![]() ![]() Ultimately, of course, he drifted into the young business of the movies beginning in 1917, where he served a brief apprenticeship as second (often third) banana to the unsubtle and hugely popular Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. The rough physical comedy of The Three Keatons clearly helped him develop some formidable athletic skills, as well as the ability to project to the cheap seats, far from the stage he would never need a close-up to get a laugh. His mother and father were itinerant vaudevillians, who introduced little Buster into their act when he was all of 4 years old his part, generally, consisted of being hurled around the stage by his father, Joe. His stage training may have had some influence on his long-shot aesthetic. He favors the more expansive vistas, as if to assert that there’s nothing funnier, really, than a small man in a vast space. He once said, “Tragedy is a close-up comedy, a long shot,” and because tragedy has nothing at all to do with his worldview, close-ups are almost non-existent in his films. That visual joke, like most of Keaton’s best, is filmed from some distance. In one memorable gag (which he would repeat on a grander scale in Steamboat Bill, Jr.), the house facade falls down, in one piece, while he’s in front of it, but he remains unhurt because the spot where he’s standing lines up perfectly with an empty window frame. In the very first short he made at his own studio, One Week (1920), he plays a newlywed building a house from a do-it-yourself kit: the house turns out to be a mess, but the jokes are precise. He said that if he hadn’t been a performer he would have liked to be an engineer, and it shows: Keaton gags are intricate, meticulously designed machines. The unchanging wonder of Keaton’s comedy is in the way he plays with the narrow (4:3) frame of silent-era filmmaking: emptying it, filling it with furious action, emptying it again, and always making it seem, somehow, wider and rangier than it is, a sort of CinemaScope of the mind. However the credits read, the comic sensibility of the films is amazingly consistent, and not only because Keaton’s famous deadpan, under a pancake-flat porkpie hat, is at the center of them all. In most of the silent material, Keaton is credited as either the sole director or a co-director with the exception of The Saphead, in which he was strictly an actor, he was always in control, working-without benefit of formal shooting scripts-with a small team of gag men and technicians. (1928), 19 remarkable shorts made at his own studio between 19, and-perhaps as a kind of cautionary tale-a disc called “Lost Keaton,” which collects 16 two-reel talkies he starred in for an independent outfit known as Educational Pictures in the 1930s. Spectacle isn’t always good for comedy, but Keaton knew how to turn it to his advantage: when you’re watching The Navigator (1924) or The General (1926) or even a two-reeler like Cops (1922), you’re awestruck with laughter.Īll the best of his work is on view in a new Blu-ray box set from Kino Lorber, The Ultimate Buster Keaton Collection, whose 14 discs contain 11 feature films, from The Saphead (1920) through Steamboat Bill, Jr. ![]() ![]() He got laughs with large machines like locomotives and cruise ships, with spectacular forces of nature like waterfalls and cyclones, and when he was on the run, as he usually was, a cast of thousands was often in pursuit. ![]() Like his great, unfunny contemporary D.W. In his heyday, between 19, Keaton dreamed up visual gags the likes of which had never been imagined, on stage or screen, and he wasn’t stingy either with their number or, especially, their scale. If necessity is the mother of invention, then Joseph Frank Keaton, better known as Buster, must have been the neediest comedy director who ever lived. With a new Blu-ray box set, his genius looks as fresh as ever. As a director of almost geometric precision, Buster Keaton created the template for physical comedy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |