Charlie Chaplin was one of the most popular and influential directors and performers in the history of film. His influence derived from many different aspects of his work but one of the most important was his role in the development of comic feature films. Although other performers and filmmakers were involved in the same process (and surpassed Chaplin at times) he was nearly unique in the degree of control he exerted over the development of his own films. A comparison of works ranging from his early days of making two-reel shorts for Keystone to later shorts and his first self-directed feature at First National, The Kid (1921), demonstrates the process through which coherent narrative features were developed from the gag-based style of the shorts. Although The Kid is not the height of Chaplin's accomplishment in the new form, as his first it displays some of the problems the vaudeville-oriented comic filmmakers faced in making the transition.
There are, of course, many ways to read film history. Jenkins and Karnick, for example, argue against the auteur- (or "author") based approach on many excellent grounds. But, especially in the case of Chaplin who produced, directed, wrote, starred in and, later, composed music for his own films, the auteur clearly conceived of himself in just this way. Thus when Jenkins and Karnick argue against reading "the shifts of individual comic artists, such as Chaplin, from short films which were largely outside the classical norms of the Hollywood system towards more classically constructed feature films . . . in terms of personal progress and maturity" they are arguing against viewing Chaplin's development in the way Chaplin himself viewed it (7). Author-based perspectives often do, as Jenkins and Karnick state, "avoid the tricky questions of artistic control and of the relationship between the individual artists and the system of production" (7). But Chaplin's control increased throughout...