, Charlot. I have built my argument upon an archive of filmic and extra-filmic
texts from 1908 to 1924 that enthralled the masses and avant-garde artists alike. My
archive therefore includes a cache of art works, documents, texts, and citations that
emerge from the Dada movement in Paris primarily, but also in Germany, the
Netherlands, and Spain.2 I use these works to elaborate Chaplins expansive star
archive beyond film-specific or industrial sources insofar as they provide an historical
account of Chaplins reception, and the evolution of his stars discursive formation
and signifying capability. However, I also use these avant-garde works to illustrate the

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communication network that formed between internationally situated Dada artists and
that was in large part facilitated by the international distribution flow of Chaplins
films, image, and publicity materials. Chaplins star became a calling-card of
commonality and mutual recognition between Dada artists who wanted to achieve, not
unlike the Hollywood film industry, international distribution and attention.3
Insofar as Chaplin became a signifier for the Dada movements shared artistic
ethos that could not like Chaplins films be confined within national borders, the
expressive system behind Chaplins stars formation was an essential component of
the avant-gardes own language of art as tactics action, performance, appropriation,
and deracination as myriad works attest, including Picabias aforementioned
canvas and, most iconically, Marcel Duchamps alter ego Rrose Slavy. Hence, I
understand the Chaplin-centred complex of art works here as also a map that testifies
to the avant-gardes understanding of cinematic stardom as a distinctly modern revolution in reception and signification. Francis and Marcel, as well as Tristan, Philippe,
Andr, and their cohort undoubtedly adored Charlot for his absurdist comic range that
echoed their own sensibility: these artists were early cinema spectators who, like the
mass audience members of their day, found an empathic resonance and identification
in Chaplins modern, physical comedy. But as radical artists, the Dadaists recognized
and seized upon the mass medias operations that transformed Chaplins name, identity, and uniquely performative style into an internationally identifiable formal semantics that made the most oblique gesture a powerfully articulate statement capable of
mobilizing the masses, as Chaplin himself recognized in an interview: I am a being
made inside out and upside down. When I turn my back on you in the screen you are
looking at something as expressive as a face. I am back foremost (Hayes 2005, 49)
(Figure 1).
By drawing upon the often deracinated and metonymic means of early cinema
stardoms signifying practices, as well as the attributes of the cinematographic image
itself, the Parisian Dadaists radicalized their concept of identity to express the
simultaneously recognizable and unknowable aspects of the modern self, or those
contradictory qualities of the human beings new, modern capacity to signify as a star.
For the young inheritors of Alfred Jarry, Rimbaud, and Lautramont, the cinemas
popular-cultural language of international stardom was a vast new horizon for modern
signification that encouraged its own appropriation. With it, they forwarded an art
practice that exchanged making for acts, tactics, and concepts that critically examined the artists modern cultural experience as well as self-consciously exploited their
particular pleasures in its consumption.4
Figure 1.

Cin-Journal (13 November 1915). Image courtesy Thierry G. Mathieu.

From name alone to the meaning of a walk, a shadow: the rise of the
star vernacular
The years leading up to the Great War coincide with a surge in the stabilization of the
star system in both America and France. Although the French film industry differs
from its transatlantic rival insofar as it never has possessed an industry sector devoted
strictly to the conception and management of the star persona, the development of
stardom in France is nonetheless a distinct phenomenon originating in caf-concert
and music-hall traditions.5 As we follow its evolution in the French film industry, and
in avant-garde art works and texts, we recognize that by 1918 the cinema star had
become a concept in its own right. But we also find that its most articulate, and developed, point in French culture arises arguably from American films and industry

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Figure 1.

Cin-Journal (13 November 1915). Image courtesy of Thierry G. Mathieu.

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267

tactics introduced during World War I. This moment was unquestionably significant
for the spate of avant-garde artists who were, with the exception of Picabia, in their
late teens around 1915 (Picabia, born in 1879, was one of the oldest members of the
Parisian Dada movement). While the threat of combat loomed, the American
cinemas modern semiotics of identity offered an entirely new fabric with which
nascent avant-garde artists could begin to fashion their own radial means of self
expression.
By 1908, Path Frres and its Films dart production unit began to foreground serious stage actors as well as popular caf-concert performers such as Sarah Bernhardt
and Mistinguett to attract more white-collar spectators to the moving pictures as well
as to raise the moral and artistic status of their cinematographic productions
(Bernardini 1994, 113).6 Paths production unit SCAGL (Socit Cinmatographique
des Auteurs et Gens des Lettres) was early to foreground the real identities of its players by promoting the names of its actors who hailed from the Comdie Franaise and
who starred in, for example, its 1908 film Assassinat du Duc de Guise. SCAGLs
posters from the same year often cut the bodies from their stars heads to render early
celebrity portraits from under the cinematographic knife, so to speak (Figure 2). This
particularly iconic strategy of visual promotion was also used in arts journals such as
Comoedia well into the teens. Often taking the form of a miniature sketch that was
published alongside the program bill, the bodiless head, as small as it was, linked the
style of caf-concert performers with the recognizability of their countenance alone.
By 1913, Comoedia, which would have been read on a regular basis by the Parisian
avant-garde, began publishing regular cinema columns and film listings alongside
those for caf-concert players. The cinemas promotional expansion into this
journalistic realm may have helped ultimately to link the dcoup celebrity head
with the address of cinematic rather than music-hall stardom whose cultural dominance was seriously diminished by the cinematographes mass-popularity during the
late 1900s.
The cinematic grammar of the emblematic shot should also be noted for its
contribution, both before and during this period, to an evolving visual vernacular of
film star discourse. Used to end or begin a majority of Paths chase-film comedies in
this period, for example, this medium to medium-close-up shot of a films principal
player maintained the films narrative status as a not yet closed object by halting
narrative coherence for the pleasures of pure visual display (Burch 1979, 79).7 The
emblematic shot was a step nonetheless in the development of dominant narrative film
language and style, but it did so by setting a character into a closer proximity with the
audience, thereby suturing the audiences gaze to a particular human player as the
signature of a films comic style. In turn, the emblematic shot mobilized spectatorial
recognition of the actor/character as part and parcel of a films comic resonance, while
it also encouraged a pattern of recognition insofar as early chase comedies were a
nascent form of film genre. By demonstrating the early cinemas particular strength as
a system of figural enunciation, the proximity offered by the emblematic shot placed
the actors face as the object of predilection in an emerging system of star signification that would soon depend alone on the power of an actors image or face to
provide a simultaneous encounter with a human being and fictive persona (Bello
2004, 181).
Some scholars have argued that the first international star hailed not from America
but from the Hexagon: by 1910, Max Linder was celebrated as the king of the cinematographe, but found his monosyllabic moniker Max pronounced upon film
Figure 2.

