The Big Stick / An Old Reel

The Big Stick /An Old Reel ... intercut[s] two Charlie Chaplin shorts centering on policemen with newsreel footage of police crowd control and street fighting. Levine questioned the social implications of media, not only by making temporal, aesthetic and contextual comparisons of his sources, but by presenting this discomforting ragout in a film gauge whose cost, availability and mobility make simply working it an intrinsically political gesture.
Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.