I began by looking into the iconic silent movie era. As there
was no sound or speech it meant that visuals obviously would take a much bigger
role and therefore the clothing would also play a big part in the portrayal of
the character.
I found this video particularly interesting to watch as I found
that the clothes and props used by the actors presented us, as the audience, with
a clear message as to who they are and they speak their own language to the
audience through storytelling. For example to policemen with their formal
uniform hats and truncheons portrays a stereotypical concept of a policeman. Likewise
the train driver with his flat cap and dirt shirt tell a story in themselves. I
feel that the silent movies can be seen as true works of art due to the lack of
technology meaning therefore that the aesthetic elements like clothing and
costume for example were relied upon heavily to support the movies.
Charlie Chaplin
He was an icon of the silent era and furthermore the creator
of the iconic ‘Tramp’ persona which lead him to be one of the most famous men
in the world by 1918. Whilst other actors were required to either dress
themselves for the part in the early days comics preferred to maintain their
costume and their own persona as a constant rather than an ever-changing
character.
Charlie Chaplin: how he turned into
the Tramp
Christopher Frayling, co-curator of the
V&A’s Hollywood Costume exhibition, explains how clothes are crucial to
creating a film character – such as Charlie Chaplain's memorable Tramp.
Ringmaster of the wardrobe: Charlie Chaplin in 1928 in The
Circus. Photo: SNAP / Rex Features
By Christopher Frayling2:32PM BST 19 Oct 2012Comment
Charlie Chaplin’s costume as ''the Tramp’’ is a bundle of
contradictions: the jacket is buttoned too tightly, the trousers are too baggy,
the bowler hat too small and the size 14 shoes much too big, as well as being
worn on the wrong feet. These disparate elements combined to help define his
screen personality and its place in the world, including his social
pretensions.
In silhouette form, the costume became, in the eyes and
minds of early film-going audiences, one of the best-known, most instantly
recognisable screen images in the world — up there with Mickey Mouse’s ears,
Boris Karloff’s cranium, Humphrey Bogart’s trench coat, Judy Garland’s ruby
slippers and Alfred Hitchcock’s line drawing of his own portly shape.
Chaplin designed the costume himself. It lasted on the
screen, in numerous shorts and features, for 22 years. Only James Bond’s dinner
jacket in Eon’s productions can compete for longevity and that has been worn —
in various designs — by six different actors.
There are several versions of how the Tramp costume came to
be invented. One, put out by the Keystone Comedy Studio, where Chaplin worked
from December 1913, was that he was passing the time one afternoon in the male
dressing room (a converted farm shed) — while waiting for the rain to stop — by
trying on various articles belonging to other contracted comedians: Fatty
Arbuckle’s trousers, star performer Ford Sterling’s shoes and so on. The
stick-on moustache was intended for a villain, but he cut it down to the
dimensions of a toothbrush. And it all seemed to work.
Another was that the costume was a collage of elements
dating back to late-Victorian music-hall routines — Dan Leno’s ill-fitting
jacket, Little Tich’s boots, George Robey’s small hat and umbrella maybe — and
that Chaplin could have been more generous in acknowledging this.
He had been “discovered” while appearing in an anthology
show of the British music hall, on 42nd Street in New York. Chaplin, in his
1964 autobiography, recalls the key moment as happening when studio head Mack
Sennett asked him to get into a funny outfit in a hurry — everything at
Keystone was done in a hurry.
“I had no idea what make-up to put on… However, on the way
to the wardrobe, I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and
a derby hat… I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the
clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him,
and by the time I walked on to the stage he was fully born… Gags and comedy
ideas went racing through my mind.”
Allowing for poetic licence over the intervening years — the
character in fact took quite a time to be “fully born” — this rings true. It is
confirmed by the cameraman on the first film to be made featuring the Tramp,
Mabel’s Strange Predicament, who in 1984 clearly recalled Chaplin coming out of
the shed to “rehearse himself — that walk, the cane, the hat and things like
that, you know”.
But this wasn’t the film that introduced audiences to the
Tramp. Two days earlier, on February 7 1914, Kid Auto Races in Venice,
California was released, a largely improvised short of just 20 shots, 572 feet,
which was filmed in 45 minutes flat against the backdrop of a real-life rally
of boys hurtling down a slope in soapbox cars: Sennett liked sometimes to use
ready-made parades and sporting events as cheap settings. Chaplin plays a tramp
who keeps ruining the set-ups of a long-suffering film director (played by the
actual director, Henry Lehrman) by elbowing his way into shot and
self-consciously playing up to the camera by doing little comedy routines.
At first, the spectators at the rally do not know what to
make of this, but they soon begin to roar with laughter. Just like audiences
who watched the film. The costume, the character, the knowing relationship with
the camera, the emotional contact with the audience were all already there, in
prototype form.
Just six months later, Chaplin could write to his
half-brother Sydney: “I am a big box-office attraction. It is wonderful how
popular I am in such a short time.” He had been directing his own films since
the end of April, and was well on the way to becoming the best-known screen
star in the world.
Charlie Chaplin’s memory of “the clothes and the make-up”
making him feel his way into the Tramp’s character and helping “to know him”
from the inside as “a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow
always hopeful of romance and adventure” has been echoed by many film actors
since the silent era. They have confirmed that an essential way into a
character can be through wearing the clothes which, when the film is released,
can make a strong emotional connection with the audience and reveal a lot of
extra information about that character, even when the talkies made mime and
bodily movement and visually distinctive clothing do less work.
Bette Davis said: “If we’re not comfortable in those
clothes, if they don’t project the character, the costume designer has failed
us.” Meryl Streep reckons that “the clothes are half the battle in creating the
character”: they help to create the feeling that the actor is not him or
herself but a character in a film.
Which is why, in the opening section of our exhibition
Hollywood Costume, about how the clothes define character, Chaplin’s costume
was a must-have. (It is the one he wore in The Circus, which he started filming
in November 1925, and was lent by the Chaplin family.) Clowns had worn
distinctive costumes in film before, especially in France and Italy. But this
one was a key element in a much-loved, long-running cinematic character as
well.
It also has a unique distinction: it is the only costume in
the show to have been designed by the actor who wore it.
Charlotte Cooper
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