With the recent coverage of time travelers documented in photographs from the past it was only a matter of time before such a being was uncovered in a motion picture. And now one blog has posted footage of what some believe to be a woman talking on a cell phone in Charlie Chaplain’s classic 1928 film “The Circus.” As this latest time traveler takes the internet by storm let’s delve into what it could and couldn’t possibly be.
A youtube user first covered the mysterious figure passing by and the blog Forgotomori made suggestions about the various things it could be. After looking at the film several times it does seem like something strange is going on with a woman dressed in black. The scene happens during a transition as passersby move in front of the camera behind an elephant. And now the elephant in the room is the behavior of one woman wearing a top hat as she walks behind the creature apparently talking excitedly into something she holds to her face. Although her features are obscured enough to make a detailed identification impossible, it is apparent she is talking and smiling as she walks alone and holding something to her face in the way others would when talking into cell phones today. Is this a technological simulacrum from another time? Are we looking at evidence that time travel exists at some point in the future? And of course if time travel exists at some point in the future, doesn’t this mean it has the potential to exist at any point in time? The most interesting and strange aspect of the images suggest that she is not only holding something up to her face but actually appears to be communicating into it.
But despite the strange suggestion, why would a time traveler decide to go back in time and then talk on a cell phone after signing up as an extra in a Charlie Chaplain film? Perhaps the rules stated she could immortalize herself in history but only in specific and purposefully obscure ways. But even if this were true, how would she then make a phone call on a cell phone?
It’s possible that whatever technology would allow for time travel would also allow for communications to pass back and forth through time. And while a time traveling device would need to be considerably larger to accomplish the transportation of a human being into the past (I’m assuming of course) a smaller device working on the same or a similar principle could be far smaller and simpler.
Of course this is just working with the time traveler theory of this footage. In reality it’s impossible to determine what the time traveler is doing, but an interesting point was raised by the original poster of the video. Without the intention of posthumously insulting this extra, but rather relaying the words of the poster since the figure cannot be seen fully it does appear a bit to look more like a man wearing drag than a woman. Such a man would have been likely put in front of the camera at last moment and may have been told he was needed (for any number of reasons) to wear women’s clothing as he walked in front of the camera. It’s not uncommon for male extras or stunt doubles to wear women’s clothing. And so the hand in front of the face could in theory have been in order to hide the more masculine features of his face (such as bushy side burns). The talking could have been to the man in front of him, and the smile a result of the unusual circumstances of the director’s request and possibly being a bit self conscious. The gait of the figure does appear to be masculine with long sweeping strides. Doing a shoe size comparison to the man in front in the white suit, it does appear the figure is wearing fairly large shoes. And the coat almost entirely obscures the frame of the figure. Is this an extra purposefully obscuring their face? Or something a bit more unusual?