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To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s annual film preservation showcase<\/a>, will close on Thursday night with a screening of Charlie Chaplin\u2019s \u201cShoulder Arms.\u201d Starring Chaplin as an American soldier during World War I, this comedy, which runs around 40 minutes, has delighted viewers since its premiere in October 1918.<\/p>\n Yet every take and every frame in MoMA\u2019s restoration, a work in progress, likely differs from what most moviegoers have watched in the past century. \u201cIt\u2019s an unknown Chaplin film, in effect, that no one has actually seen as it was released,\u201d said Dave Kehr, a curator in the museum\u2019s film department. (Before joining MoMA, Kehr was a longtime contributor to The New York Times.)<\/p>\n The version that Chaplin distributed in the United States in 1918 is not the version that has circulated here for decades. Understanding why requires an explanation of how the film was made \u2014 and then, in a sense, remade.<\/p>\n Chaplin shot \u201cShoulder Arms\u201d with two cameras, as was common practice in the silent era. Kodak had not yet developed<\/a> a stock for making duplicate negatives, and Chaplin needed to create more than one negative to strike enough film prints to satisfy his worldwide audience. \u201cA Chaplin movie was an event, even by 1918,\u201d said Scott Eyman, the author of the recent biography \u201cCharlie Chaplin vs. America.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n From the footage shot with the two cameras, Chaplin assembled four versions of \u201cShoulder Arms.\u201d Foremost among these was what is called the A negative \u2014 the one that incorporated Chaplin\u2019s preferred takes from his preferred camera angles. That negative was used to make film prints for American theaters in 1918.<\/p>\n For other markets, Chaplin created a B negative (his preferred takes from the unused camera angle), a C negative (his second-choice takes from his preferred angle) and a D negative (his second-choice takes from the other angle). This meant that audiences on different continents saw versions of \u201cShoulder Arms\u201d that were close, but not the same.<\/p>\n As much as editors in those days might try to make the negatives conform, Eyman said, \u201cThe takes were always slightly different, especially with a comedian like Chaplin, who was working physically and in the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n A twist came in 1943 when the United States Army asked if Chaplin would make \u201cShoulder Arms\u201d available as a morale-booster for World War II troops. That prospect delighted the director, his biographer David Robinson wrote in the 1985 book \u201cChaplin: His Life and Art.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But there was a problem: By that point, degradation meant that the A negative could no longer be used. Because of image bleaching, any prints made from it would basically show a black screen, Peter Williamson, the film conservation manager at MoMA, explained in a presentation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The B negative would have been off-limits to Chaplin because of complicated rights issues \u2014 and in any case, it had been destroyed in a fire in 1938. That meant that Rollie Totheroh, Chaplin\u2019s regular cinematographer, had only the C and D negatives to work with when making prints for the army screenings.<\/p>\n To complicate matters further, the army showed \u201cShoulder Arms\u201d on sound projectors, which ran at 24 frames per second, a faster rate than projectors had used in 1918. To adjust for those projectors, the film was stretch-printed, which means that certain frames were doubled to bring the movie up to speed. As a consequence, a lot of movement in \u201cShoulder Arms\u201d would have looked jerky.<\/p>\n Finally, the revision from the 1940s was trimmed and stretch-printed with a different pattern, Williamson said, when it was included in \u201cThe Chaplin Revue,\u201d a 1959 feature that brought together \u201cShoulder Arms\u201d and two other Chaplin films, \u201cA Dog\u2019s Life\u201d (1918) and \u201cThe Pilgrim\u201d (1923).<\/p>\n It is this \u201cShoulder Arms,\u201d from 1959, that is generally used in official releases today. But the bulk of it, Williamson said, came from the D negative: Chaplin\u2019s second-choice takes from his second-choice angles. <\/strong>And because of the stretch-printing, a lot of the motion still looks jerky.<\/p>\n Beginning in 2021, Adrian Gerber, an archivist and film historian, worked with the Swiss archive Lichtspiel\/Kinemathek Bern on a project to locate and catalog all the surviving film prints of \u201cShoulder Arms.\u201d<\/a> MoMA had reported its copies, but Gerber said he was unaware of the restoration until this weekend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe are quite happy, because this was the basic goal of our research project,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wanted to do research to do a proper restoration.\u201d Lichtspiel is a small archive, he said, and had made clear that it didn\u2019t have the resources to restore the film itself.<\/p>\n MoMA\u2019s goal was to reconstruct the movie that American audiences saw in 1918. What is screening Thursday has been assembled as much as possible from surviving prints based on the original A-negative material. It is a work in progress because MoMA had to fall back on 16-millimeter and 28-millimeter prints for a small portion of the film. When those sections turn up in 35-millimeter, the restoration can be completed.<\/p>\n The stretch printing is gone, though, and \u201cShoulder Arms\u201d now runs at a more period-appropriate 20 frames per second. The closest equivalent to this version, a reissue that Path\u00e9 put out domestically in 1927<\/a>, had used the A negative but altered the title cards, which have now been returned to how they looked in 1918.<\/p>\n You would need a side-by-side comparison to see how all the shots diverge, but some variations are striking.<\/p>\n In the restoration, when the infantryman Chaplin plays is shown entering a trench for the first time, he walks toward the camera, which dollies back with his movement. In the \u201cChaplin Revue\u201d version, he enters from the opposite end of the trench, and the camera initially dollies forward.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, the uproarious sequence in which Chaplin ventures behind enemy lines disguised as a tree begins slightly differently, with the star scratching his behind. After a cut to a closer view, Chaplin appears, if anything, a little more annoyed to be a tree in the MoMA version.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cShoulder Arms\u201d is hardly the only film that Chaplin reworked years after its release. \u201cHe reissued almost all of his silent films at one time or another, to keep himself relevant as his own production slowed up,\u201d Eyman said. The Chaplin estate has favored the versions that the filmmaker left behind when he died in 1977, Eyman explained, and that has always been the source of arguments, with strong cases to be made either way.<\/p>\n Still, he added, \u201cWithin the critical community, people want to see what he made when he was at full-bore.\u201d<\/p>\n By email, Arnold Lozano, the managing director of the office in Paris that represents Chaplin\u2019s holdings, noted the director\u2019s perfectionism even late in life and said that the rights holders\u2019 policies for screenings respect Chaplin\u2019s wishes and the family\u2019s instructions. But while \u201cThe Chaplin Revue\u201d and the score that Chaplin added to \u201cShoulder Arms\u201d remain under copyright, the movie as it existed in 1918 is well past the age when it entered the public domain<\/a> in the United States, clearing the way for MoMA\u2019s screening of the restored version.<\/p>\n Kehr likened Chaplin\u2019s tinkering to George Lucas\u2019s. \u201cWhat we\u2019re doing for you is the 1977 \u2018Star Wars,\u2019\u201d he said, \u201cand not the 2024 \u2018Star Wars.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n