Filmography
Any filmography of a film-maker of the earlier silent period - even one as celebrated and chronicled as Chaplin - is likely to remain, perhaps perennially, a work in progress. In the early years of cinema, nobody thought of history apart from last week's profits and costs. The first attempt at a Chaplin filmography - a pioneering essay in the genre - was Theodore Huff's Index to the Films of Charles Chaplin, published by the British Film Institute, itself at that time still a youthful adventure. Thirty years later Denis Gifford, with a sharp eye for identifying long-forgotten supporting players, greatly expanded Huff's filmography, correcting the old errors and inevitably introducing a few new ones. The filmography of David Robinson's 1985 biography Chaplin His Life and Art had the advantage of access to the Chaplin archives, which made possible comprehensive and detailed records of the post-1918 films. The revised edition of this book in 2001 was able to incorporate new research by Brent Walker, Phil Posner, Steve Rydzewski and Bo Berglund. This filmography has drawn freely and gratefully on all these resources and others, notably the anonymous contributors to the Internet Movie Data Base, whose claimed sightings of many bit-players have in many cases been incorporated here under the provisional heading of "unverified credits".
The system of numbering established in Uno Asplund's 1971 filmography Chaplin's Films, adopted by Timothy J. Lyons' Charles Chaplin: A Guide to References and Resources (1979) and supplemented in David Robinson's Chaplin His Life and Art is again followed here to avoid the confusion which might result from the co-existence of two systems. As far as may be ascertained, the footages given for films are those of the original release prints. "Other titles" signifies known titles given to a film on subsequent reissue.
For the details of dates of shooting and shipping of the negatives of Keystone films we are grateful to Bo Berglund, who has also established the full cast list for Tillie's Punctured Romance.
The Chaplin Foundation will welcome all comments, corrections and contributions to maintain this filmography as the most authoritative available. Please use the Chaplin contact form.
