Charlie Chaplin Archive the official catalogue and information site of and about Charles Chaplin’s very own and painstakingly preserved professional and personal archives, from his early career on the English stage to his final days in Switzerland. Over 75 years of handwritten and printed documents, photographs and press clippings spanning the career of the cinema’s most universal man and shedding light on how he worked, played and lived, but particularly how he worked. From the first handwritten notes of a story line to the shooting of the film itself, stage by stage documentary evidence of the development of a film, or a project that never even became a film. Poems, lyrics, drawings, programmes, contracts, letters, magazines, travel souvenirs, comic books, cartoon strips, praise and criticism, good times and bad .... the vast online catalogue lists them all and allows you to read nearly all the documents. Certain reserved documents may be consulted upon request.
The images and documents on this website are reproduced for research purposes only, and may NOT be used for any commercial purpose or publication. Requests to publish or copy or reproduce extracts from, transcripts of or copies of any of the documents (other than in a university thesis for in-house university publication requirements) must be submitted in writing and such request may be refused at the discretion of the owners.
The documents are the property and/or copyright of Roy Export Company Ltd and the Association Chaplin.
The various document types in the Chaplin Archive are described according to the areas and punctuation prescribed by the International Standards for Bibliographic Description of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (published in Italy by the Istituto Centrale per il catalogo unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche).
For unpublished material we used the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, second edition, revised 1988, drawn up under the direction of the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR, the American Library Association, the Australian Committee on Cataloguing, the British Library, the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, the Library Association and the Library of Congress, edited by Michael Gorman and Paul W. Winkler. (Italian edition by Rossella Dini and Luigi Crocetti, Bibliografica, 1997).
For the description of the photographic material, reference was made to La fotografia: manuale di catalogazione, edited by Giuseppina Benassati, introduction by Marina Miraglia, Grafis Edizioni, 1990.
The catalogue outline makes use of additional fields of description such as "Type", "Series" and "Summary" which enable the document to be defined and analysed critically and provide a channel of access since all the words act as search keys.
Each bibliographical record has a link to lists of Authors, Subjects, Filmography and Bibliography.
The Authors' index features all the people or organisations contributing to the intellectual and artistic creation of the document, responsible for its publication or distribution or appearing as "addressees" of the document.
The form of the heading follows the "Regole italiane di catalogazione per autori of the Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche", Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Environmental Conservation, ICCU, 1979. For subject labelling, the subject fields are those prescribed by the draft of Soggettario cinema e precinema edited by the Biblioteca Internazionale di Cinema e Fotografia "Mario Gromo", Museo del Cinema di Torino, University of Turin and the Cineteca Comunale di Bologna.
The Search tool on this website requires input of one piece of information at a time. Example: If you are looking for all the contracts that Edna Purviance signed, and you enter two items of information - such as Purviance contract - in the search field, zero results appear. Whereas, if you first select Contract in TYPE, and then enter Edna, or Purviance (or both) in the Search field, two documents will be displayed, the only two contracts in the archive signed by Edna Purviance. You can achieve the same result by entering Purviance (or Edna) in the Search field, waiting for all the results to appear, and then entering contract in the Search field.