Excerpted from The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins
Morace Park was footling around on eBay looking for antiques when he stumbled on an item that was listed casually as an “old film” – and even then he was really more interested in the tin it was in. “It had a lovely look to it,” said Park. But the contents of the battered container, which he bought for the princely sum of £3.20, have turned out to be a previously unknown film by Charlie Chaplin.
. . . he unfurled a little of the film and saw the title: Charlie Chaplin in Zepped. . . . The film, just under seven minutes long, is a mixture of footage of Chaplin and exuberant animation that reminded Park of Monty Python sequences. “It starts with live shots of Chaplin. It then turns into a dreamscape. We see a Zeppelin bombing attack. And then we see Chaplin taking the mickey out of the Zeppelin, at the time a powerful instrument of terror,” he said.
. . . the movie, shot on 35mm nitrate film, had been put together as a first world war propaganda piece aimed at defusing fear of airship bombing raids, which had been launched on Britain by Germany from the beginning of 1915.
. . .Michael Pogorzelski, a film-history expert and director of the archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: “It is an extremely interesting find. An unknown and uncatalogued Charlie Chaplin film.”
Pogorzelski believes the film consists of outtakes and footage from previous films re-edited by Essanay, and spliced together with fresh shots of Zeppelins and animated material, to create a “new” film. It was, he said, “definitely important and definitely interesting”. It was an example of what he called “either piracy or entrepreneurship – depending on which side of the fence you’re on.” . . .
According to Pogorzelski, it is essential that the desperately fragile nitrate print is transferred to film. “We at the academy have volunteered to take it on,” he said. “But this film was uncovered in the UK and it should probably remain there.”
Thanks to Peter Chattaway