Charlie Chaplin. The Keystone Album

While the tramp is celebrating his 100th anniversary, the Keystone album is published for the first time in its whole version. 

This digital edition reproduces the canevas of the original photo album and adds extracts from films and critical texts by Glenn Mitchell, Cecilia Cenciarelli, Francis Bordat and Sylvain Portmann.

H.D. Waley, who admired Charlie Chaplin, knew his work very well and also supported silent movies, directed this graphic photo album in the 30s-40s in order to show Chaplin’s first steps in front of cameras. He annotated each plate and then recounted the stories of 29 of the 36 first short-length films made by Chaplin in 1914 for the Keystone Film Company. This ebook shows how Chaplin gradually takes control behind and in front of cameras. We can see Chaplin’s playing evolving through the different scenarios.

At first, his character is fickle and immoral but you can recognize his look, some of his representative gestures and his own humour. Sam Stourdzé (former directer of the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne (Switzerland) and Carole Sandrin (curator in the Musée de l’Élysée for the Chaplin Photos Collections) explain how important are the first movies in the creation of The Tramp myth.