i definitely should be sleeping right now, but i had to get up and stick this here; i might add much more about this whole calhoon thing in general later, but for now it must be at least this, just a burr on the way, a tiny one too but.

The modernism to which Chaplin belonged rebelled against the imposture of mechanisms disguised as nature. Henri Bergson sounded a proto-Brechtian note when he wrote that "[t]o imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person." Appropriately, Bazin ventures that Chaplin exposed Hitler ("the man with the broken wrist who still obsesses our generation") as a mechanical puppet, an empty amalgam of rage, sentimentality, and mustache.

if you have access to jstor, this article...that's how i accessed it in the first place. and the bit about the imagined but never cut scenes, with the flower girl envisioning the tramp as a prince or soldier...i don't know what to say about that.

okay. sleep now; this time really.