Candido de Faria, poster, Tous les grands artistes jouent dans les Films dArt Path frres & les films dauteurs (SCAGL, c. 1908). Image courtesy La Fondation Jrme Seydoux-Path, Paris.

J. Wild

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268

Figure 2. Candido de Faria, poster, Tous les grands artistes jouent dans les Films dArt
Path frres & les films dauteurs (SCAGL, c. 1908). Image courtesy of La Fondation Jrme
Seydoux-Path, Paris.

advertisements by 1909 (Abel 1998).8 Linders emergence as a largely unified film

star (Linder was making films with Path, beginning in 1905) depended on the coherence of his persona as the eccentric if bourgeois dandy prone to domestic and social
conundrums and mishaps. Another early star by the name of Prince was one of

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Linders most significant rivals during the late 1900s. At times similarly styled as a
dandy yet more bumbling, less overtly bourgeois, and typed more aptly as a wide-eyed
rube, Prince starred in and subsequently directed SCGAL comedies that featured his
screen character, Rigadin (Abel 1998, 253).
Yet it was neither Max nor Prince who piqued the interest of Maurice Raynal
(1913, 67), film critic for Guillaume Apollinaires journal Les Soires de Paris as
early as 1913. A friend of Picasso, Raynals art criticism from this period fiercely
promoted cubisms importance as a radical style; yet in his film column, he
championed the low-brow film comedies of Polydor (Andr Deed) or the comic
people new-yorkais epitomized by F.C. Buny (sic), whom he described as having
escaped from the comic-strip world of Happy Hooligan.9 It is important that such a
staunch proponent of modernism took time in his column to distinguish his cinematographic preferences, and that he did so on the basis of his encounter with cinemas
early stars. He found Path Frres reproduction of historical scenes particularly
revolting for their vulgar stars (Raynal refers to Madeleine Roch and Stacia
Napierkowska) who hailed from the Parisian theatre world and who were, in his view,
both thoroughly uninteresting and un-cinematographic (Raynal 1913, 6).10 Raynal
demonstrates several essential aspects regarding early cinema stardom in this period,
and its relationship to the emerging avant-garde. On the one hand, cinemas were fully
secular and lawless spaces opposed to the trappings of a bourgeois art market; hence,
they were attractive venues where radical artists at all stages of their careers could
express a fascination with a popular, even louche world, an outlaw medium, comic
violence, anti-naturalism, irony and biting humor (Staller 2001, 2078). On the
other hand, Raynals specific rejection of Paths Film DArt productions a rejection
made more succinct by his identification of the films actors confirms the extent to
which early French star discourse remained tied to bourgeois theatre traditions, and
thus to discourses of cinematic legitimization throughout the early teens. While
Raynal may have appreciated the cinemas visual, sensorial, and quite libidinous
space where smoking and drinking accompanied wry commentary on everything from
musical accompaniment to film acting, his distaste for Film dArts outmoded theatrical style anticipates what became a pervasive sentiment among the avant-garde
toward French film by the time of the war.11 Hence, despite the iconic and potentially
critical resonance of Maxs silk top hat and tails, or the comic puissance of Princes
characterization as a naive arriviste, it seems the avant-garde of 1913 could not yet
perceive star discourse as a development in either figuration or their burgeoning sense
of radical address. Although the avant-garde was being nurtured by early cinema and
its early star-system vernacular, the conceptual and iconic palette of stardom still
remained an outcropping of legitimate culture that would soon be the object of their
own attacks.
Following this logic, there is little wonder that neither Maxs nor Princes name
appears in Louis Aragons schema for a Project of Contemporary Literary History
(Projet dhistoire littraire contemporaine) that was first printed in an autumn 1922
issue of the avant-garde journal Littrature.12 Meant as a retrospective evaluation of
the developmental trajectory behind Parisian avant-gardism, Aragon first lists Futurism, the Ballets Russes, the comic-book figure Nick Carter, Apollinaires Alcools,
Lautramont, Rimbaud, Arthur Cravan, de Chirico all remarkable entities and
figures, all recognizable in their own right. But it is in the third section of Aragons
Projet that dates between August 1, 1914 and the death of Apollinarie (November 10,
1918) that we remark the first mention of cinema stardom: the first line reads Le

