A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman opens a drawer looking for a handkerchief. A man's starched collar falls out. She puts it back.

Two seconds, no title card. From that you know Marie St. Clair is being kept, that the man who keeps her comes and goes freely enough to leave laundry behind, and that the arrangement is domestic, ordinary, months old. Chaplin cut the entire year that would have shown you this. He kept the collar.

That deletion is the film. He took the most exhausted story available in 1923 — village girl, missed train, rich protector, doomed painter, gunshot — the architecture Griffith had used in Way Down East, and kept the beats while removing the two things that made them melodrama: the verdict and the ordeal. Nobody proves her virtue on an ice floe. No intertitle pronounces on her. What's left has to be read.

Deleuze has a precise name for that collar, and it's worth having, because the phrase this film always attracts is "visual economy," which makes it sound like thrift. It isn't thrift. Chaplin isn't saving footage. He's moving the story into you.

In Cinema 1 Deleuze separates two ways an action film can be built. In the large form, a situation bears down on someone until they act and change it: the town is rotten, the marshal shoots. The small form runs the other way. An act or an object comes first, and from it you deduce a situation you were never shown. The unit that does this he calls an index of lack: a visible sign whose meaning is the invisible thing missing around it. Slapstick lives on these; the pratfall discloses the banana peel you never saw. Chaplin had spent a decade building stories out of handled props because intertitles were slow and expensive, and The Kid already ran its emotional turns on an object and a delayed reaction. A Woman of Paris carries that reflex into drama, where nobody had thought to put it. The ellipses are load-bearing. The story is made of them.

Push one step further and you get why this picture meant more to filmmakers than to ticket buyers. An index points at a situation; the collar also breaks a habit. A woman's dresser, a woman's things, then a man's collar. Deleuze's word for the anomaly that snaps a customary chain and forces interpretation is a demark, and it belongs to the relation-image: the level where meaning sits neither in the shot nor in the cut, but in a relation the viewer holds between them. The audience becomes the third term.

Which is fitting, since the working title was Public Opinion and the real antagonist is the crowd's verdict on a woman it knows nothing about. Chaplin opens by addressing us directly: people are neither heroes nor villains, and the wise pity what the ignorant condemn. Then he builds a film that only works for a viewer willing to infer instead of judge. The gossip is right there in the frame, Marie face down on a massage table while her friends chatter. You hear what public opinion sounds like at the moment you're asked to do better than it.

The other celebrated shot works in reverse. On the village platform, the Paris train arrives without appearing: bars of light from its windows sweep across the waiting faces. Deleuze would call the train out-of-field, the frame opening onto a space it declines to show. And the light doesn't merely imply a train. It puts Paris on Marie's face before she has boarded. Totheroh shot it flat, with none of the German shadow-play then arriving in Hollywood.

Then the pearls. Pierre tells Marie he is marrying someone suitable; she throws his necklace out the window, then runs down the stairs and takes it back from the tramp who picked it up. A minute, no title. Deleuze has a term for an act that could belong to two situations at once, an index of equivocity, and this is the cleanest instance in silent cinema. Wounded love and protected property, the same body doing both, and the film won't tell you the proportion. The necklace becomes his symbol in the strict sense: the object condensing the relation the film turns on, love and money refusing to stay in separate compartments. A prop makes a moral argument no intertitle could make without preaching.

All of it depends on faces that refuse to help. Purviance plays Marie watchfully, giving very little; Menjou plays the rich protector with no villainy at all, urbane and candid about the terms of the deal. Deleuze calls the still reflecting face a qualisign: a face holding a quality that never discharges into action, so feeling registers and then just sits there. That wasn't standard equipment in American melodrama. Chaplin got it from Sessue Hayakawa in The Cheat, who proved in 1915 that near-motionless playing makes the audience do the reading, and from Broken Blossoms, keeping Griffith's chamber scale and the close-up as narrative unit while stripping the soft focus and the moralizing cards. DeMille's Why Change Your Wife? had shown that furniture can state a woman's position; Chaplin kept the method and cut the inventory of luxury to three objects. And Scherben had told a whole story on essentially one title, after which an intertitle is a confession of failure.

What this does to storytelling is the strange part. The subtitle is A Drama of Fate, and the engine is accident. A father dies, so Jean misses the train. A telephone call fails to land. Two people meet in a Paris street by chance. Nothing that matters is caused by anybody's decision. Deleuze's name for links gone slack, where events follow one another without answering one another, is weak links, and he dates the general condition to postwar Europe, two decades later. The claim isn't that Chaplin got there first. It's that he ran the experiment locally, inside the action-image's best decade, to see what melodrama does when you take its causality away. The confrontations deflate. The suicide is over almost before it registers. The avenging mother ends up sharing a house with the woman she blamed. And the last scene refuses the reunion the structure has promised: Marie passes on a hay cart going one way, Pierre's car goes the other, and he wonders aloud whatever became of Marie St. Clair. She is fifty feet behind him, just outside his frame.

Audiences had bought a ticket to a Chaplin picture and found no Chaplin. He withdrew the film for fifty years, so its standing was built almost entirely out of what it did to other people's work. Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle follows in 1924 with the same elliptical construction, the same meaningful object, the same refusal of a verdict; the touch later named after him has this picture underneath it. Bell, Sutherland and d'Arrast left the unit to direct, and the mid-twenties cycle of urbane American comedy came out of that dispersal. Menjou carried the boulevardier he invented here through a decade. And Chaplin, having proved he could hold a drama without a gag, took the permission back to the Tramp.

Watch it for the deletions. Every time the film jumps and you notice you understood the jump anyway, that's the work being done in you rather than at you, and it's a habit most movies have stopped asking for. The question it leaves open is the one Chaplin puts in his own opening address. If this really is a drama of fate, what are we judging when we judge Marie? The film won't say. It refuses to punish her, which in 1923 was the harder position to hold, and then goes quiet and waits to see whether you can refuse too.