Film
Beyond The Canon: Sidewalk Stories + The Kid
- 2PM
Dir. Charles Lane
With Lane, Nicole Alysia, Sandye Wilson
1989, 97min, DCP
Charles Lane’s brilliantly inventive silent homage to Chaplin’s The Kid stars the director as a homeless artist scraping by in New York City. When he winds up caring for an orphaned toddler, the modern-day Little Tramp is whisked along on an alternately comic and heartrending adventure. Shot on the streets of 1980s Greenwich Village, this DIY gem balances charming visual gags with an earnest social realism that doesn’t sugarcoat the struggle of life on the streets.
Dir. Charlie Chaplin
With Chaplin, Jackie Coogan, Edna Purviance
1921, 53min, DCP
Charlie Chaplin’s debut feature (he also wrote, directed, produced, and composed music for the film) declares itself from the first title card a “picture with a smile—and, perhaps, a tear.” Abandoned by his mother, a young boy winds up in the care Chaplin’s clownish Little Tramp, who fights to protect him amid feats of transcendentally graceful physical comedy and moments of heart-tugging pathos.
Arguably Sidewalk Stories’ most profound revisionist success is that it asks audiences to care for the well-being of society’s most ignored child: the little black girl.
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