Chaplin and the Surrealists

Abstract Chapter 4 begins with the sensational sexual allegations made against Chaplin in Lita Grey’s divorce complaint (1927). Chaplin’s behavior was much criticized in America but received strong support in France. “Hands Off Love,” a manifesto written by Louis Aragon and signed by thirty-one surrealists (all male), defended Chaplin’s right to sexual emancipation rather than conventional marriage. The chapter discusses Chaplin’s relationship with surrealism both before and after “Hands Off Love.” It suggests that his films were a formative influence on both surrealism and its predecessor, Dadaism. By 1927, however, surrealism itself was being torn apart by political disputes, and as a movement—as opposed to an enduring cultural influence—it soon largely disappeared. Chaplin himself would be an unwitting observer of what might be seen as its last rites: at a press conference in Paris in 1952, a group of international lettrists/situationists attacked both Chaplin and surrealism as passé.