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J. Wild

Cinma, Charlot et les Vampires. On the one hand, Aragons periodization suggests
that by 1914 the cinema had finally been recognized as a powerful force in the avantgardes cultural experience quite generally; on the other hand, the mention of the name
Charlot more importantly confirms that by 1914 the concept of the film star had
transformed within French culture. Charlot was a purely filmic creation with an
identity fully liberated from any trace of theatrical discourse that had previously
signaled the cinemas cultural legitimacy. With Charlot came another stage in the
formation of cinema stardom that, as we shall see, made the identity of the filmic character and the human being not only contingent but assimilable.
The reasons for this transformation stem in large part from the wartime influx of
American cinema into France that ignited a second period of a cinema of attractions
whose effect was felt among the avant-garde as well as within the French film industry
at large (Gunning 1992).13 This cinemas new attractivity what Walter Benjamin
labeled as a ballistics (Benjamin 2002) was built on the introduction of American
forms of cinematographic address, gender representation, mise-en-scne, and onlocation shooting that garnered exotic views of Western landscapes, for example.
But this cinemas effect was also generated by the American cinema industrys more
advanced strategies of star discourse. In fact, as William DeCordova (1990) has
shown, the American film industry ushered in the picture personality, a transitional
phase of fully developed stardom that mentioned neither an actors previous theatrical
renown, nor any information concerning the stars real-world identity. Distinct from
the French example, the American industry consciously integrated the audiences
lack of knowledge about film actors into its promotional rhetoric by privileging
secrecy and revelation as a central hermeneutic (845). With the picture personality,
DeCordova writes, the spectator was encouraged to follow through all of the
associations created through a specific actors appearance from film to film. The more
films the spectator saw, and the more she or he focused on the actors, the richer the
associations would be (51).
Hence, when Chaplin arrived upon French screens in March, 1915 only a year
preceding the first appearances of Dada in Zurich so too did American promotional
tactics that utilized an entirely new semiotics of fame and identity. By 1915, CinJournal and Le Film, the most prolific early French journals devoted to the cinema,
were replete with images and advertisements that simultaneously promoted the films
and Chaplin the character, the star. The symbolic economy of recognition generated
by the spectators successive encounter with Chaplin was probably the motor behind
Aragons own declaration in his literary history, or the one found in Blaise Cendrars
poem Le Musickissme in which he writes: CHARLOT orchestra conductor taps the
baton/Before/the hatted European and his corseted wife.14
But insofar as the name (Aragon and Cendrars use Charlot, and not Chaplin, after
all) and its circulation were central components of the extra-filmic discourse
encouraging such spectatorial recognition, Chaplins appellation in the French context
deserves special attention. The French trade presss promotion of Chaplin most
certainly took the form of images (hand-drawn illustrations and, later, photographs),
but the copyright war surrounding use of Charlot is fascinating for its particularly
lithe symbolic economy that the avant-garde later used to great effect. Several
companies distributed Chaplins films during this period, but from 1915 until the early
1920s the name Charlot was the sole property of Jacques Hak, independent distributor of Keystone and Essanay films (Mathieu, n.d.). Hak fought continuously with the
industry giant Path Frres, whose advertisements were bound by law to use the name

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Charlie Chaplin, and who subsequently insisted on the veritable nature of their
distributions (Figure 3). Although Chaplin quickly became assimilated into French
culture as Charlot, the squabble over the names authenticity was in large part a
response to a spate of imitators who mimicked Chaplins unique expressivity, and
whose own promotion hailed the spectator with a similarly metonymic image style.
One such imitator was comedian Billie Ritchie who was also strongly promoted in

Figure 3.
Mathieu.

Le film no. 19 Nouvelle Srie (22 July 1916). Image courtesy of Thierry G.

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J. Wild

Cin-Journal and La Cinmatographie Franaise throughout the mid-teens. The

journals advertisements for Ritchie, who had also crossed the Atlantic to make you
laugh, used publicity tactics that directly challenged Chaplins growing recognizability as a visual form, including life-sized silhouettes to adorn a cinemas faade (CinJournal, 13 November 1915).
Despite the natural assimilation of Charlot into the French language, the signifying capacity of Chaplins body did not need linguistic support. Only eight months after
Chaplins image became fare for French audiences, Cin-Journal promoted Chaplin
on its cover without a trace of either Chaplins name or his copyrighted appellation.15
Rather, his gestural form and vestiture made his identity metonymically recognizable
even when his back is turned. Always IMITATED Never EQUALLED the journal announced, underscoring the readers comprehension that Chaplins style was
inimitable and recognizable even when performed by another filmic body, even as it
was detached deracinated from its name (Figure 4).
Insofar as Cendrars early poem bears witness to the semiotic density of Charlot,
Max Jacobs comparative meditation (1918) on the cinema and the theater (Nord-Sud,
1980) traces the further evolution in cinematic stardom that was taking place in
France near the end of the war. Jacob argues that film advertisements use of real-life
information about their celebrities were merely remnants of an outmoded rhetoric
belonging to bourgeois theatre traditions evidence of theatrical mores in the
cinematographic (Jacob 1980). On the one hand, Jacob shares Aragons stance taken
the same year regarding the avant-gardes challenge to contemporary theatre: Les
Mamelles [de Tiresias, Guillaume Apollinaire, 1917] finally liberates us from
Figure 3.

Cin-Journal (22 July 1916). Image courtesy Thierry G. Mathieu.

