4:30 pm - Opening event repeat show
THE KID  (US 1921, 60')
by and with Charles Chaplin and with Jackie Coogan and Edna Purviance
Score: Charles Chaplin
Performed live by: Orchestra San Marco, Pordenone
Conductor: Günter A. Buchwald

The Kid stands alone among Chaplin’s films as his most direct and personal response to his own childhood traumas of separation from his mother, and abandonment to the custody of constitutionally inhuman public authorities. He did not deny the autobiographical element, and even acknowledged that the set of the attic which is home to the Tramp and his adopted Kid is based on memories of the garrets of his own London childhood. The role of the Kid is taken over by Jackie Coogan, who was in his fifth year when Chaplin first saw him as part of his parents’ vaudeville eccentric dance act, performing a virtuoso shimmy in imitation of his father. Chaplin was enchanted, and even more delighted when he met the child in person and discovered his extraordinary gift for mimicry – a normal element of the infant learning process, but in Jackie’s case phenomenally developed. Chaplin had found his perfect actor: someone who could assimilate, embody, and reproduce his own performance!
Photo: The Kid © Roy Export S.A.S