How "The Gold Rush" Expanded Cinematic Language

 Jacob Raymond

COM 126

Professor Saphire

9-17-20

After watching “The Gold Rush”, it is clear to confirm that this movie has expanded cinematic language. It demonstrates a number of the general terms and concepts that we have covered in class with the amount of visual ideas it delivers to the audience. Aside from that, the film also adds more variety because of the 1942 reissue, which adds background music to the movie and narrative dialogue presented by Charlie Chaplin himself. No matter if you watch the silent version or the reissue version of the film, it will always demonstrate some of the best cinematic elements a movie could have at the time. In other words, here is how “The Gold Rush” expanded cinematic language.

In the beginning of the film, the form of the film already starts to take shape when we see Chaplin traveling along the mountainside, fully geared and ready to hunt for some gold. When a snowstorm hits, we then see some parallel editing when the shots switch between Chaplin trying to get inside a cabin and the scoundrel who currently lives in there. This was pointed out and defined by Mark Cousins in his documentary “Birth of the Cinema”, where he shows how parallel editing is showing what is happening at the same time by saying “meanwhile” while analyzing the 1907 film “The Horse That Bolted”. It was used in “The Gold Rush” as a way to contrast two different events happening all at once. Continuing on, the film then shows a sequence of events where Big Jim and the scoundrel fought over a shotgun, which reflects on the real life struggle for survival during the gold rush while also foreshadowing more drastic events later on. We then see the visual ideas come into play when Big Jim is hallucinating from severe hunger. Mark Cousin points out in his documentary that visual ideas drive the movies, not money. This is the case where Big Jim pictures Chaplin as a big chicken. Chapter 2 of “Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film” by Richard Barsam and Dave Monahan defines this act as verisimilitude, where the hallucinations are convinced as the appearance of truth and that the big chicken is “really there”. In brief, these were some of the cinematic language concepts that were demonstrated within the first half of the movie.

The second half further expands the cinematic language by demonstrating more filmmaking concepts. For one, there was a confrontation between Big Jim and the scoundrel, which used two close up shots of both of their faces staring down at each other in the scene. The narrative in that confrontation resulted in Big Jim being knocked unconscious and losing his memory, while the scoundrel later falls to his death. Focusing back on Chaplin, the scene where he dances with Georgia demonstrated a powerful role of using sound in the 1942 reissue because the waltz music that accompanied their dance fills in a hole that really brings the movie to life and completes the overall mise-en-scene of the elements of the 1920’s era with the costumes, figure movement, and the overall setting. Near the end of the film, the film also showed good editing techniques when Chaplin was shoveling snow from the general stores. What the editing process did was fast forward his progress to where the audience sees that he ended up moving the pile of snow in front of another store, which added some comedy to it. Finally, parallel editing returns with the shots switching between the cabin leaning over the cliffside and Big Jim and Chaplin trying to stay steady inside the cabin. These shots help bridge a sequence of events that builds tension and suspense for the audience. In conclusion, with the support of analysis from Mark Cousins documentary and Barsam and Monahan’s textbook, Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” has since expanded cinematic language as a whole.