CHILDREN’S CINEMA

Light Industry’s ongoing program for kid cinephiles returns for a special edition in Rockaway. In this program we’ll begin with Marie Menken’s Dwightiana, an abstract portrait of the artist Dwight Ripley rendered through swinging stop-action animation. Afterward we’ll cool off with a trip to the Klondike in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (Chaplin, as it happens, was rumored to live in the neighborhood, on Beach 91st Street, and made his professional debut in Rockaway, in a stage performance at the old Morrison’s Summer Theatre on Beach 102 Street). His film is the ideal introduction to the art of slapstick, a comedy classic that follows The Tramp as a prospector looking to strike it rich, and finding love along the way. It also includes some of Chaplin’s most celebrated bits, as when he dances with dinner rolls; or, in a moment of desperation, when he boils and eats his shoe (it’s chewy); or, most dramatically, when a storm blows his cabin onto the edge of a mountain, leaving it teetering back and forth with its inhabitants’ every step.

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“Watching The Gold Rush is a weirdly communal experience,” wrote Lucy Sante, “because it was one of the first truly worldwide cultural phenomena, and it has enjoyed an unusually extended life for a film. Watching along with you, spectrally, are most of a century’s worth of people, in every corner of the globe, in opulent movie palaces and slum storefronts, on state-of-the-art equipment and sheets hung from trees. Its humor and poetry transcend cultural and historical boundaries, and there has never been a time when that was in doubt…The Tramp—small, innocent, beleaguered, romantic, oblivious, resourceful, idealistic—lives inside everyone, but Charlie Chaplin made him manifest, with humor that is never cruel, never aggressive, and always speaks to our best selves.”

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DWIGHTIANA by Marie Menken. 1959. 4 min. Projected on 16mm.

THE GOLD RUSH by Charlie Chaplin. 1925/1942. 71 min.

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