Modern Times: Geraldine Chaplin across contemporary cinema

In the biopic Chaplin (1992), Geraldine Chaplin plays her own grandmother. This is the role that, in owing perhaps to the novelty of a film star playing her own relation, is perhaps the most widely seen of Geraldine Chaplin’s performances. And it reminds us that like her father, Geraldine, although perhaps mostly remembered by film enthusiasts for her work in films by Carlos Saura, Jacques Rivette, and Robert Altman, has spent much of her career negotiating the rather less sympathetic strictures of the commercial film industry. Where much of the book up to this point focuses on Geraldine Chaplin’s presence in various national and transnational art cinemas, this final chapter deepens our sense of her screen persona by looking at several of her most important films made outside of the context of the earlier chapters. Using the motif of the close-up as a point of departure, the film analyses Chaplin’s contemporary performances for numerous directors, including Pedro Almodóvar, Jane Birkin, Guy Maddin, Richard Lester, and more.