It would be difficult to imagine silent cinema without a characteristic, small character with a mustache, a cane and a bowler hat. During the second edition of the NFM Organ Cinema this summer, we will see three films directed by the legendary Charlie Chaplin – a master of pantomime and slapstick. The screening will be accompanied by Anna Vavilkina’s improvisations. This organist works in the Babylon cinema in Berlin, which has been operating for almost a hundred years, playing the only functioning cinema organ in Germany, installed in the theatre where it was originally built.

The short comedies The Immigrant, The Pawnshop and The Adventurer - in which Chaplin also played the main roles – were created when he was working full-time for The Mutual Film Corporation. During a year-and-a-half contract, he created a total of twelve films, earning a then-exorbitant sum of ten thousand dollars a week. In The Immigrant, we observe in a distorting mirror the stories of Europeans coming to America in search of a better life. In The Pawnshop we will see Chaplin as a clever pawn shop employee, while in The Adventurer he is a run-away prisoner. Collaboration with The Mutual brought the artist to the top of the film industry. When he left the company in September 1917, his next job made him the highest-paid actor in the world at that time.

In productions for The Mutual, Chaplin was accompanied by a team of collaborators. One of the most important at that time was Edna Purviance – an actress who in 1915 was working as a stenographer when she was spotted by a talent scout looking for actors for Chaplin’s productions – and eventually she had an affair with the master. Chaplin appreciated her work, paying her a fixed salary even after she ended her acting career. Another close collaborator of the artist at that time – the gargantuan Scot Eric Campbell – was Chaplin’s personal discovery: Chaplin noticed his playing during a visit to a Broadway theatre. When he left The Mutual, he planned to move to First National with Campbell, but the latter died in a car accident.