Figure 4.

Cin-Journal (1 August 1915). Image courtesy Thierry G. Mathieu.

Figure 4.

Cin-Journal (1 August 1915). Image courtesy of Thierry G. Mathieu.

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boulevard theatre already the cinema has given us Charlie Chaplin (wont he act in
Les Mamelles!), Apollinaire has given us Tirsias (Aragon 1993, 206).
On the other hand, Jacob also delineates the emergence of, precisely, cinematographic stardom as a distinct phenomenal operation opposed to the indigenous ones
still at work in the French context. For Jacob, Charlot, the only name to appear in
his treatise, did not simply denote a player, a man, or a character. Rather, Charlot
was an assimilated signifier connoting Chaplins simultaneous immortality and
humanity, a man made large by this art. Jacob (1980, n.p.) explains that such an effect
is made possible through the photographic nature of the cinema: The mirror offered
by the theatre, in an attempt to aggrandize us as heroes, only deforms us; without wishing to, the photographic mirror aggrandizes us by externalizing us, by recreating us .16
The French avant-garde made no mistake in their ability to identify the object of
their filmic attention, and in doing so in poems, essays, plays and art works, they
also attested to cinema stardoms modern signifying range.17 But the case of Chaplin
was singular insofar as the signs of his particular star could be read apart from of its
image and name its most specific identity signifiers, or used as a semiotic bridge
between figuration and abstraction. An incident during the production of Jean
Cocteaus 1917 ballet Parade perhaps best describes the extent to which by the late
teens Charlot as name, image, metonymic or even conceptual form became radically recognizable. Parade has become known to Chaplin scholars through the plays
Little American Girl character whose jittery walk explicitly referenced Chaplins
gestural neurasthenia.18
In 1917, Cocteau addressed the readers of Nord-Sud, and described the creative
process that he shared with choreographer Lonide Massine and costume and set
designer Pablo Picasso (Cocteau 1980, 2931). Ostensibly, they worked to render an
overall marriage of choreography, decor and costuming, while they also strived to
make the dancers movements recall the ferocious habits of insects from early scientific films.19 However, Cocteau also described how Chaplins silhouette appeared by
happenstance during one of the last rehearsals. Suddenly, when the shadow of an enormous and poorly constructed two-man horse appeared against the backdrop, it seemed
to metamorphose into the silhouette of Fntomass Hackney, with Chaplin in the
mount.20 The laugh that the shadow apparently generated in Picasso and the stagehands convinced Cocteau to leave this chimera intact as a rather ghostly presence of
the star who quite literally possessed the Little American Girl (Maria Chabelska) as
she performed live, on stage.
Chaplins spontaneous and planned appearances as shadow and motion demonstrate his stars transversal mobility across varied fields and material circumstances.
By the late teens in Europe, the avant-garde witnessed and took part in Chaplins
unprecedented mass-public renown as a comic persona. But with Charlots increasing
capability to be recognized despite the reduction of identity signifiers, or in his total
absence, they also realized that his star formation went far beyond the parameters of
the cinemas mass-public domain. It had entered into the vocabulary of modern art,
which by 1918 had already exchanged the classic contours of figurative expression for
a signifying economy of traces, shadows, and spatial decomposition.
Cubism may have been the first to execute this feat, but in 1918 Marcel
Duchamps Tu m declared itself to be a painting to end all painting, just as the artist
renounced painting for chess. Commissioned by the artists American patron
Katherine Drier, the tableaus title alone set a self-referential circuit into motion with
its interdependent yet deracinated use of personal and impersonal pronouns. The

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canvas forms themselves perform a similar signifying relay across the horizontal
stretch of the picture plane: the shadow of Duchamps earlier readymade Bicycle
Wheel (1913) mobilizes the gaze toward an iconographically painted manicule, or
hand that seemingly points both to and beyond another shadow-reference to Readymade (Hat-Rack, 1917). Picabia would alight upon this self-referential strategy a
few years later in LOeil Cacodylate, providing Tzara with a place for his own iconic
self-pronouncement that he visually amplified by drawing the outline sketch of
another hand, this time pointing back toward Tzaras Tzara.
While these examples do not explicitly refer to Chaplin, they nonetheless demonstrate a parallel with cinema stardoms signifying strategies, which, especially in
Chaplins case, construct identity from the relational distribution of both identity
signifiers, and flat symbols that alone are rather vacuous signs pointing only to themselves. I am thinking here of the manicule, the phoneme, or, in Chaplins case, the
bowler hat, a pair of baggy trousers, or a cane. In the case of Tu m, Duchamps identity was encapsulated by the rendered shadows of previous works alongside the massproduced symbol of the pointing hand; yet, in works that emerge a few years later
from the Parisian Dada movement, a circuit of creation, distribution and reception is
formed around the specific economy of artistic identity as also a star identity. In a
formulation that Andy Warhol would regenerate on a much larger scale decades later,
the Dadaists drew from the very modern circuits of perception that early cinema stardom provided: human form turned iconic, metonymic, and endlessly reproducible,
with a capacity to be recognized across international boarders, languages, and
materials, and in vastly different circumstances of reception.21
Becoming an avant-garde icon
What Im most impressed with is when I meet somebody I thought I could never meet
that Id never dream Id be talking to one day. People like Kate Smith, Lassie, Paloma
Picassos mother, Nixon, Mamie Eisenhower, Tab Hunter, Charlie Chaplin.
Andy Warhol

