Charlie Chaplin as a composer

Abstract

The article is devoted to the composer’s work of the outstanding film director and actor Charles Spencer Chaplin. This aspect of his work is the least studied, especially in Russian-language musicology. The material for the study was: Chaplin’s “Autobiography” published in Russian (Chaplin C. S. “About myself and my work”), as well as various Internet sources and articles published in English on his personal website. The basis of the analysis were films with Chaplin’s music and the notes of his film music published on the Internet. The discussion focuses on the complex talent of the film director, actor and composer. The final conclusion is the multi-level nature of genius. It was embodied in the creation of films on the visual, plastic, film dramaturgic, choreographic, sound and composer levels, which serve as the basis for the author’s counterpoint, representing Chaplin's universalism. The conclusion of the article is that Chaplin created an organic synthesis of sound and gesture in his films, in the context of which he managed to present the music for the film in a structureforming and semantic context, through the creation of a system of sound markersleitmotifs.