The spark that lit Charlie Chaplin's The Circus, his wonderful follow-up to The Gold Rush, was actually rather minor. It began with a note about a gag that had yet to be filmed or performed on stage: A man, elevated high, beset by a group of monkeys that nearly cause his demise. Henry Bergman, a close friend, warned him that the gag would never work on stage but gave him the idea to set it under the big top. Bergman would later teach him to walk a tightrope in under a week.

As in nearly all of his work, Chaplin came up with the set-pieces and drive of The Circus, which is being screened in a new print as part of Film Forum's Chaplin retrospective, through a series of notes (what he referred to as "suggestions") on gags that he dreamt up while walking around his dual homes of Los Angeles and New York with his co-star and assistant director Harry Crocker. Around the dozen or so gags, Chaplin went about constructing both a love triangle and a meditation on the art of comedy and how self-awareness, success, and ambition refract and inform a performer.

The end result had the director deploying his classic alter-ego, The Tramp, as the unknowing savior of both a fledgling big top and the step-daughter (Merna Kennedy) of a heartless ringmaster (Al Ernest Garcia). The opening gag ranks with one of Chapdin's best: Unknowingly wrangled into a pickpocket scam, The Tramp finds himself evading the cops, the thief and the mark in a funhouse inside a mock Jonah's Ark. In terms of sheer physicality, this is as challenging a gauntlet as Chaplin ever dared himself to come out of with his mustache intact, and the image of him recreating the precise movements of a wooden figurine is reward enough.

The chase concludes in the center ring of the humdrum circus, a fact that infuriates the ringmaster until he realizes that the crowd is eating it up. Hopelessly unaware and falling for the hunger-stricken step-daughter, The Tramp eventually realizes his talents and becomes demanding towards the ringmaster, an act that coincides with a decline in the reception of his performances. All seems on track for The Tramp to win his beloved's heart until he is upstaged by Rex (Crocker), a well-groomed tightrope walker.

What might have been a genteel parable, concluding in a sort of B-grade alternative to City Lights' miraculous ending, becomes something more complex as The Tramp plans to become a tightrope walker to win back the stepdaughter, leading to the gag which The Circus was meant to encapsulate. Though the film went into production in January of 1926, some eighteen months before The Jazz Singer began shooting, The Circus bluntly allegorizes the fickleness of the motion picture audience and, by extension, the elusive nature of popularity and stardom. Rex, for both the audience and the stepdaughter, becomes the new show and The Tramp, despite attempts to catch up with the new wave, eventually faces the fact that the art, at least for him, has met its expiration date.

This is how The Circus ends, but it obviously made little difference to Chaplin. His two subsequent films, City Lights and Modern Times, continued to evade sound and (rightly) remain his best-regarded works. Released through a raging typhoon of personal turmoil -- his second wife, Lita Grey, filed divorced and released an unprecedented 52-page summation of their turbulent marriage, including sexual proclivities -- The Circus will perhaps always be considered minor, eclipsed by the films that directly followed and preceded it. Minor or not, the film remains, by all means, a refined and personal work by a great artist.  

Jorge, the elder of the two subjects of Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio's lovely new documentary hybrid Alamar, makes his living catching fish, stingrays and lobsters in Banco Chorrico, an atoll reef off the southeast coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico. A lean and tan man of Mayan heritage, Jorge, as the film's prelude informs, enjoyed an intense but ultimately short-lived romance with an Italian woman named Roberta. The result was Natan who, at five years old, is told that he will spend a week with his father in the wilds of Banco Chorrico before moving back to Rome with his mother.

Roberta and Jorge's separation creates a structure for Alamar but from the moment Natan and Jorge step onto a small fishing vessel piloted by Jorge's elderly friend and fellow fisher Nestor, it is clear that the pains of broken home are far from what Gonzalez-Rubio's film is fascinated by. In fact, from the moment they leave her home, Roberta is only spoken of near the end of the film and not negatively, though it should be said that her presence is felt when, in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, Natan takes out a handheld video game for a moment.    

Rather than focusing on the situation they have been forced into, Gonzalez-Rubio stays towards the unspoken moments that Jorge and Natan are connected by, amplified generously by the splendorous, colorful surroundings of Banco Chorrico. For Jorge, bonding includes a coral dive to spear lobsters, fishing for barracudas without reels, lessons on how to properly snorkel, washing Nestor's boat and eating fish both fried and boiled in a stew. A lesson on how to properly handle a cattle egret, that comes to be known as Blanquito, speaks more clearly to the inherent bonds between man and animal than a dozen guilt-trip eco docs have been able to muster.    

Indeed, even more than depictions of father-son or man-animal connections, Alamar is a film full-to-bursting with vitality and generosity, one that could have so easily tipped into either a sterile Discovery Channel special or a hokey portrait of familial bonds at sea. Neither of said scenarios would allow for moments as natural and genuinely joyful as Nestor and Jorge's discussion on effects of coffee or Natan drawing fish with markers and, without warning, pointing out that he will remember the Gonzalez-Rubio's camera along with the sea life. These instances, not to mention some spectacular images of friendly crocodiles and writhing barracudas, give Alamar a lived-in feeling yet the film remains surprising and only minimally sentimental throughout. 

The film ends with a cut from the clear waters of Banco Chorrico to the dirty canals of Rome, where Roberta and Natan look out on the great city from a high spot. The story of Natan in the urban world is one that might be interesting but Alamar is not a film of balances, nor is it all that interested in the realities of Roberta's world. Banco Chorrico might seem as normal as anything else to Jorge, which the press notes describe as "part Johnny Depp, part Peter Pan," but for Natan and the audience, it's The Jungle Book with Jorge recast as a fatherly Balloo, attempting to reinforce unspoken principals of life that may get lost by the wayside when he returns to the "real" world.