Une ressource audio authentique : l’interview de Louise Hilton

Louise Hilton est archiviste à la Margaret Herrick Library, le centre d’archive des Oscars à Los Angeles. Elle a réalisé une vidéo pour l’exposition du Mémorial de Caen ‘L’Aube du siècle américain, 1919-1944’ (08.05.2024 - 05.01.2025). Elle revient ici plus longuement sur les aspects abordés dans cette exposition : Charlie Chaplin, Hollywood, la censure, le rôle d’archiviste et la nécessité de collecter les informations sur le passé.

Ce projet a pu être mené grâce à l’intermédiaire d’Olivier Menou, professeur d’anglais et professeur relais auprès du Mémorial.

Toutes les informations pour les visites au Mémorial sont disponibles dans l’espace pédagogique sur le site internet : https://www.memorial-caen.fr/

L’entretien a été réalisé par Valentin Locoge via zoom en juillet 2024.

L’interview étant riche et les propos développés, les parties en gras peuvent être extraites du document et utilisées comme « citations » en fonction du niveau des élèves et des objectifs visés. La ressource a pour vocation à faire l’objet d’une compréhension orale.

[1] Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your job ?

My name is Louise Hilton and I am the research archivist at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, so we are a research library located in Beverly Hills, California. We are part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, so we’re best known for giving out the Oscars every year. But the rest of the year the librarians and I are busy helping researchers from around the world. We have about 2000 collections in my department, which is ‘special collections’, so it’s the personal papers of people who worked in the industry : everything from fan mail, to scrap books, to scripts - all the different script versions, script notes, casting - it really runs the gamut…daily production reports, which were printed, they still are to this day, I guess they’re on ipads now, but back in the day they were printed out for people on set to see what time the actors had to report to work, and how long shooting took. So, we have a lot of those from Paramount studios in particular, so that’s what I do. So, I help people with their research project. It could be everything from journalists who are writing an article, to professors trying to come up with a set of courses, to just everyday writers who are either writing about Hollywood, the production of a particular film or a biography of a film star or director.

[2] Who was Charlie Chaplin and what do you have in the archives about him ?

Charlie Chaplin was an English-born performer. He was the product of sort of a turbulent childhood. He was a young man who was on the road a lot with his mother who was an actress. She had some mental health issues, so when he was a child, she was committed to an asylum several times, so he was sort of left on his own with his big brother, Sydney. So, he was very talented and he ended up becoming, I would say, the most popular star of the 20th century. I don’t know, maybe Marilyn surpassed him later on, but certainly the first 50 years of the century, everyone around the world would have recognized his name. He first appeared in a film, what we call a one reeler - a short film - in 1914, and then the rest was History. He directed, wrote, composed his own music, starred in his own films, he really was sort of a one man show. I personally adore him. I know he had some issues in his personal life. His archives are actually in Switzerland, so we don’t have specifically the Charlie Chaplin papers at the Academy, but we do have a wonderful collection from a gentleman named Harry Crocker, who was his assistant. He worked with Chaplin for decades. We have this great collection of fan mail to Chaplin, and he was so well-known that he was staying in London and Paris for this collection of correspondent, they just drew the Tramp - his famous character - they just drew the Tramp’s cane and his hat and his big shoes and then they just put London and it got to him. So it just really speaks to the fans that he had around the world.

[3] In the exhibition at the Mémorial de Caen, you discuss the significance of his film The Great Dictator, can you tell us about it ?

