Chaplin stared at the bridge as fiercely as if his eyes were welding its joints. The awful little village where the Little Fellow was booted in the behind was to the left, and the sheer wild wonder of paradise was to the right, and the bridge was between them.

Four lovely girls appeared for him, barefoot, one blond, three brunette, in flowing white diaphanous gowns. They introduced themselves—Willie Mae, Olive, Helen, and another Olive, who laughed and said today she would be Olive Ann—and as they spoke, he watched how the sunlight caught their hair. He liked how each of them wore a headband of large white roses mixed with smaller buds of star jasmine, each headdress unique in the rhythm of its design.

“Has any of you seen Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune? Oh, did that sound pretentious?” He put his hand to his mouth; they all laughed. Good. “He dances like this.” Chaplin extended one arm north, one leg south in a lazy arabesque.

It was one o’clock. The first twelve minutes of Sunnyside had taken him fourteen weeks to shoot. He had four hours to shoot the eight minutes he needed for a two-reeler. Clearly, it was impossible.

The footage he shot that day began in the ditch, with Chaplin asprawl as if thrown by an explosion. On the bridge above, by magic of double exposure, four nymphs, transparent and then delightfully solid, dance with charming abandon, each girl tethered to the next by a chain of flowers. One happy beast, eight arms, eight legs, and moving with the winds. The togas promote diegetic effect, in that they allow the audience’s eye to travel to mysterious and arousing places without shame, for the outfits are classical.

Olive Ann, of the longest brunette hair, tips the flower chain link by link down to Charlie. The flowers tickle his nose. How delightful to awaken when the rescue comes like this. Fluttering his hands like gills, he allows himself to be brought up from the riverbed and into the company of these dreamy fisherwomen. They love what they’ve caught!

Chaplin swoons, hands to his heart, he pirouettes, and then—a lunge!—they bound into a crescent field, nymphs and satyr, Chaplin’s elevation almost supernaturally light as he takes grands jetés through bristles of unmown grass. He has quadriceps like a golden Pan, his bones are hollow, his arms are wings, he could leap nine feet in the air. The girls dash away quick as a school of minnows, and he, maintaining the grace of Nijinsky, pursues them with his cornering move, bounding three times on one leg, kicking little puffs of dust behind him. For sixteen frames—a second—the frame is empty except for the transient landscape. In the background, oak leaves reflect like tiny mirrors when the breeze runs through them.