ABSTRACT
The early Charlie Chaplin and B. Keaton comedies are perfectly straightforward movies, showing us funny men doing funny things. And the fun no doubt lies in the incongruities of the childish or stupid heart acting in a world which it has never mastered and which remains more or less unintelligible to it. Good humour transforms itself into the passion for reform; something must be done about the world, and are looking at a movie no longer as retrospection upon inevitable disproportions in life but as an incitement to revolt. The work of the imagination in the moviemaker is confined to the possibilities sketched out in the realities. The opportunity which the film offers is to make visible the imaginary. Reality is one domain, surreality another; and while there are very definite rules pertaining to the real and the practical, there are other rules for the unreal, the imaginary, the deepest self and its dreams which the movies can serve admirably.