So, as early as 1938, Chaplin had planned on making a film in which he would parody Hitler, and when it was first announced in the Press, it really did cause sort of an uproar, because The United States, we were so isolationists at that point, and a lot of people in the industry just didn’t want to…what they considered play with fire. But Chaplin was very politically engaged and determined to, you know, make his own voice known by making this film, in which they called it ‘burlesquing Hitler.’ So he plays two characters in the film : a Jewish barber who ends up being sent to a work camp, and being persecuted throughout the film ; and then he also plays what he called ‘Adenoid Hynkel.’ If you go to [the exhibition at] the Mémorial de Caen, they have a really wonderful set-up, because they show scenes of an actual speech by Hitler, as well as a scene from the film, in which Chaplin is, you know, doing the Nazi salute and just talking gibberish, like he’s not saying real words in English, or German, or anything, so I think it’s really powerful the way they put it together. So, the film came out in 1940 and it was a success, I mean people - even though they’re laughing at it overall -...there’s a powerful speech at the end where the barber, who is actually taking the place of Hynkel, talks about all he wants is peace in the world and, you know, for people not to think about borders and not to think about patriotism necessarily, but just to really think about humanity. I find it very moving, and, again, it was popular when it came out, and I think it still stands out, all these years later.

[4] Why were his political views controversial ?

Chaplin during the war, he went around the country speaking in favor of aid to Russia, and in favor of, you know, the Soviet-American friendship, I mean of course, during the war, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, and quickly after the war became sworn enemies and then the Cold War started, so because of his outspokenness throughout really his adult life, he was accused of having pro-Communist sympathies, and that was definitely a bad thing in the eyes of most of the American people and some people in the industry. So he ended up being, I mean I would say I think ‘persecuted’ is a strong word, but I don’t know that there’s another word for it, for his political views, and sure enough when he left in September of 1952 to go have the premiere of his new film Limelight in London, it was announced the day that he left on the ship, or the day after that his visa was revoked to re-enter the United States, and if he wanted to, he would have to submit to multiple interviews about his faith toward the United States and his real political conviction. So he made the decision to leave, and he spent the rest of his life in Europe. He bought a manor in Switzerland and he was already…he had married this lady named Oona O’Neill, who was really the love of his life, and they had a bunch of children together. He just came back to America once, for an honorary Academy award actually. He wanted, you know, to do it on his own terms…

[5] What does the Academy have for Chaplin ?

We have, like I said, the Harry Crocker papers, so there is quite a bit of…there’s some correspondence, but it’s a lot of fan mail that he received and that he must have held on to, because it ended up with Harry who worked with him certainly later in life. We have…when I was talking about The Great Dictator, as part of this big collection of censorship files, it was commonly called the Hays Office, but it was the Production Code Administration, and what happened was from 1934 until the 1960s every studio in Hollywood had to send their projected scripts, I mean the projects they were hoping to make into films, to this office, for vetting, which means that they would read this script and then they would send back letters and say, “on page 17, you have to make sure that the lady doesn’t have to much cleavage, or you have to make sure that there is no suggesting of anything sort of unbecoming.” ‘cause there were certain things you had to follow in the code. Anyway, so, the file we have on The Great Dictator is really interesting because there’s a letter from the German consul in Los Angeles, who wrote a very concerned letter in ‘38, saying, you know, ‘I just heard about this Chaplin project, you have to be careful, you’d better not be talking about Hitler, you don’t want to cause any trouble in Europe. So, we have things like that. And then we have a bunch of photos, we estimate that we have overall in our photo collection about 13 million photographs, obviously not all of Chaplin, but we do have photos from his films, from his early films, and we have posters from some of them, but unfortunately we don’t have a lot of letters, just a handful of letters from him and the censorship files.

[6] Why is it important to have archives for the Film Academy ?

We have existed - The library has existed - since 1927, there’s talk - as soon as the Academy was founded that year - there’s talk in some of the early newsletters about starting a library. So, they weren’t talking yet about an archive, but it started off as a reading room, just sort of a club atmosphere at this famous hotel in Hollywood called The Roosevelt Hotel. And up until a few years ago, there was still a bar there, called the Library bar, ‘cause that’s where we started. And then we had a librarian come on board, and she sort of put things into shape and she started making clipping files, and we started collecting the papers of people who worked in the industry. It was such a new industry when the Academy was founded, so the thought of archives for History’s sake, or for posterity’s sake wasn’t really in the picture yet, but as people got older, and they finished working, they thought of the Academy to donate their papers to, so, it’s incredibly important. I mean, I’m the daughter of a History professor and an archivist, so of course, I think it’s very valuable. But we have students come in all the time, and I get excited to see young people in the archives, because maybe they’ve never been in one before, and they don’t know the sort of material that they can find, but you can really document this cultural, you know, phenomenon that was Hollywood, through these papers, whether it’s through the fan mail because you can see it touched the lives of some, you know, housewife in Kansas, or some big city girl in New York. It just really was, not just a domestic, but an international success, so, you can just kind of trace the trajectory of, really, I would say, American culture, through these archives.

