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Medium grande histoire delage book

Chaplin Facing History

This book shows how in the “Great Dictator” Chaplin exposes his personal world to the pressure of world events. Chaplin’s “real history” was not just the one he was facing up to, but also the one he himself was recounting by combining the characters of the Tramp and the jewish barber in the image of the “pariah”. The analysis presented here is articulated through historical archives, photographs, poetry and fiction. It attempts to recapture the spirit of one of Jorge Luis Borges last books, Atlas, which he presented as being “neither a series of texts illustrated with photos nor a series of photographs explained by epigraphs. Each title encapsulates a whole, made up of image and words.” This “whole” comes to light in the movement that goes from exploration of the archives to the works of ordering and interpretation. Why not build this experience of editing and researching into the form of the book itself, thus telling the story not only verbally but also visually ?[…]