![]() Welles believed there is no finer American picture than Keaton’s The General (1926), a film about the love between an engineer and his train. But to probe on the silent film years is to explore purely transformative art. Once you get past Keaton’s silent era masterpieces, the book is for completists, which is no knock. In writing about the whole Keaton shebang, Curtis’ text wears thin just as Keaton’s own later material did. To hear him speak in a movie must have been shocking at the time, Keaton sounding like he’d just gargled a bucket of rocks. The sound years were not kind to Keaton, being stripped as he was of the hyper-visual core of his métier. This is no book-length apologia for comedy, nor is it some jargon-y exercise in mental onanism that one gets so often with the sort of academic writings that endeavor to take Keaton’s comedy seriously. They’re discussed as movies we can watch again and again, always gleaning new insight. Your buddy could well be a Buster Keaton comedy.Ĭurtis treats Keaton’s films the way a Hawthorne scholar would regard the stories: art for the centuries that’s not going anywhere. When you get to the church, though, your buddy isn’t allowed inside. It’s going to be a tough day, it’s a pain to get there, and having this person along for the ride-and the ride back, crucially-helps you get through it, and maybe helps you learn a thing or two about life and death and purpose and truth. But a work of comedic movie artistry is akin to that person you have with you in the car on the long trip to a funeral. He’s a filmmaker like Jean Vigo was a filmmaker, and John Ford, and Howard Hawks only, Keaton may be better than all of them.Ĭomedies get the shaft when it comes to cinematic prestige. Not a clown, not “just a comedian,” a yucks purveyor. Thus we have a book like Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life, by James Curtis, which attempts to do for the magisterial Stone Face what Simon Callow has been doing biographically for Orson Welles, though in a single volume rather than Callow’s four.Ĭurtis’s three-word subtitle speaks volumes and is voluminously respectful: Keaton is an artist. Chaplin, with the former having been at last critically elevated to his rightful perch. There’s been a course-correction when it comes to Keaton v. Anyone could see that Keaton wasn’t just the man, he was the force of life. Scott Fitzgerald, Thoreau’s journals, and mid-period Billie Holiday.Ĭharlie Chaplin was then still celebrated as the genius visionary of the early age of American cinema, his Little Tramp character touted as the most iconic creation of the cinematic medium. By the Beatles, Beethoven, the short stories of F. Come Monday, I would have been thoroughly wowed in a manner I’ve only been a handful of times in my life. On Fridays, I’d take advantage of the rent 10-for-1 deal, departing the store with a stack of Buster Keaton VHS tapes balanced against my chest. ![]() Years ago, home in the summers from college, I embarked on a Buster Keaton odyssey. This is one reason why no one has ever been more necessary in the history of cinema than Buster Keaton, and why we’d be wise, even today, to spend time with his perpetually modern self. Essential, too, is the individual who makes us laugh. Few skills in life-and make no mistake, it is a skill-are more vital to maintaining one’s humanity than finding a way to laugh. ![]()
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