Page "Charlie Chaplin" Paragraph 79

Chaplin disliked unconventional camera angles and only used close-ups to highlight an emotional scene, and usually preferred to employ a static, " stage-like " camera setting where the scenes were portrayed as if set on a stage.

To some scholars, such as Donald McCaffrey, this is an indication that Chaplin never completely understood film as a medium, but Gerald Mast has argued that by deliberately adopting this approach, Chaplin made " all consciousness of the cinematic medium disappear so completely that we concentrate solely on the photographic subject rather than the process ".

Both Richard Schickel and Andrew Sarris have also written that many of the gags in his silent films needed the " intimacy of the camera " to work and could not have been performed on the stage to the same effect.