The boiled shoe as dinner for two starving men on Thanksgiving and the baked potatoes dancing the Oceana at forks’ end have long secured a fondly held place in the popular consciousness. Gold Rush, in addition to being the film Chaplin claimed he wanted “to be remembered by,” is also home to a handful of some of the most enduring examples of his comedic genius. While Gold Rush does not conjure the haunting sentiments of City Lights (1931), or the progressive social critique of The Great Dictator (1940), this is the Little Tramp as his most inviting and adorable. Chronicling the exploits of Chaplin’s famous Little Tramp character as he heads north to the Alaskan frontier hot on the heels of the gold rush, the film is rife with colourful characters burly prospectors, small town lotharios, and luminescent silent screen beauties all serve as instruments for high comedy. The Gold Rush, first released in 1925 and subsequently re-released in 1942 in a version several minutes shorter with a new score and voice over, is a perennial classic. In this climate, Pacific Cinematheque delivers filmgoers a reason to celebrate with two new recently restored 35mm prints of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear. While the 2013 expiration date is little more than educated guess work - and many a cinephile is putting up a fight (a recent online petition from twitter's being a noble and notable example) – it is certain that the unique pleasure of watching stories told by beaming light through a strip of film is becoming increasingly rare. Movie theatres, given little alternative, are gradually switching over from traditional 35mm projection to DCP (Digital Cinema Package) compliant projectors, the industry standard for digital exhibition. With major studios less and less inclined to bear the cost of shipping actual film prints out to theatres when presented with digital alternatives, some are now predicting the effective end of celluloid film print distribution by as early as 2013. In the midst of the digital revolution, film has found itself on the endangered species list.
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