To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art’s annual film preservation showcase, will close on Thursday night with a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s “Shoulder Arms.” Starring Chaplin as an American soldier during World War I, this comedy, which runs around 40 minutes, has delighted viewers since its premiere in October 1918.
Yet every take and every frame in MoMA’s restoration, a work in progress, likely differs from what most moviegoers have watched in the past century. “It’s an unknown Chaplin film, in effect, that no one has actually seen as it was released,” said Dave Kehr, a curator in the museum’s film department. (Before joining MoMA, Kehr was a longtime contributor to The New York Times.)
The version that Chaplin distributed in the United States in 1918 is not the version that has circulated here for decades. Understanding why requires an explanation of how the film was made — and then, in a sense, remade.
Chaplin shot “Shoulder Arms” with two cameras, as was common practice in the silent era. Kodak had not yet developed a stock for making duplicate negatives, and Chaplin needed to create more than one negative to strike enough film prints to satisfy his worldwide audience. “A Chaplin movie was an event, even by 1918,” said Scott Eyman, the author of the recent biography “Charlie Chaplin vs. America.”
From the footage shot with the two cameras, Chaplin assembled four versions of “Shoulder Arms.” Foremost among these was what is called the A negative — the one that incorporated Chaplin’s preferred takes from his preferred camera angles. That negative was used to make film prints for American theaters in 1918.
For other markets, Chaplin created a B negative (his preferred takes from the unused camera angle), a C negative (his second-choice takes from his preferred angle) and a D negative (his second-choice takes from the other angle). This meant that audiences on different continents saw versions of “Shoulder Arms” that were close, but not the same.
As much as editors in those days might try to make the negatives conform, Eyman said, “The takes were always slightly different, especially with a comedian like Chaplin, who was working physically and in the moment.”
A twist came in 1943 when the United States Army asked if Chaplin would make “Shoulder Arms” available as a morale-booster for World War II troops. That prospect delighted the director, his biographer David Robinson wrote in the 1985 book “Chaplin: His Life and Art.”
But there was a problem: By that point, degradation meant that the A negative could no longer be used. Because of image bleaching, any prints made from it would basically show a black screen, Peter Williamson, the film conservation manager at MoMA, explained in a presentation.
The B negative would have been off-limits to Chaplin because of complicated rights issues — and in any case, it had been destroyed in a fire in 1938. That meant that Rollie Totheroh, Chaplin’s regular cinematographer, had only the C and D negatives to work with when making prints for the army screenings.
To complicate matters further, the army showed “Shoulder Arms” on sound projectors, which ran at 24 frames per second, a faster rate than projectors had used in 1918. To adjust for those projectors, the film was stretch-printed, which means that certain frames were doubled to bring the movie up to speed. As a consequence, a lot of movement in “Shoulder Arms” would have looked jerky.
Finally, the revision from the 1940s was trimmed and stretch-printed with a different pattern, Williamson said, when it was included in “The Chaplin Revue,” a 1959 feature that brought together “Shoulder Arms” and two other Chaplin films, “A Dog’s Life” (1918) and “The Pilgrim” (1923).
It is this “Shoulder Arms,” from 1959, that is generally used in official releases today. But the bulk of it, Williamson said, came from the D negative: Chaplin’s second-choice takes from his second-choice angles. And because of the stretch-printing, a lot of the motion still looks jerky.
Beginning in 2021, Adrian Gerber, an archivist and film historian, worked with the Swiss archive Lichtspiel/Kinemathek Bern on a project to locate and catalog all the surviving film prints of “Shoulder Arms.” MoMA had reported its copies, but Gerber said he was unaware of the restoration until this weekend.
“We are quite happy, because this was the basic goal of our research project,” he said. “We wanted to do research to do a proper restoration.” Lichtspiel is a small archive, he said, and had made clear that it didn’t have the resources to restore the film itself.
MoMA’s goal was to reconstruct the movie that American audiences saw in 1918. What is screening Thursday has been assembled as much as possible from surviving prints based on the original A-negative material. It is a work in progress because MoMA had to fall back on 16-millimeter and 28-millimeter prints for a small portion of the film. When those sections turn up in 35-millimeter, the restoration can be completed.
The stretch printing is gone, though, and “Shoulder Arms” now runs at a more period-appropriate 20 frames per second. The closest equivalent to this version, a reissue that Pathé put out domestically in 1927, had used the A negative but altered the title cards, which have now been returned to how they looked in 1918.
You would need a side-by-side comparison to see how all the shots diverge, but some variations are striking.
In the restoration, when the infantryman Chaplin plays is shown entering a trench for the first time, he walks toward the camera, which dollies back with his movement. In the “Chaplin Revue” version, he enters from the opposite end of the trench, and the camera initially dollies forward.
Elsewhere, the uproarious sequence in which Chaplin ventures behind enemy lines disguised as a tree begins slightly differently, with the star scratching his behind. After a cut to a closer view, Chaplin appears, if anything, a little more annoyed to be a tree in the MoMA version.
“Shoulder Arms” is hardly the only film that Chaplin reworked years after its release. “He reissued almost all of his silent films at one time or another, to keep himself relevant as his own production slowed up,” Eyman said. The Chaplin estate has favored the versions that the filmmaker left behind when he died in 1977, Eyman explained, and that has always been the source of arguments, with strong cases to be made either way.
Still, he added, “Within the critical community, people want to see what he made when he was at full-bore.”
By email, Arnold Lozano, the managing director of the office in Paris that represents Chaplin’s holdings, noted the director’s perfectionism even late in life and said that the rights holders’ policies for screenings respect Chaplin’s wishes and the family’s instructions. But while “The Chaplin Revue” and the score that Chaplin added to “Shoulder Arms” remain under copyright, the movie as it existed in 1918 is well past the age when it entered the public domain in the United States, clearing the way for MoMA’s screening of the restored version.
Kehr likened Chaplin’s tinkering to George Lucas’s. “What we’re doing for you is the 1977 ‘Star Wars,’” he said, “and not the 2024 ‘Star Wars.’”
