Kid Auto Races at Venice production company Keystone Studios
Plot
Made by Keystone Studios and directed by Henry Lehrman, the movie portrays Chaplin as a spectator at a "baby-cart race" in Venice, Los Angeles. The film was shot during the Junior Vanderbilt Cup, an actual race with Chaplin and Lehrman improvising gags in front of real-life spectators.
The film is presented at first like a genuine newsreel, with Chaplin's attention-seeking spectator getting in the way of the camera, causing great frustration to the cameraman. Lehrman begins by roughly pushing an obnoxiously persistent Chaplin away, but eventually he starts knocking Chaplin to the ground.Unusually, the camera breaks the fourth wall to show a second camera filming (as though it were the first) in order to better explain the joke. At this stage, Chaplin gets in the way only of the visible camera on screen, not the actual filming camera. In this way, the filming camera takes on a spectator's viewpoint, and Kid Auto Races becomes one of the first public films to show a movie camera and cameraman in operation.
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