4. Charlie Chaplin: The Return of the Allegorical Mode in Modernity

Abstract

This chapter addresses Walter Benjamin’s writings on Charlie Chaplin as a project to rehabilitate allegory in the 20th century. This project is evaluated in connection with Kafka and Brecht, since Benjamin approached all of these figures through the concept of Gestus. Benjamin discerned in film the prospect of undoing the numbing of the senses, which had become deadened as a consequence of the shock experience of modern life. In connection with Kafka and Brecht, this chapter analyses Chaplin as a paradigmatic cinematic figure to counteract the alienation of human beings in a technologically saturated modernity through his gestic and allegorical performance.