Monsieur Verdoux

Charles Chaplin - 1947
The greatest is always beyond easy reckonings, explanations, while at once being so simple... Chaplin is not trying to confues, to make a code to decipher, he just makes films.
The technqiue here isn't really 'technique', it's just filming something. We usually have a longer shot to start and then a neat, pleasurable but pretty silent track in. Every cut is necessary, used for emphasis when cutting in, and longer shots otherwise. The stagings can be complex, can be pretty 'primitive'. There is nothing to be too ostentatious about, cuts between groups quite near are often made.
Their is, of course, huge pleasure in the sheer physicality, of simply watching another human being (usually Chaplin) on screen. Little movements and looks, big ones.
This film has no pretty pictures; but it is remarkably beautiful. A simple mis-en-scene, though not overly so, that one suddenly realises has a kind of realist truth to it. People just come together in groups, against lights in hallways.
My reaction is to say that Chaplin has created the most complex and interesting character out of all the films I have ever seen. Verdoux can be read as a bourgeois we must despise for his narrowness, but be sympathetic to for his naivete. Yet Verdoux is also Chaplin, an exploiter who is in fact some kind of humanist. He doesn't fit into any box comfortably.
And yet the film is clearly showing how capitalism tends towards making even the 'good' murder, installing misery. Chaplin is not scared to tell us this- why would he be? Why must a film lie? One of the greatest things about the film is how Verdoux intermittently talks to us, quite naturally, explains what is happening and what we need to know. And why not? No one is trying to confuse anyone; let's exaplain and work things out together. This film is remarkably self-reflexive.
As Chaplin's wider points are made explicit, we have a historical montage, it is at once a lunge and the apotheosis of trying to do what cinema can do; communicate, be with us, not just reflect life, but be life in a complex dialectic. There is also, for all the explictness, a fascinating and beautiful restraint in not showing Verdoux's greatest misery; just a rather low-key and unemotional explanation.
Yet for all this clearness, there is an enigmatic feature behind Chaplin, and Verdoux. Some later lines obviously mean certaint things, yet they are cryptic. And the final shot, rejecting postcardism, referencing both the end of 'Modern Times' and a peculiarly modern misery is quite something. Chaplin is in dialogue with his own earlier films, his truth, and with the untrue world.

final shot