Uploaded August 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A video essay about Charles Chaplin's celebrated speech at the end of "The Great Dictator" (1940).
It's very frequently called one of the greatest if not THE greatest movie speech of all time, but is it? Here I'll go through Chaplin's use of rhetorical devices and strong emotion and find some unexpected flaws in his highly articulate (too much so?) text.
Whatever flaw the speech may have in its appropriateness it's impossible to forget that Chaplin is speaking not as much to his diegetic audience as to actual movie goers watching him in the real world. This fact makes judging the speech in narrative and only narrative terms an incomplete approach. A singular case!
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#videoessay #screenwriting #charleschaplin
Brandenburg Concerto No4-1 BWV1049 - Classical Whimsical by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100303
Artist: incompetech.com
A video essay about Charles Chaplin's celebrated speech at the end of "The Great Dictator" (1940).
It's very frequently called one of the greatest if not THE greatest movie speech of all time, but is it? Here I'll go through Chaplin's use of rhetorical devices and strong emotion and find some unexpected flaws in his highly articulate (too much so?) text.
Whatever flaw the speech may have in its appropriateness it's impossible to forget that Chaplin is speaking not as much to his diegetic audience as to actual movie goers watching him in the real world. This fact makes judging the speech in narrative and only narrative terms an incomplete approach. A singular case!
// Join me on Patreon: patreon.com/Moviewise
// Follow me on Twitter: https://x.com/MrMoviewise
#videoessay #screenwriting #charleschaplin
Brandenburg Concerto No4-1 BWV1049 - Classical Whimsical by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100303
Artist: incompetech.com
