The Gold Rush and the Expansion of Cinematic Language

 Logan Peterson

Professor Saphire

COM 126.01

9/25/20

The most shocking thing about The Gold Rush is how timeless it is. Its humor holds up under the weight of time, the story is simple, but elegant and there is not a moment in the film, no matter how fantastic, where an audience member may doubt what is happening on the screen. The Gold Rush, released in 1925, is now as it was then: a masterpiece. However, it is not the weight of time that is to be examined, but rather, how The Gold Rush innovated on what came before. Though the film is a rather obvious slapstick, Charlie Chaplin not only proves himself a master of the fantastic, but also of what is real.

Throughout the film, absurdity and things that couldn’t possibly happen in real life tend to hold up the weight of the humor. Towards the end of the film, Chaplin’s character, the Tramp, finds  himself and his friend Big Jim trapped in a house on a cliff after it is blown along the ground in an intense blizzard. Anytime Big Jim and the Tramp shift their weight towards the cliff, the house begins to tip. The situation continues to escalate until the house tips and the two companions almost plummet to their deaths. Soon, Big Jim is able to climb out and save the Tramp by throwing him a rope. This expands on what early films had already accomplished in regards to antirealism. In Méliès film A Trip to the Moon, a rather fantastic scene takes place, where a few men travel to the moon. While Méliès used one continuous shot to show the travelers approaching the moon, Chaplin uses parallel editing to add tension and humor to the situation the characters are in. When the characters move, Chaplin often would cut to the outside of the house to show it tipping to establish the danger the characters are in and by showing how both the characters and the house reacted to each other, established verisimilitude within the context of that particular story. 

In his documentary, Mark Cousins speaks about the realism of D.W. Griffith’s  films. Though it is certainly a stretch to classify The Gold Rush as a realist film, there are moments in it that are genuinely relatable and certainly do feel quite real. Cousins’ described realism as “the wind in the trees” which marked the beginning of making theatrical films feel more like real life. Though it most certainly is a disgusting film with a horrible message, Griffith’s Birth of a Nation accomplished realism in the literal sense of showing “the wind in the trees”. The Gold Rush expands on this principle. Its establishing shot has hundreds of extras climbing a mountain, pretending to be miners and the storms look as brutal as one might expect a mountain top blizzard to look. Beyond that, Chaplin manages to give his film real emotional weight. The scene where the Tramp has become a millionaire and freezes when he sees a picture of his love interest, Georgia, felt believable and human even though the film itself often finds itself to be quite ridiculous in nature. 

The Gold Rush, though fantastic, manages to expand on what the early filmmakers managed to do with both realism and antirealism while maintaining the overall believability of the story. Chaplin not only thrives on the ridiculous and absurd, he thrives on the relatable and the human. The Gold Rush is a masterpiece, not only because it expanded, but innovated as well.