Beginning in 1920, the ubiquitous mobility of Chaplins star is demonstrated in a host

of works and texts that corroborate the Dada ethos and attitude, and that mimic the
circulation flow of Chaplins image and films to artists spread across Europe. Alone,
Ivan Golls 1920 film-poem Die Chaplinade [La Chaplinade or Charlot Pote] does
just this (Goll 1965). It is a fascinating point of intersection between the various
strains of Dada as an international movement; but it also pinpoints Chaplins value as
bridge across cultural, linguistic, and geographical divides. Illustrated by Fernand
Lger in Paris, its German-language text depicted the prima facie visual presence of
Chaplins star discourse in the modern urban context. It begins with a description of
hundreds of giant, colourful advertising posters for Chaplins films that would have
lined the walls and kiosks of European streets during the teens, while it goes on to
recount the story of the Tramps travels through Europe as if on a promotional tour for
his films.22
However, when Golls text ends with a cinematographically inspired passage that
announces a Chaplin-Christ, we are provided with an important segue to Erwin
Blumenfelds 1921 Charlie-Christus who at that time was living in the Netherlands.
Blumenfelds watercolour drawing was made the same year as the postcard

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photomontage that he addressed to Tristan Tzara. Titled PresidentDadaChaplinist,

Blumenfelds visual missive is a clear response to a message sent previously from
Tzaras address: To my Dear Tzara is inscribed above a whimsical and thoroughly
Chaplinesque depiction of himself, hands posed under his chin. This gesture,
combined with Chaplins name, establishes a circuit of signification that positions
Blumenfelds identity, Chaplins gestural iconicity, and the Dada movement into a
voluble relay. Furthermore, the photomontages bottom inscription reads Charlotin
a play on the similarity between the name Charlot and the French word charlatan.
It thereby summarizes Blumenfelds recognition of the underlying tension contained
in his self-portrait: by positing himself as both Chaplin and PresidentDada, he in
fact performs a playfully fraudulent imitation of two far more powerful sources behind
the formation of his artistic identity and the one expressed in this collage: Chaplin, as
well as Tzara, the authentic DadaPresident.
Epistolary exchange was a mainstay among Tzaras efforts to grow the Dada
movement and to effect a transformation in art practice on an international scale.
These exchanges were at times less iconographic than those had with Blumenfeld, but
nonetheless they often stitched Chaplin into their fabric of content, such as we find in
the aerogram from Spanish Dadaist Guillermo de Torre in 1920. Addressed to Tzara,
de Torre wrote, All of Madrid is becoming hiper-Dadaist [sic]. For my part, I am
going to read an [sic] study of spasmodic erudition on the influence of Charlot in the
DADA movement (de Torre 1920, n.p.). Although the text to which he refers
remains regrettably unknown, his message concludes with an enthusiastic description
of his plans to organize a cinema screening with his fellow artists. As a twentiethcentury carte de visite, the cinema generally and Chaplin quite specifically were
communication technologies that helped transform shared cultural experience into a
structure for radical, artistic identity. But as the self-proclaimed leader of the Dada
movement, it was Tzara who performed the most thoroughgoing elaboration of stardom in the service of avant-garde revolution. As I will show, Tzaras activities have
much broader implications for how we should understand the parallel province of
Dadas and the cinemas identity formations.
In the years before Tristan Tzara relocated to Paris from Zurich in 1920, he had
already established the popular press as a key factor in the construction of Dada
practice and its international circulation. As art historians and Dadaists alike have
attested, the vast number of newspaper clippings amassed by Tzara, his colleagues,
and by the professional agency the artists hired to track mention of Dada in the press,
amounts to nothing short of a life-panorama of both Tzara and the movement Dada:
Supposedly this is how it went: day by day, in their local caf, the Dadaists read to
one another newspaper critiques from all over the world and delighted in the echo of
Dada, each offering new proof that Dada had struck yet another heart (Meyer
2004, 11).23 With this image in mind, it is easy to imagine Tzara newspaper in hand,
undoubtedly surrounded by Hugo Ball, Marcel Janco, Sophie Taeuber, and Jean
Arp delighted by the international attention his antics were gaining, as well as
narcissistically titillated to see his own name in print along side those of criminals,
politicians, and movie stars. The Genevan newspaper La Feuille (3 August 1918)
reported that A new literary school, recently launched by Tristan Tzara, is making
lots of noise in Zurich Anarchy and disorder dominate in the manifesto read by
Tristan Tzara (Watts 2004, 35). In another Swiss publication from 1920 (LOpinion,
No. 8, 21 February 1920), a reporter applies a tone better suited for a bank robbery
than an avant-garde event:

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Mr. Tristan Tzara whose nationality remains unknown works in Paris. But the Dada
World Congress took place last month in Zurich.