[7] Is it easy to be an archivist and to reckon with the complexity of the past, of the world ?

We’re dedicated to preserving History no matter what, the good, the bad and the ugly ; we as archivist in 2024, would certainly never suppress a letter that has, you know, racial language, or some sort of sexist commentary or something that is just, to us, not ok, because, again, you have to look at things in their contexts. And, I feel that covering up History just makes it like it never happened, and that is a very real part of History, these issues between men and women, these issues between races, and it certainly still resonates today in American society and I think around the world, so I think it’s more important than ever to look at the past and to see how things were and, you know, hope for, hope for improvements in some ways, and then maybe be nostalgic about the better aspects of the past, but yeah, I think it’s very important. Nowadays, for people working in the industry, it’s gonna be harder and harder to document their careers, because of the digital world we live in, so, in terms of correspondence and things, I mean, there might not be…like they might delete that email before it comes to us, and it wouldn’t necessarily be in a diary anymore, or, you know, an actual letter for somebody, but I definitely think it’s more important than ever to hold on to things and hopefully learn from the past.

[8] What’s your favorite item from the archive ?

Sometimes my answer changes, but I would say it’s almost always the glasses from Cary Grant. Cary Grant was another British actor, but made his career in Hollywood, and he was always very debonaire, sort of a gentleman, always had a very well-dressed appearance, and, sort of chic…I adore him, and so, he was a big star in the 30s, through, really, the rest of his life, I would almost say, like the 50s, 60s. So, we have his papers, from his last wife - he was married a bunch of times -, and there are these little glasses, they’re actually French, they’re Pierre Cardin, and they fold up into this little case, and it just says Cary Grant on the inside, and then he was offering a reward if you found his glasses, to a P.O. box in Beverly Hills…so it just makes me laugh. I think it’s great, just think of him as an old man, walking around with this little case. We also have his monogram cufflinks for his shirt, and some monogram slippers. I think it was also a different time where people, certainly, dressed up more, and paid more attention, I think, to the way they presented themselves to the world.

Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes

Les liens avec les thématiques culturelles des programmes sont les suivants :

● Des repères géographiques, historiques et culturels des villes, pays et régions dont on étudie la langue (cycle 3)
● L’imaginaire (cycle 3)
● Rencontre avec d’autres cultures (cycle 4)
● Voyages et migrations (cycle 4)
● Représentation de soi et rapport à autrui (2nde)
● La création et le rapport aux arts (2nde)
● Le passé dans le présent (2nde)
● Les univers professionnels, le monde du travail (2nde)
● Identité et échanges (cycle terminal)
● Art et pouvoir (cycle terminal)
● Fictions et réalités (cycle terminal)
● Territoire et mémoire (cycle terminal)

Spécialités :
● LLCER - Imaginaire - utopies et dystopies / imagination créatrice et visionnaire
● LLCER - Voyages, territoires, frontières - ancrage et héritage
● LLCER - Arts et débat d’idées
● LLCER-AMC - Représentations - Faire entendre sa voix / Représenter le monde et se représenter / Informer et s’informer
● LLCER-AMC - Environnements en mutation
● LLCER-AMC - La relation au monde - héritage commun et diversité

Conclusion

L’article proposé s’inscrit dans une dynamique de projets culturels développée dans l’Académie de Normandie. Les ressources proposées par M. Locoge visent à initier l’exploration de nouveaux thèmes culturels au sein des classes grâce à l’utilisation de nouveaux documents, la variété des thématiques abordées permettant en effet d’enrichir la compétence culturelle des élèves.

Pour aller plus loin :
https://www.oscars.org/library
https://www.charliechaplin.com/en
https://www.academymuseum.org/en