I think that Buster Keaton is the greatest filmmaker who ever lived. I hope this appreciation will give you some idea of why I feel that way...
If you're unfamiliar with Keaton, it doesn't much matter where you start. Most of his silent movies are masterpieces, and even the lesser ones (Battling Butler, College, Spite Marriage) are inspired, and far more spellbinding and entertaining than anything you're likely to find playing at your local multiplex. |
"In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler's effortless, uninterested face." -- James Agee, "Comedy's Greatest Era" By Jim Emerson When movie critic and screenwriter James Agee (Night of the Hunter) wrote that sentence about Buster Keaton in a 1949 Life magazine essay, "The Great Stone Face" had faded into obscurity, his career eclipsed by those of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. When Keaton died, on January 30, 1966, the world was just beginning to recognize that, as Walter Kerr has written, "He was the most silent, as well as the most cinematic, of silent screen comedians." I might argue with Agee's use of the word "uninterested" up there -- Keaton is always keenly aware of, and resourceful in adapting to, that universe swirling around him. But I think I what Agee is referring to is Keaton's almost (but not quite) expressionless face -- an implacable visage that is nevertheless capable of expressing all the joy and wonder and delight and frustration and despair of... well, of being alive in this whirlwind of a universe. Keaton's comedy is ideally suited to the aesthetics and technology of the movies. It's a medium brought to life by sprockets and shutters, lamps and lenses, and to Keaton the world itself is one huge, whirring, implacable machine. But if Buster is forever at the mercy of the inexorable, indifferent forces around him, it's his impassivity and adaptability to those forces that allow him to survive, and triumph, over adversity. Keaton can always roll with whatever punches the universe can throw at him. Unlike Chaplin's "Little Tramp," Keaton never cries out for sympathy. The audience doesn't need to be coaxed into identifying with him; the serene blankness of his face is like an empty screen onto which viewers can project their own hopes and fears. Like the audience, Keaton himself is an observer. He doesn't rush blindly into action; he waits, watches, considers, taking in everything around him. And that's his secret. Life, Keaton demonstrates, is just a matter of timing. Even when surrounded by chaos (a hurricane in Steamboat Bill, Jr.; an avalanche in Seven Chances; a raging river in Our Hospitality; a Civil War battle in The General), Keaton understands that if you know where to look, and when to leap, you can hurl yourself right into the eye of the storm and pass through, safely, to come out on the other side. Keaton makes that leap of faith again and again in his films. He trusts the universe, no matter how many reasons it gives him not to. It may be an unfathomable and inhospitable place (no wonder Keaton was a favorite of the existentialists), but Buster intuitively grasps the underlying logic beneath all the confusion. Keaton's comedy is founded firmly on the principles of Newtonian physics, the invisible substructure that alone keeps the universe from simply flying apart in all directions. Keaton lives (and repeatedly almost dies) by the Law of Gravity in a perilous world rife with holes. His own center of gravity, the weight that keeps him from from flying off and disappearing into the raging powers that are forever circling around him, is his grave, immobile face. From the raw material around him, Buster spontaneously creates simple makeshift contraptions that harness elemental principles of physics to keep him moving along through the maelstrom of modern life: a wheel, a lever, a crank, a ladder, a bucket, a siphon, a see-saw, a bridge, a boat, a balloon... In the famous early short, "One Week," Buster needs to climb up to the roof of his house. He detaches the porch railing, turns it sideways and -- voila! -- it's a ladder. Keaton sees through ordinary objects and appreciates them for their essential properties, and their protean possibilities. To him, all objects (alive or inanimate) assume identities that are merely temporary; everything is always in flux. A car becomes a sailboat (Sherlock Jr.), a horse's behind becomes a Southern Belle (Our Hospitality) -- and, on a more abstract or metaphorical level, brides-to-be become boulders, and vice-versa (Seven Chances). If, when riding on a train (in Our Hospitality), Keaton finds himself in a coal car that has just fallen into a river, he grasps the situation at once. Hitting the water, the coal car floats; to Buster, it suggests a canoe. So, he picks up the shovel, which in the blink of an eye becomes an oar. Unperturbed, Buster paddles calmly to shore as if he'd planned to fall off that train all along. In a Buster Keaton movie, you're always aware that at any moment a tear could suddenly and inexplicably occur in the fabric of the universe and a body could just fall through it and disappear -- like the abyss in the middle of the river (sometimes referred to as a waterfall) in Our Hospitality or the hole at the end of the train (a hole created when Buster, running along the top of the cars, runs out of train) in Sherlock