With the achievement of the public presentation of moving images in 1895, a major breakthrough happened that brought technological advance together with mass media appeal. Merely the ability to photograph and reproduce moving images such as Workers Leaving a Factory by the Lumiere Brothers (1895), offered both naïve astonishment and an ever-growing desire to say more moving images. The imagination of Melies that brought the magicians illusion to film stories, liberated a whole new world of imagination. By the time of The Great War, film had become a world wide phenomenon involving both great commercial success and a growing world of artistic and entertainment achievement.

Perhaps the most important figure in the history of film was Charlie Chaplin’s creation of the tramp. Chaplin came from a very poor English background and worked in Vaudeville in Britain and the United States. In 1914, he began performing in the short but frenetic comedies of the Keystone Cops. By 1916, he was the highest paid performer in the world and the most popular entertainment figure anywhere. Chaplin evolved the persona of the low-class outsider, the tramp, with his bowler hat, his bamboo cane, his baggy trousers and large shoes. The tramp became a figure of the common man, open to every foible, full of good intentions, caught between the absurd accidents of life and the pathos of loneliness. Chaplin developed this figure up into the 1930’s in a famous series of films that included The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1927), Modern Times (1931) and City Lights (1933). Chaplin was a brilliant comedian who linked the random events of daily life with a sense of social and economic awareness and hints of spiritual yearning. His films appealed to an immense public from the lower-classes to the sophisticated artist.

Chaplin’s vivid imagination and his genius for improvisation led to innumerable stories and sequences that remain classic to this day. In The Gold Rush, Charlie and his friend, Big Jim, are stranded in a snow-isolated cabin and have run out of food. What to do for Thanksgiving? Charlie decides the only thing is to cook Big Jim’s shoe and have a feast. The scene of Charlie’s relishing the taste of over boiled leather and shoe nails makes one appreciate even the simples fare. In another sequence, he hosts a New Years Eve party for the girls at the local bar and vaudeville house. They forget, that Charlie in a dream sees them arrive and to entertain them he does the ‘Oceana Roll’ dance. He takes two dinner rolls and two forks, uses his face like a puppet, the forks his legs and the rolls as oversized shoes and does a charming and unforgettable dance.

While Chaplin sometimes flirted with sentimentality, he captured the poetry and comedy of daily life and made a newfound hero out of the least prepossessing figure in society. It is no wonder that the immigrants of New York and the workers in Shang Hai all loved Charlie and flocked to his films in droves. There is a charming moment in the life of the challenging writer, James Joyce, where he writes the well-known Irish Tenor, John McCormick about going to the movies. McCormick was ill and missed the show, but Joyce writes: “what delight he had, seeing Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (1923).”