Charlie Chaplin's 'City Lights': An Analytical Essay (Essay Sample)

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FMP 100: Film History
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Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights”: An Analytical Essay
As a masterpiece film of the 1930s, Charlie Chaplin’s film City Lights, stipulates a romantic, tragic, and a comedy film that reveals the hurdles of surviving the world’s harshest scenarios incapacitated on an individual’s fear of being ejected from it. Furthermore, the film is one of the most successful commercially produced silent films. The film was written, produced, directed as well as scored by one Charlie Chaplin who invested his undying efforts to make City Lights a historical film in America. This paper transcends personal impressions as well as a rational discussion that Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights possess to achieve its objectives.
The film utilizes three main characters and two secondary characters. The three most important characters are; Tramp, Charlie Chaplin himself, the blind woman, and the millionaire. Secondary characters include the butler and the grandmother. In a nutshell, the film depicts the encounters of Charlie Chaplin, the Tramp. He first wanders through New York and meets a blind woman, The Flower Girl whom he feels acquainted. Then he meets the Millionaire whose split personality, as a result of alcoholism, makes Chaplin’s life swifter and rocky. After meeting the millionaire, Charlie finds a purpose of pursuing the blind woman to the extent of visiting a Viennese doctor who has devised a way to heal the Flower Girl's blindness. The Tramp is the involved in a number of scenes that makes his life on earth difficult but at last she ends up with the girl CITATION Cha31 \l 1033 (Chaplin).
Charlie Chaplin utilizes the classical style of silent film. The film depicts non-synchronized recorded sound with no dialogue, even though City Lights has inaudible dialogue. This technique was commonly used during the silent film era, 1895-1936. Even though the sound style of the movie was silent, Chaplin accompanied the scenes with musical sounds that portrayed emotions to make his viewers understand his intentions of revealing the romance and humor in his productions.
Additionally, the film applies cinematography techniques where the camera navigates simultaneously with the plot. My personal impression about Charlie Chaplin’s cinematography is that he portrays artistic quality as well as a sense of individual humor. The movement of pictures in the film is irregular and rapid, a result of editing, which initiates a psychological effect on its viewers. Also, in terms of lighting and kinetics, the language and expressions depicted by the characters dictates the flow of events in the film. Optimistic nature is further revealed in this masterpiece in cases where high-key lighting is used, for example, the daytime scenes when the blind woman is in the streets. Alternatively, subtle lighting is portrayed at the river scene during the night, the boxing scene as well as during robbery which depicts pessimism perspectives.
Furthermore, mise-en-scene is a defined vastly in this film as the environment and the acting of characters are used to convey the message of the film as their acting solely depends on the character movements, utilized props, and the environment. To add on, Charlie Chaplin uses comedic styles such as the use repetitive jokes which makes a viewer slightly uncomfortable or make the audience laugh at his preposterousness. Also, witty as...