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During a discussion, at the point of argumentation, Mr. Tzara, it seems, fired four shots
from a revolver blanks, fortunately at one of his interlocutors. Intervention by the
police, appearance at the station. (Watts 2004, 61)

In another particularly successful Dada bluff that was again reported from Geneva,
the Zurich Dadaists used a tactic that took far more from slapstick comedy than
criminality. More specifically, the stunt remarkably echoed Chaplins roving tree
costume gag that he used in Shoulder Arms (1918), a film that was released in France
in March, 1919. Apparently, Tzara and his cohort built a shapeless cardboard
construction that stood three metres tall and covered it with boards and coloured paper
bearing different inscriptions. Placed between some trees in Burkli Platz on the
Bahnhofstrasse, the structure probably resembled a deconstructed Morris column
replete with similarly recomposed advertising posters. However, when a mass of
people gathered around to proclaim their outrage at this object or its odd placement,
the column was quite literally uprooted from its function as an inanimate object:
shouts were uttered from within the structures hollow centre just before the column
went walking, much to the onlookers surprise. Dada or gaga, its all the same, the
reporter concluded (Watts 2004, 59).24
It is important to note the extent to which the Dada movement, in all of its urban
centres, critically drew upon the visual and verbal address of mass journalism in their
own publications. As with the March 1920 issue of Dada, these avant-garde journals
were designed to parody the contents and formal layout of the mainstream press: read
alongside the adjacent yet free-standing photograph of Andr Breton, the title for
Tzaras poem Mr. Aa Submitted to the Tax [Monsieur Aa Soumis la Taxe] resonates more aptly as newspaper headline than poetry.25 In the lower right-hand corner
of the same page, above a photograph of Aragon, a small poem might at first glance
be mistaken for a petite annonce, or classified ad: Charlot//lets disconcert/lets
disrupt/lets annoy/everywhere/war by starch (Edwards 1920).26 Another prose poem
found below, this time by Aragon, operates in the guise of a short report on the cinema
(or salle de spectacle), the Electric Palace (located in the 2nd arrondissement at 5,
Blvd. des Italians), and was no doubt an homage to Aragons particularly cinphilic
attitude at the time. Only six months later, Aragon would publish the first two chapters
of Anicet, ou Le Panorama in the Nouvelle Revue Franaise, a work that indisputably
took Chaplin as inspiration for its main character, Pol.
However much these examples signal the Dada movements appropriation of
popular journalism or the star systems own language within it, Tzaras mediatized
route to the French capital in 1920 bears even clearer witness. In 1919, the same year
Duchamp travelled to Paris and dismantled a reproduction of the Mona Lisas iconic
countenance with a moustache, Tristan Tzara sent his poster The Only Expression of
the Modern Man [La seule expression de lhomme moderne] to Andr Breton,
Aragon, and Philippe Soupault. The poets were to include it in their journal Littrature
a gesture that undoubtedly served both to advertise the international growth of the
movement Dada, and to further prepare the Parisians for Tzaras arrival into the
French capital the following year. Originally created for Tzaras own Zurich-based
journal Dada, the poster denotes three kinds of subscribers to both the journal and the
movement Dada, as Michel Sanouillet (Sanouillet and Poupard-Leiussou 1974, 23)
initially observed: first, actual Dada agents (Aragon, Hans Arp, Paul luard, Paul

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Derme, Francis Picabia); second, supporters who had ties with Littrature such as
Andr Gide, Jean Paulhan, and Paul Valry; and third, a purely fantastical list of
names that together stand as icons for a transitional moment in European politics,
contemporary thought, and popular culture: the Prince of Monaco (Prince Albert I),
Henri Bergson, and Charlie Chaplin. While all of the names on the poster are fascinating and interpretable, Chaplins is the most readable as a source for Tzaras for
Dadas conceptual project that materially manifested in Paris, Hanover, Berlin, New
York, and Madrid like Chaplins films.
Yet the subtler implications of this pre-emptive, star-studded advertising
campaign for Dada are revealed if we recall Andr Bretons letter to Tzara in June,
1919. At this moment, we can be sure that Breton had already received the poster (or
word of it), because near the letters end Breton pens a two-line paragraph that
terminates with a question mark: This echo of Charlie Chaplin is a delicious
surprise. But of course, its not true? (Sanouillet 2005, 409). The tentative nature of
Bretons language is surprising in the context of a missive replete with names, references, confessions, and seductively effusive remarks. I understand his inquiry
indeed, that question mark to mean that somewhere Breton believes, or wants to
believe, that among all of Tzaras outlandish new subscribers to Dada, Chaplin may
very well have been authentic. Perhaps unknown to himself, Breton subtly reveals a
confession of his own fandom, his own desire, or his own identification with the star
Charlot.
It seems that the poet Paul luard best perceived Bretons love for, if not identification with, Chaplin. In Prsentations de Circonstance (1920), submitted to Francis
Picabias journal 391 (at the time published as Cannibale), luard enumerated a
playful list describing the various participants of what, by 1920, had become the
Parisian Dada movement: Tzara was an inventor of subterranean flowers for volcanos; Soupault was a fragment of a bottle; Picabia had succeeded in making it
known that young girls had only one charm. Breton, however, was a tragic Charlot:
Breton, eleven petits morts. Sure to never finish it with this heart, his doorknob
(Sanouillet 2005, 182).
When Tzara eventually arrived on Picabias and Germaine Everlings doorstep on
17 January 1920, his mechanical mannerisms and appearance as well as his
famously overstuffed suitcase made him seem not unlike the iconic Tramp. Everling
(Sanouillet 2005, 119) recalled:
He was short, slightly stooped over, swinging two short arms at the end of which hung
two chubby hands. His skin was waxy, his myopic eyes seemed to search behind his
pince-nez for a stable point to fix upon. Raising himself up at any moment, with a
machine-like gesture, a long tuft of black hair swooped down over his forehead

Only weeks later, at the second official Dada event of 5 February 1920, his
conceptual, clownishly decadent, and undoubtedly philosophic project composed of
star-based operations became more direct, and operated on a much larger scale. To
assure that a vast and varied public would be in attendance at this event held at the
Salon des Indpendants in the Grand Palais des Champs Elyses, days before Tzara
contacted Le Journal du Peuple with information that was published on 2 February:
Charlie Chaplin, the illustrious Charlot, has just arrived in Paris. He is going to give us
reason to applaud; his friends the poets of the Movement Dada invite us to the morning
meeting they are organizing the famous American actor will give an address We

