Tuesday, December 31, 2019

The film that changed my life / The Gold Rush by Charlie Chaplin (1925)

The film that

changed my life

The Gold Rush

by Charlie Chaplin (1925)

Nick Broomfield
Sun 7 Mar 2010

My mother was a communist/socialist from eastern Europe. As a treat when I was a kid, prior to television, we'd get out an old sheet and project Charlie Chaplin films. I particularly remember The Gold Rush, in which Chaplin eats a guy's boot. Hysterical but also social – this little guy against an awful system, the guy with the heart against the greedy capitalists. Very, very funny. Sometimes I thought I was going to have a heart seizure because I couldn't stop laughing. I used to love that film more than anything. It taught me to love slapstick.

I think if you can get slapstick into stuff, that's the ultimate achievement. I always used to inject myself into my documentaries as the comedic idiot, as the Chaplin or the Peter Sellers. It's easy to play the idiot yourself, and half knock yourself out, or half fall over, or ask gormless questions. And when I first started doing it, the commissioning editors would be begging my crew to keep me behind the camera. "Get him out of the fucking film!" Then, as time went on, they really wanted me in front of the camera, and it became less interesting to do. I had amused myself for some time and then I couldn't stand it any more. I was heartily sick of myself.

I didn't realise it when I was seven, but Chaplin's genius, in a sense, was that he got you in with the humour and then the rest sort of came with it. I did a string of early films that were social but also comedies in this spirit, from Driving Me Crazy through Tracking Down Maggie and Kurt & Courtney to His Big White Self. The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife was about the rightwing Nazi party in South Africa, made before Mandela came to power – and I called it a black comedy about the white right. People love to laugh, and they'll accept opinions they might not necessarily agree with if you make them laugh (which is why comedians can get away with murder). Dr Strangelove, Chaplin's The Great Dictator – all of those films work, even while making statements that are a bit on the nose, because they're making you laugh, and it's wonderful to laugh.

As I'm saying this, I'm thinking mournfully about some of the later films I've done which haven't been so funny. My more recent films, Ghosts and Battle for Haditha, are definitely not comedies. Humour is the thing that enables us to survive the most stringent and difficult of circumstances. I probably need to evolve into something more humorous for the next film.

Nick Broomfield is a Bafta award-winning documentary film-maker

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