âUtopian and Cynical Elementsâ: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory

Antonis Balasopoulos

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âUtopian and Cynical Elementsâ: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory

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Antonis Balasopoulos

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 327â358

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789042026032_016

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This essay seeks to challenge the postwar marginalization of Charlie Chaplinâs films within the canon of film theory by arguing for their crucial significance as complex meditations on the precariousness of utopian desire. I suggest, first, that Chaplinâs corpus was vital in the gestation of the ambivalent approach to mass culture that characterized Weimar Critical Theory; secondly, that the juncture between Chaplin and Weimar thought owed much to a shared tendency to view the utopian potential of modernity as something that rebounds from within the very forces of capitalist reification; and lastly, that in both Chaplin and Weimar thought, the volatile interplay between reification and utopia is exponentially complicated by being processed through the relay of affective cynicism and its own ambivalent functions. These three premises are explored through the demonstration of the close interdependence between the theory of reification and the conception of the modernity of the cinematic gaze; the examination of the role of Chaplinâs affective and gestural milieu in creating possibilities of utopian fulfillment out of the re-presentation of reification; and the anatomy of the theoretical problems introduced by the ambivalent hermeneutic and political function of cynicism/kynicism as both anti-utopian and anti-reifying strategy. I conclude with a reading of Chaplinâs The Kid (1921) as a paradigmatic instance of Chaplinâs function as the exponent of an abyssal dialectic wherein the conflicting forces of utopia/reification and cynicism/kynicism are kept in permanent suspension, âat a standstill.â

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Futurescapes

Space in Utopian and Science Fiction Discourses

Series:Â Spatial Practices, Volume: 9

E-Book ISBN:: 9789042026032

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 01 Jan 2009

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies
  - Criticism & Theory
  - English & Anglophone

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âUtopian and Cynical Elementsâ: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory

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Futurescapes

Space in Utopian and Science Fiction Discourses

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âUtopian and Cynical Elementsâ: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory