STATE LIBRARY NSW -15 March 2025 - Shorts Live Music

As part of Cinema’s 130th Anniversary Tribute, three significant shorts rich in film heritage are presented.
With live music (Graeme Costin), 70 minutes.
Tickets: $30/$25  
General seating - not reserved or numbered
(T 0419 267 318)

Three shorts from the early decades of the movies. The Edison Studio presented cinema’s first horror film and was based on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. In the US the Library of Congress has brought this early piece back to audiences for them to savour the tale of the monster being created not merely through warped science but also its emergence from the darkness within Frankenstein himself.

Charlie created a number of films in 1915 with the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company in both their California and Chicago studios and firmly established himself as the world’s favourite screen comedian. In them he further experimented with new cinematic techniques while continuing to add complexities and pathos into his celebrated Little Tramp character. By 1916 this fully formed character beloved universally became immortalized as the face, hat, and moustache of modern screen comedy.

Two Chaplin shorts from the crucial stage of the Tramp’s development in 1915 at Essanay. The first is Charlie, now the director and superstar, at his slapstick best when he draws on one of his great successes from his music hall days and plays two parts, Mr. Pest and Mr. Rowdy. Disorder in the house as his exceptional mayhem as he skewers all and sundry in the theatre!

The second and longer short was his parody of Cecil B DeMille’s feature with Charlie as the easily led Darn Hosiery and the beautiful seductress, Carmen, played superbly by Edna Purviance. The fast paced and inventive comic piece displays the Tramp’s growing confidence as a filmmaker as he, tongue and cheek, blends bizarre comedy and serious emotion. His weapons of choice? A rubber dagger and he and Edna smiling at the camera as the fourth wall in cinema shatters. Restored and conforming as nearly as possible to Chaplin’s original intentions for release.