ABSTRACT
Long before the homage to silent film The Artist won the 2011 Academy Award for Best Picture. Independent filmmaker Charles Lane adapted classic silent film to contemporary subject matter with his underappreciated Sidewalk Stories, a 1989 black-and-white silent-film reworking of Chaplin's The Kid that focuses on contemporary homelessness in New York City. In the condemned building where he sleeps, the Artist in Sidewalk Stories is similar to the character in Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, as Clark also notes in her review of the film in Film Comment. Chaplin also engineered a domestic haven in The Kid, after this baby's mother had abandoned him in despair on the streets. In another silent film in sound era, Silent Movie, Mel Brooks uses undercranking to exaggerate action sequences and to enhance the physical comedy of his actors, particularly Marty Feldman. Charles Lane's Sidewalk Stories denies nostalgia by jolting audiences into reflecting on a contemporary social problem.
