The film Easy Street, presents rich social elements. It includes religion, poverty, love, family, violence, police(law), drugs, children, etc. Together, these elements create an undoubtedly complex whole. Since it is not easy to present so many elements in a silent film less than half an hour. We try to see how the director presents them and what his technique is.
Throughout the beginning of Easy Street, we notice the significance being placed on the theme of religion so much that the film revisits it during the conclusion. If we carefully observe, we will find that the beginning of the film is a complete fragment, which plays a certain role in summarizing the film. During the opening sequence, we hope to recognize the world as constructed by the director and his values.
The opening sequence begins with the caption "the lost sheep". This subtitle is from the Bible. The original verse states, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on question the iniquity of us all”(Bible, Isaiah. 53.6). In this, the director simply explains that, in God's greatness, he can save everyone with love.
In the next scene, Chaplin displays a lost sheep and recreates the biblical metaphor. Crouching in the corner of a house, in about the right third of the frame, the character is emphasized. At this moment, the camera is positioned slightly higher than Chaplin, exemplifying an angle of caring for children versus an angle of looking down on the world. We can also see the door of the church, left ajar leading us to the question, is the director preparing to preach the Gospel to the lost sheep?
We might as well go indoors with Charlie. The sequence that shows Charlie entering the house takes eight shots, and the cross-cutting comes into play here. The first panorama shows a singing activity in the room, where a man that looks like Charlie, a tramp, is sitting in the middle of the picture dozing off. The less serious detail comes as the director prepares to introduce a stately religious topic.
The director sets subtle humor in a group scene. However, the humor of those people who are passionately engaged in the singing ceremony feels particularly glaring. It brings a discordant element to the solemn atmosphere of the church. When Charlie wakes up to the song, he rolls his eyes to show he is guessing and quickly cuts to the next scene, where the director tells us the answer.
The director gives Edna a close-up, the light shining down from behind her, illuminating her hair. With the use of shallow depth of field, Edna has the aura of the leading role or even the myth of Edna. The cross-cutting of these two scenes shows us that Edna and Charlie are destined to have a connection, maybe it is God's plan again. In the imagination of the song, Edna comes to Charlie's mind. The director cuts Edna in the same scene totaling three times, but the duration of each scene becomes shorter, signifying Charlie's desire for her as urgent and strong.
As Charlie prepares to enter the room, three times, he looks at the sign that reads, “Hope Mission”. He seems unsure, in this moment, because just before he was curled up in the corner asleep. Charlie appears to be the lost sheep as if he did not choose to believe in God. It soon becomes clear that Charlie is a quiet troublemaker and a thief. From the moment he enters the church, he is eyeing the money. He takes off his hat and rubbing it several times. As a very real thief, Charlie acts with subtle mannerisms, psychological expressions allowing us to begin denying his morality. He is a tramp who ought to be pitied. Chaplin always broke and made fun of the concept of reality. He seems to not want to encourage the audience to expect a religion that is hopeful and the mainstream proposition that the poor should be sympathized with.
Charlie took the woman's Bible and hid it in his pocket. The exquisite performances in these two scenes create the continuity of the characters. Charlie wants everything. By this time, the tramp seems to just be waking up, but his eyes are glazed over and the song he was singing was not in tune. As the two tramps stood together, Charlie despised him. Maybe, he thought he sang badly, or Charlie thinks he is pretending to be in the church.
Babies are the most direct form of fun. Charlie laughed like a child when we saw that instead of the baby peeing, he had wet his pants with milk. The comedic effect is created by the dramatic irony between the audience and the characters. The woman was ungrateful for Charlie's help in caring for her children. Whereas, her expression is full of complaints and blame.
The other tramp falls asleep again. He was standing up and singing because he was woken up. But Charlie's foolishness and laughter spoiled the ritual. Here, low angle shot shows a very unpleasant look of the pastor in front of the podium. His one-handed akimbo posture was arrogant and there was no sympathy and tolerance for Charlie's mistakes. He is in the same audience's visual angle. Perhaps, he already knows Charlie's mistakes, but he did not remind him. At this moment, the low angle shot enlarges the space and distance between him and the audience, which is a kind of angle of shooting authority figures with a sense of pressure. Looking at the first two shots of him preaching the audience, we can see that in this church, he is in charge and he is in control.
The final ceremony is the offertory. Charlie examines the box as if to confirm the amount of money. The lady with the baby did not donate any money. The homeless man was more like a drunk here. This is also, of course, a kind of humor arranged by the director. But we notice another detail, the people in the back all stare at the box as it passes demonstrating that people are extremely sensitive and serious about money matters. We must admire Chaplin's psychological portrayal of the whole scene.
Finally, everyone stands and sings again. Charlie always turns the Bible upside down, another gesture of Chaplin's humor. In almost every scene, he uses humor to pierce the solid reality and belief, like sharing the Bible with the baby, playing with it and being childlike at the same time. It also shows that neither the baby nor he is genuinely interested in the Bible. Until the end, a counterpoint cut of two close-ups between Charlie and Edna in a form that essentially overlaps with how Charlie first imagined Edna outside the house.
The director uses this technique to overlap imagination and reality, creating a sense of fantasy for their encounter as if they were two people who had met before. Sure enough, Charlie's eyes were dull and guilty as a child who had done something wrong. We can see this when he gives up all his playfulness and becomes pure. Charlie is influenced by Edna's love, and finally hands over the money box he was once prepared to steal. God's salvation seems to have arrived, and the subtitles tell us that it is a new beginning.
Charlie left the church with this loving trust and commitment to himself. But while full of confidence, he stumbled on the doorstep, like waking from a dream of love. By the end of the sequence, we can already see that Chaplin has no intention of creating a truly happy ending rather a new beginning, marked by a stumble. The wrestling movement is typical of Chaplin's comedic performances, in which Charlie made fun of himself. This was also Chaplin’s way of light-heartedly depicting the endless cycle of a contradictory world. This sequence, in this way, controls the entire film.
CONCLUSION
This is a wonderful series of mise-en-scène. Seemingly, a replica of a religious ceremony. In fact, Chaplin shows a lot of meaning here. People come with piety and selfishness. God spreads love, but the pastor looks angry. Religious services were also a means of collecting money, so finally, the pastor continued to preach to the two men who had not donated. Although it is a small room, it is actually a concentration of society and the soul of the film. All the hysteria is squeezed in this space, eyes crossed, for many acts. It depicts the complexity of human nature and the world.
What can be seen is that Chaplin always uses humor to clean up all the serious reality constructed by him. He never offers a solution to these ugly but seemingly dignified societies. He shot almost entirely with fixed shots, creating a contradiction between the quiet shot and the dynamic world. He is constantly disturbing everything, expressing a cynical, nihilistic attitude in the image of the immoral, stupid, selfish and eager Charlie. We see, as he clapped his chest, he has fallen from the height of hope.
Author: Huadong
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