Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp. “It was really my father’s alter ego,” Chaplin’s son has said, of the silent-film character, “the little boy who never grew up.” PHOTOGRAPH BY HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY

The most un-put-downable movie book of the season is also the most un-pick-uppable one: “The Charlie Chaplin Archives” (Taschen), which is the size of a small suitcase and weighs in at fourteen pounds, packed tightly with five hundred and sixty pages’ worth of thick and glossy paper bearing a treasure trove of superbly printed images alongside a relentlessly fascinating collage-like textual biography of Chaplin. It’s an apt tribute to the filmmaker, whose artistry transcends the cinema and spans world-historical dimensions.

The book’s editor, Paul Duncan, who also wrote or co-wrote ten of its fifteen chapters, states his aim in the first line of his introduction—“to show you how Charlie Chaplin made his films”—and he has access to an extraordinary trove of documents for the reconstruction, “preserved thanks to Charlie’s half brothers Sydney Chaplin and Wheeler Dryden.” The Chaplin family made these materials available to Duncan and his collaborators, but their involvement doesn’t seem to have inflected the substance of the book, which also ranges widely through Chaplin’s private life, including its lurid, scandalous, and criminal byways.

Even if the book were published without its images, solely as a collection of its wide-ranging texts, it would still provide crucial visions of Chaplin’s artistry and its inescapable coalescence with his life. He was born in 1889. His childhood in London was burdened with desperate poverty; the son of a struggling actress, he got his first acting job at fourteen, enjoyed success in the music halls, and, in 1910, sailed with the Fred Karno troupe for a three-year gig in the United States. Another member of the company, Stan Laurel (later of Laurel and Hardy), reported on Chaplin’s antics aboard ship:

Charles put his foot up on the rail of the boat, swung his arm landward in one of his burlesque dramatic gestures, and declared, “America, I am coming to conquer you! Every man, woman, and child shall have my name on their lips—Charles Spencer Chaplin!”

The rodomontade was, Laurel saw, a gag, but the essence of its truth was soon realized. In 1913, in Philadelphia, the company manager received a fateful telegram from representatives of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios: “Is there a man named Chaffin in your company or something like that.”

Chaplin was overjoyed by Keystone’s salary of one hundred and fifty dollars a week, but less happy with movies themselves. He wrote to his brother Sydney: “Just think Sid, £35 per week is not to be laugh[ed] at and I only want to work about five years at that and then we are independent for life. I shall save like a son of a gun.” Chaplin told his Keystone colleague Chester Conklin, “I’m going to get out of this business. … I figure the cinema is little more than a fad.” But a month into his contract, after an unsteady beginning with Keystone, he spontaneously, accidentally adopted a costume consisting of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s large trousers, a smaller actor’s tight jacket, and Arbuckle’s father-in-law’s derby. Then Chaplin decided to add, as he put it, “a small moustache, which, I reasoned, would add age”—he was only twenty-four—“without hiding my expression.”

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born. When I confronted Sennett I assumed the character and strutted about, swinging my cane and parading before him. Gags and comedy ideas went racing through my mind.

Charles Chaplin, Jr., said of the Tramp: “It was just released whole from somewhere deep within my father, it was really my father’s alter ego, the little boy who never grew up: ragged, cold, hungry, but still thumbing his nose at the world.” The Tramp, Chaplin also said, “is always quick to do things for his own protection and he is clever in dodging brickbats and rebuffs of others and sliding adverse conditions off on some other fellow. He does not care who falls so long as he gets out safe and sound.” Buster Keaton, meanwhile, was careful to distinguish his own screen persona from Chaplin’s: “Charlie’s tramp was a bum with the bum’s philosophy. Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a working man and honest.”

But a philosophy it was, and with it, Chaplin’s ambitions and ideas took flight. He sought to invent gags and routines for his character, but he also became keenly aware that performance in movies doesn’t exist in isolation from framings, rhythms—the entire compositional aspect of cinema. He took control of the stories and the production of his films over all; he became a director and screenwriter, and also edited his movies.

As the Tramp, Chaplin became a nearly instant celebrity: his fame and fortune rose meteorically. So did his artistry, along with critical recognition of it. In 1915, one critic wrote, “He was born to laughter as much as Edison was born to invention, and Tolstoy was born to world literature.” Another added, “Sitting in a house of a thousand persons the other night one could feel the stillness that settled over the gathering as the realization sunk deeper that the player was more than a comedian.”

Chaplin, on that boat in 1910, may have been joking about the triumphant destiny that awaited him in the United States, but once he had realized his basic dream of financial independence, he expanded the boundaries of what independence could mean. His self-realization involved an unprecedented artistic freedom that was bound up with his expansion of the burgeoning, still incipient art of the cinema. As Chaplin developed his on-screen persona, he also made explicit his sense of an artistic calling, through the increased refinement and scope of his films, through the audacious and socially critical subject matter, the anarchic tone, and the exacting craft by which he realized them.