Jr. Other holes have to be punched, such as the one in Sherlock Jr. that enables our young cat-napping projectionist to dream his way into the world of the silver screen. It takes a couple of running starts, but Buster breaks through that barrier between fantasy and reality. (Woody Allen used a variation on this idea as the premise for The Purple Rose of Cairo.) Some holes occur propitiously, like a certain window in a certain housefront in a justly famous and breathtaking moment in Steamboat Bill Jr.: When the wall breaks away from the structure and comes crashing down around Buster, the window frame clears his head and shoulders by a couple of inches and he's left standing, slightly puzzled but unscathed. (Keaton insisted that this shot could not be faked; he wanted his audience to trust him, too, so he preferred to present his miracles in clear, unbroken takes whenever possible. He may see the world as whirling and chaotic, but as a filmmaker he views it with integrity.) Other holes are plugged up propitiously: As Keaton rides on the handlebars of a runaway motorcycle in Sherlock Jr., he starts across a causeway which not only ends in mid-air, but has a middle section missing as well. As Buster is about to plummet through the chasm in the middle, two trucks pass through the gap and their tops fill up the hole just long enough for him to cross it. Then, as he nears the precipitous end of the causeway, the entire structure slowly collapses, easing him down and depositing him back on the road, still in motion. Within the space of a few seconds, two bridges have momentarily come into existence where there was none before -- and, what's more, they have appeared only for the instant they were needed. What a marvelous universe. Keaton also knows that, once you open up a hole in the cosmos, stuff is just as likely to come out of it as it is to go into it. You could accidentally open up a Pandora's Hole. In his great one-reeler, "The Boat," Buster's vessel springs a leak. The water is spewing in from a spot on the hull, forming a nice arc on its way to the floor. Like the average person, Keaton's first impulse is to plug the hole where the water is coming in; he attempts the repair job with one of his wife's inedible pancakes. But when that doesn't work, he gets an even more inspired idea: He drills another hole at the other end of the arc so that the water can go out. Unfortunately in this instance, Buster ends up on the wrong side of the law of physics for a change, but you've got to admit that his logic is visionary, even if it isn't correct. At times like this, Keaton's understanding of the way the world works is even more brilliant than Newton's. It just doesn't quite apply to the world we live in. In The Navigator, Buster tries to drill a hole in the top of a can of evaporated milk, but the drill goes all the way through the bottom of the can. When he discovers this, he instinctively cups his hand below the leak, while holding the can in his other hand, and then tries to pour the milk back in the top -- juggling with liquid, as if he could somehow suspend the milk in mid-air and keep it running in a circle until he's ready to pour it into another receptacle. There's a purity and a lucidity to Keaton's directorial vision that's so beautiful and enthralling there are times you almost forget to laugh. The most violent forces (like the above-mentioned storms, rivers, avalanches, wars) are shaped by Keaton's enchanted eye into curves, arcs and circles that, in the abstract, look like graceful apparitions, even when they're threatening to pulverize Buster into meatloaf. All the objects in Keaton's silent universe are constantly on the move, following their own trajectories through space. Part of his fascination with trains undoubtedly has to do with the fact that the vectors along with they travel (the tracks, that is) are visible. All these hurtling objects, Keaton included, are forever colliding with one another, their paths intersecting, or narrowly avoiding intersecting, at comically opportune or tragicomically inopportune moments. But Keaton seems incapable of just going through the motions for the sake of going through the motions; his eyes are always fixed on some goal, some glorious spot on the horizon, which usually assumes the form of a seemingly unattainable love object of whom he must prove himself worthy. Buster is the underdog whose own dogged ingenuity carries him through to triumph. He may be a lousy seaman in Steamboat Bill Jr. or an inept athlete in College, but when the situation demands it (i.e., when he must perform some feat for a purpose, such as rescuing his girlfriend or his father) he invariably discovers a way to rise to the occasion.
|
"I have called Keaton the most silent of silent film comedians without quite explaining why. The silence was related to another deeply rooted quality -- that immobility, that sense of alert repose, we have so often seen in him. Keaton could run like a jackrabbit and, in almost every feature film, he did. He could stunt like Lloyd, as honestly and even more dangerously. His pictures are motion pictures. Yet, though there is a hurricane eternally raging around him, and though he is often caught up in it, Keaton's constant drift is toward the quiet at the hurricane's eye." -- Walter Kerr,
Best Buster books: Just click to by 'em...
|
