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ABSTRACT: Louis Delluc's Charlot (1921) was the first book-length study of Charlie Chaplin and the first such critical study of any cinematic artist. Though still cited for its place in Chaplin studies and its role in the development of French film theory, it is rarely considered at length. This article presents an in-depth examination of Delluc's treatise, focusing especially on its relationship to the concepts of cinematic representation and filmic authorship expressed in Delluc's groundbreaking film journalism. Through its historicization and analysis of Chaplin's work, Charlot aims ultimately to substantiate film's then-contested status as an art form worthy of critical attention.
KEYWORDS: Louis Delluc, Charlie Chaplin, Charlot, film theory, film criticism, photogénie
Louis Delluc (fig. 1) was well-known in the years following the First World War for his aggressive and often assiduous critical style, which dominated the pages of a number of prominent Parisian film magazines. But perhaps nothing in his body of work quite compares to the "Prelude" that opens his 1921 monograph Charlot (fig. 2), which only half-jokingly bars unreceptive readers from proceeding any further than the book 's opening page:
To the creative artist of the cinema, the mask of Charlie Chaplin has just the same importance as the traditional mask of Beethoven has to the musical composer.
I hope that this pronouncement will automatically eliminate all superfluous readers, and that we shall only be concerned with people who are capable of understanding each other.
That sets our minds at rest. And we can go on.1
Delluc wrote these words in the midst of Chaplin's meteoric rise to worldwide stardom in the teens and early twenties; indeed, his book appeared in the same year as Chaplin's triumphant European tour debuting The Kid (1921), in the course of which he received over seventy thousand pieces of fan mail during his stop in London alone. With his prefatory remarks, Delluc carefully expelled in a single stroke two very different classes of consumers: on the one hand, those high-minded critics who viewed the Chaplin craze only with disdain and condescension, and on the other, those fans of the star looking only for the kind of fawning celebrity profile that was commonly printed in the newspapers and trade magazines of the time. Delluc's study of...