Kid Auto Races at Venice



A milestone in film history, the 1914 silent movie Kid Auto Races at Venice (also called The Pest or The Kid Auto Race) features the debut of Charlie Chaplin's little tramp character as he continually disrupts a cameraman trying to film a soapbox derby car race.

By 1914, the Vanderbilt Cup had become an important automobile racing event in the United States, and the 1914 event was to be held in Santa Monica, California. The city decided to sponsor a junior version of the event, apparently with several classes of engines and with age limits for the drivers. Some classes had no engines and used a ramp to accelerate the cars in a manner similar to soap box derby races. Other classes used small engines. Chaplin's movie includes one scene shot at the bottom of the ramp used for the engineless races.

Unusually, the camera breaks the fourth wall to show a second camera filming (as though it were the first), to better explain the joke. At this stage, Chaplin gets in the way only of the visible camera on screen, not the actual filming camera. In this way, the filming camera takes on a spectator's viewpoint, and Kid Auto Races becomes one of the first public films to show a film camera and cameraman in operation.

A contemporary review in The Cinema noted, "Kid Auto Races struck us as about the funniest film we have ever seen. When we subsequently saw Chaplin in more ambitious efforts, our opinion that the Keystone Company had made the capture of their career was strengthened. Chaplin is a born screen comedian; he does things we have never seen done on the screen before."

The film was added to the National Film Registry in 2020.

Kid Auto Races at Venice is in the public domain. Watch this movie here, on this very wiki, or download it from the Internet Archive.

(This article contains text from the Library of Congress and Wikipedia.)


 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: As mentioned above, we see the Tramp get in the way of the camera "filming" the races.
 * Enforced Method Acting: Chaplin knew he was making a movie set at the races. The spectators and participants didn't - their reactions are real.