“Topics in Film Studies: European Pantomime and the Films of Charles Chaplin” will discover Charlie Chaplin’s life and the political messages of his works. (CC BY-SA 2.zero)
The English and Cinema Studies Departments are providing a new course this fall that examines European pantomime and the legacy of actor and comic Charlie Chaplin.
The Benjamin Franklin Seminar, titled “Topics in Film Studies: European Pantomime and the Films of Charles Chaplin,” will look at the historical past of European-style pantomime — the artwork of storytelling or portraying a character by way of physique actions — and the social and political impacts of Chaplin’s 20th-century silent movies.
The course additionally intends to scale back social obstacles between Penn’s campus and the Philadelphia neighborhood by way of silent movie screenings and performances open to the general public.
Benjamin Franklin Seminars are small programs targeted on intensive dialogue and investigation. These seminars are required for students within the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program.
English professor and British literature specialist Toni Bowers will train the seminar, which is cross-listed as ENGL 392 and CIMS 392.
“Silent films are just amazing kinds of other worlds,” Bowers said. “I wish I could take each student by the hand and lead them to this world of silence and laughter.”
Bowers mentioned she will hint the affect of European pantomime from its 16th-century Italian origins by way of 18th-century farces, British musicals, and in the end silent movies.
Unlike pantomime from different elements of the world, European pantomime is “really about evoking shared feelings [like laughter] in the audience,” Bowers mentioned.
English professor and British literature specialist Toni Bowers will train the seminar.
The course will discover Chaplin’s life and the political messages of his works. It will emphasize how he resisted fascism by way of his silent movies. Chaplin famously satirized Adolf Hitler in his 1940 movie, “The Great Dictator.” Because language is carefully tied to nationwide id, Chaplin believed that movie with dialogue — not like silent movie — divided individuals primarily based on nationality, Bowers mentioned.
“He saw that silent film transgressed or evaded those boundaries and made it impossible for people to pretend that they were fundamentally different from other people,” Bowers mentioned. “His great thesis was that people are all the same.”
To replicate Chaplin’s thought of the unifying potential of pantomime, Bowers mentioned class assignments will search to attach the Penn neighborhood and the encircling neighborhood.
Wearing their very own Chaplin costumes and channeling the titular character from his 1915 movie, “The Tramp,” students will current a “10-minute bit of clowning” at a venue close to campus. The class will additionally display Chaplin’s silent movies on the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, the Lightbox Film Center on the University of the Arts, and The Rotunda for the general public.
For the ultimate examination, students will carry out a quick skit in small teams and current an open-ended venture for the general public. This may very well be an interpretation of a scene, a selfmade pantomime movie, an artwork set up, or one other endeavor.
This initiative to interact the general public is a “small step toward making a few more people comfortable coming to campus and feeling like they could have some fun and learn something,” Bowers mentioned.
Other assignments will embrace workshops with skilled mimes and clowns and carrying a Chaplin costume for a whole day. With students going about their day in costume, Bowers mentioned she goals to recreate Nov. 12, 1916 — the day there have been “800 simultaneous sightings of Charlie Chaplin.”
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Although the assignments are primarily creative, students don’t want prior efficiency expertise to take the course.
Students “have to want to try something new and be brave and be willing to be silly,” Bowers mentioned.
The purpose of the category merely is “to have fun [and to] evoke laughter. And maybe to replicate some of that sense that people can relax together and feel comfortable with each other and we can take down some of the divisions,” Bowers mentioned.
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