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only recently learned that Charlie Chaplin has joined the Dada Movement Gabriele
dAnnunzio, Henri Bergson, the Prince of Monaco will be converted to Dadaism. 27

This stunt indeed drew a large audience that historians have described as raucous:
projectiles were thrown, insults hurled, and general outrage expressed because, of
course, Charlot was not mentioned and he certainly did not appear.28 In his place stood
the Dadaists, who read manifestos or poems: Aragon pronounced, Me all that is not
me is incomprehensible, while Picabia, speaking as American art collector W.C.
Arensberg, declared, Dada is American, Dada is Russian, Dada is Spanish, Dada is
Swiss (Sanouillet 2005, 1323). Tzara later recalled in 1950 that the artists simply
continued to perform with an iconic indifference to the climate of hostility that his
media stunt had created (Lacte and Haldas 1952, 26).29
If we were to imagine this scene as it really took place, we would have to imagine
the excitement of success the Dadaists felt as the room at the Grand Palais filled to
maximum capacity by noon (Sanouillet 2005, 131). We would also have to imagine
how the eager audience would have been filled with adoring possibly fanatical
film enthusiasts who undoubtedly would have looked for Chaplin in the face of each
Dadaist who presented himself on stage. Some may have even wondered from a
distance if the dark-haired Breton was in fact Charlot himself, albeit a rather tragic
one. We would finally be pressed to imagine the moments leading up to the scandal:
would have Tristan, Andr, Louis, Paul, Francis, Jean, and Georges all potentially
envisioned themselves as the star the masses were feverishly expecting to see in
person?
This is an exercise in speculation, but it nonetheless encourages us to recognize the
spectatorial dynamics that Tzara both used and set into motion as he drew upon the
most potent effects of cinema stardom. Accepted as a media coup alone, Tzaras stunt
would be deprived of its lithe economy that parallels American film-industry star
promotion, and that also anticipated it: over a year later, on 18 September 1921,
Chaplin finally arrived in Paris from London (Anon 1921). With his actions, Tzara did
not simply convey his understanding of stardom as a modern effect of the popular
cultures combinatory strategies; he also performed an elaborated conversation with
them so as to transform the spectatorial behaviour before art works into an altogether
more active and affective affair of the masses. There is little doubt that Tzara also used
this event to further his own identity and notoriety within the Parisian avant-garde
scene. In doing so, he instructed the Parisian Dadaists in the ways of iconicity, celebrity, and tactical self-promotion such that artistic identity itself became a medium for
twentieth-century art practice.
Replacing genius for the self-possession of a nonetheless highly styled and selfaware anti-artist, artistic identity in the Dada movement was fashioned in countless
affectations of nimbly mediatized selfhood. Perhaps its best-known avant-garde icon
is Rrose Slavy, whose image, when compared with that of the silent starlet Mae
Murray (Figure 5), might well have arrived directly from the star unit of any
Hollywood-based film production company.30 Duchamps image did in fact arrive in
Paris from New York, where he regularly posed for Man Rays camera. Yet Rrose
Slavy is only one of Duchamps many other identity formations that, as David Joselit
(2001, 106) suggests, are defined by Nietzsche as the vicious circle, the cycle of
alternate identities through which one must pass to will the self out of its lavalike
formlessness. Cinema stardom was a modern formulation that countered the formlessness of early twentieth-century artistic identity as Duchamp, Tzara, Picabia and

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Figure 5.

Anonymous, publicity image, Mae Murray (c. 1920). Source: Authors collection.

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J. Wild

others understood it. Stardom offered a network of identity signifiers whose relational
combination promoted spurious human grandeur, beauty, wit, notoriety, and, above
all, recognizability. But it also made these artists at times deliriously sick with the
symptoms of Chaplinitis symptoms they recognized in the masses around them,
and that they then placed into signifying relays that revolutionized modern art practice. With this particular strain of the disease, as Chaplin might have described it, The
slapstick, of course, is a symbol (Hayes 2005, 72).
Figure 5.

Anonymous, publicity image, Mae Murray (c. 1920). Collection of the author.

Acknowledgements

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Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. This essay was originally written for
The Charles Chaplin Conference, London College of Communication, London, July 2005. The
author would like to thank Mike Hammond, the journals peer reviewers, and Karl Schoonover.

Notes
1. Baker has suggested that Roscoe Fatty Arbuckles signature appears on LOeil

2.

3.
4.
5.
6.

7.
8.

9.
10.

11.
12.
13.

