[1] Chaplin was famous in a way that no one had been
before; arguably, no one has been as famous since. At the peak
of his popularity, his screen persona, the Tramp, was the most
[4] recognized image in the world. His name came first in
discussions of the new medium as popular entertainment, and
in defences of it as a distinct art form — a cultural position
[7] occupied afterwards only by the Beatles, whose own
era-defining popularity never equalled Chaplin’s. He’s the
closest thing the 20th century produced to a universal cultural
[10] touchstone.
Film histories will invariably assert that Chaplin’s
mass popularity was owed to the way in which the Tramp
[13] represented a destitute everyman. His films turned hunger,
laziness, and the feeling of being unwanted into comedy. He
was an ego artist, a performer with an uncanny relationship to
[16] the camera who spent the early part of his career refining his
screen persona and the latter part of it deconstructing it.
Many a film critic raises the issue of Chaplin’s actual
[19] relationship to the cultural moment of the time — and the fact
that his popularity survived several periods of sweeping
cultural change. His post-silent films — which include his two
[22] most enduringly popular features, Modern Times and The
Great Dictator — reflect his own attitudes more than the
feelings of American audiences at the time. His mature work is
[25] deliberately artificial, set in a world pieced together from
chunks of European and American past, present, and, in the
case of Modern Times, future.
Ignaty Vishnevetsky A century later, why does Chaplin still matters? Internet: (adapted)
According to the text above, judge a following statement.
“At the peak of” (l. 2 and 3) can be correctly rewritten as At the height of.
