Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. (1914)

 “In picturing this event an odd character discovered that motion pictures were being taken and it became impossible to keep him away from the camera.”

It’s strangely appropriate that this should be the first intertitle of the first film to be released that featured Charlie Chaplin’s immortal character: The Tramp.  From his very first appearance, primitive though it is, he is undeniably engaging, though there is nothing in Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. to suggest the character was endearing enough to be a long-term fixture, let along the icon he became. Considering Chaplin himself would go on to appear in a staggering 35 films over the next 12 months for Keystone, it seems it was just as impossible to keep him away from the camera. But this is the place it all started for The Little Tramp.

Well over a century has now passed since the Keystone comedies producer Mack Sennett decided to make a short film with director Henry Lehrman and new actor Charles Chaplin at the Kid Auto Races on Saturday January 10, 1914, and to watch the 6-minute film today is to look back onto a world completely alien to anyone alive today. Even the title is cumbersome and obscure. The Kid Auto Race, in this case the Junior Vanderbilt Cup Race, was a short-lived event where the streets were closed off in Venice and young teenage boys were encouraged to race each other in their own home-made carts, usually powered by motorcycle engines. The race was officially administered, and for the winner there was a considerable prize of $250 on offer. To see boys racing what are effectively motorcars around the roads, with no safety equipment whatsoever, only adds to the modern disconnection with the film. It’s to this usual backdrop that Chaplin debuted his creation to a large audience for the first time.

The most fascinating aspect of Kid Auto Races is the reaction of the audience to Chaplin’s presence. Film cameras were still uncommon at the time, so there would have been a degree of excitement about appearing in a film (one woman apparently had no intention of being immortalised on nitrate, and visible hides behind a programme for the duration of a scene with Chaplin right in front of her), but more than that we see their amusement and interest in the strange looking fellow jumping around in front of the camera. Mack Sennett had found the Tramp character hilarious when Chaplin first experimented with it on the Keystone lot, but looking around the many faces in the crowd, they are all smiling or laughing, even if they are slightly bemused. If this was an indication of how audiences might react when the character was shown in theatres across the country, then it was a positive one.

The film is all improvised, with Chaplin and the “director” the only apparent actors. There’s also the virtually unprecedented scenes in which the camera is filming another cameraman hand-cranking the camera on screen which Chaplin is larking around in front of – in one of the first examples of this happening. Despite this on-screen camera, Chaplin regularly breaks the fourth wall, and it’s inconsistent throughout which camera is being addressed.

As entertainment, even the most enthusiastic film historian would have a tough job making a case for Kid Auto Races aging well. The film is almost like an artists’ original sketch for what would eventually become a magnificent painting. There are many better Chaplin shorts, and many better shorts featuring The Tramp. But as a historical document, showing the origins of this great character, this is absolutely invaluable and it’s easy to imagine in another 100 years people watching this to see exactly how Charlie Chaplin originally conceived The Little Tramp.