Cacodylate. This would necessarily be a forgery because in 1921, Arbuckle would have
been in Hollywood caught up in the notorious and highly publicized scandal wherein he
was charged of murder, and later manslaughter. See Baker, 2007.
Richard Abels (1975, 1976) early research has been indispensable to my own. As Abel
makes clear, there are many more mentions of Chaplin in avant-garde literature than I can
address here. For excellent work on Chaplins reception outside of France, see Hake (1990)
and Simmons (1999, 2001).
Since I began this project, a few art historians have begun to make similar observations;
see Janine Mileaf and Matthew S. Witkovsky (2006, 352). In the same volume, Brigid
Doherty also offers an insightful interpretation of the cinemas function in Berlin Dada.
My formulation for appropriation here is derived in large part from Michel de Certeau
(1988).
For a sustained discussion of French cinema, caf-concert practices and stars, see Kelly
Conway (2004).
Bernhardt signed with Paths Films dArt in 1908, the same year that Stacia
Napierkowska, who will be mentioned later, made her first film with Path: LArlsienne
(Albert Capellani, 1908). For an excellent, and more recent, volume on Films dArt, see the
journal 1895 (vol. 56, December 2008).
See also Burch (1973). For a discussion of the emblematic shot and emblematic close-up
see Salt (1992) and Gunning (1982).
It should be noted that Linder was also promoted early by SCGAL. Richard Abels definitive account of early French cinema provides the basis for my understanding of early
French stardom; he has remarked that Path renamed Linders film series simply Max by
1910 (see Abel 1998). For further reading on French stars, see Vincendeau (2000).
Raynals writing contains many misspellings and misattributions. Stuart J. Blackton made
several films based on Frederick Burr Oppers comic strip Happy Hooligan around 1900;
I have yet to confirm that these films circulated in Paris in 1913.
Cest dans ce sens que le cinma pourrait, peut-tre, crer quelque chose et non dans la
reproduction de scnes historiques, telle que cette Clopatre coeurante et vue ailleurs, que
la vulgarit de Mlle Roche et les dsarticulations de Mlle Napierkowska, la dsosse, ne
parvinrent pas rendre interessante [It is in this sense that the cinema can, perhaps, create
something and not in the reproduction of historical scenes, such as this Cleopatra, revolting
and seen elsewhere, and that the vulgarity of Mlle. Roche and the dislocations of Mlle.
Napierkowska, the boneless one, do not make interesting.]. Roch, Napierkowska, and Max
Linder are featured on the 1908 poster from SCGAL.
See Soupault (1979), who in an essay from 1924 describes how French cinema had become
a wasteland of bourgeois melodramas.
The prose of Aragons full manuscript was largely composed in 1923, but remained unpublished until 1994. See Aragon (1994), where a facsimile of the time-line is also published.
For an elaboration of this second period of attractions, see Wild (2007).

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14. CHARLOT chef dorchestre bat la mesure/Devant/Leuropen chapeaut et sa femme

15.

16.
17.

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18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.

28.
29.

30.

en corset. According to Abel (1976), Cendrars text was dated November 1916, but
was published in LOeuf dur, 14 (Autumn 1923). Cendrars may be referencing A Night
in the Show (1915) in which an orchestra conductor taps Charlot on the head with his
baton.
Throughout the late teens, close-up images adorn covers of the French film press such as
La Cinmatographie Franaise. Customarily, two covers ran for each issue and featured
the close-up image of an actor rarely in character. One exception would be issue No. 21,
29 March 1919: a close-up of Chaplin appears as his character from Shoulder Arms. With
a gun slung over his shoulder, he addresses the reader with a knowing wink.
Le miroir quoffre le thtre voulant nous agrandir en hros nous dforme; le miroir
photographique nous agrandit sans le vouloir en nous extriorisant, en nous recrant.
Aragon published his poem Charlot sentimental in Le Film (March 1918), and again in
Nord-Sud (May 1918).
For an analysis of the figure of La Jeune Fille Amricaine in works of the historical avantgarde, see Turner (1998). On the topic of neurasthenia and Chaplins expressivity, see
Gordon (2001).
Nos bonshommes ressemblrent vite aux insectes dont le film dnonce les habitudes
froces. [Our fellows quickly resembled insects, the film of which reveals their ferocious
habits.]
The horse was inspired by the Cirque Mdranos Fratellini Brothers. See Rothschild
(1991).
See Jones (1995) for a discussion of Chris Makoss portrait of Andy Warhol titled Alter
Ego (Andy Warhol in Tribute to Rrose Slavy).
Witkovsky (2004) has suggested that Golls poem possibly inspired Vtzslav Nezvals
1922 short film script, Charlie in Court (Charlie pred soudem).
See also Foster (1996).
In the French language, gaga might mean doddering, or, as in English, to be crazy
about.
This journal and many others can be found in the online archive from the University of
Iowa, http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/.
Charlot//Dconcertons/troublons/nervons//partout//guerre lamidon.
Charlie Chaplin, lillustre Charlot, vient darriver Paris. Il va nous tre donn de
lapplaudir; ses amis les potes du Mouvement Dada nous convient la matine quils
organisent Le clbre acteur amricain y prendra la parole On a su dernirement que
Charlie Chaplin venait dadhrer au Movement Dada Gabriele dAnnunzio, Henri
Bergson, Le prince de Monaco [se seraient ] convertis au Dadaisme. mile Duharme was
the articles author (quoted in Sanouillet 2005, 131).
See Lacte and Haldas (1952, 26).
Incidentally, when Ribemont-Dessaignes was asked to respond to the journal Du Cinmas
survey entitled Are You Afraid of the Cinema?, he responded at length but only
mentioned two names: Jusqu prsent cest dans les films de Charlie Chaplin et de Man
Ray que jai saisi la prsence immdiate de ce qui peut faire peur [As yet, its in the films
of Charlie Chaplin and Man Ray that I seized the immediate presence of that which frightens.] (see Ribemont-Dessaignes 1994, 511).
Incidentally, Mae Murray was the subject of Jacques Rigauts eponymous poem published
in Littrature (March 1922).

Notes on contributor
Jennifer Wild is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.
She is currently completing a manuscript titled The Cinematic Idiom of Modernism.

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