Although best known for full-length features like Sherlock Jr. <\/em>(1924), The General <\/em>(1927), and Steamboat Bill, Jr. <\/em>(1928), Buster Keaton made\u2014that is to say, wrote, directed, choreographed, starred in, and stunted in\u201419 amazing silent \u201ctwo-reelers\u201d between 1920 and 1923. (Mostly collaborations with Eddie Cline and Joseph Schenck, these films are largely forgotten but readily available on YouTube.) In reel one (more or less the first 10 minutes) of each of these shorts, Buster is a bumbling, all-wrong figure of antic, absurd fun, blocked at every turn by capricious authority figures: a peremptory father, a dastardly older rival, a murderous gang of assassins. Then, somewhere in the second reel, the tables turn.<\/p>\n Reel one features social dejection and physical abasement. In The Scarecrow<\/em><\/a> (1920), for example, a downcast farmhand Buster is walking along (9:38) when he spots his beloved dancing with another man. Dejected, Buster himself spins away<\/a>\u2014hidden from his sweetheart by a wall of hay bales, but visible to the audience in his disconsolate parallel play. Then (from humiliation to pain) his moping, spinning dance takes him into the path of a dog<\/a> he believes is rabid. The audience knows there is nothing to fear (that white foam actually comes from a cream pie the dog just gobbled) so we can delightedly watch the pooch chase Buster through doorways<\/a> and windows, up ladders, along narrow walls, over perilous drops.<\/p>\n Buster\u2019s dash through that endlessly varied obstacle course throws him into the sort of purely physical exertion that turns stunts into something more. If you want to signal to an audience that what\u2019s happening is life itself\u2014not a mere simulacrum of it\u2014man chased by dog does the trick. This is the case for the same reason that actors famously loathe working with animals and babies: they offer the autograph of the actual.<\/p>\n The second reel of these shorts, however, turns around and runs the same process in reverse. Now, Buster\u2019s physical clowning becomes a social asset rather than a liability. In The Scarecrow<\/em>, we watch a bedraggled Buster drag himself out of a river and go down on one knee to tie up his laces<\/a> (17:30). Lo and behold, his beloved appears while his head is down, just in time to transform his kneeling form into that most social of icons: man proposing on one knee. She bats her eyelashes delightedly, and the intertitle reads: \u201cThis is so sudden.\u201d Keaton\u2019s true genius resides in his delightful disorientation from\u2014and re-orientation to\u2014a world that is never quite what he takes it to be.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n One lesson I draw from all this back-and-forth is the power of pliability. Charlie Chaplin gins up the pathos by presenting himself as a still point in a changing world; Harold Lloyd is so well adjusted to his environment we can sometimes forget what is the environment and what is Harold Lloyd. Keaton aims higher and lower at once. Buster is not the life of the party, but he is also not external to the machinery of life. He\u2019s an octagonal peg that halfway fits into life\u2019s round hole.<\/p>\n Unlike the work of Chaplin and Lloyd, Keaton films rest neither on rebellion nor on conformity, but on imperfect alignment. Buster would succumb to his circumstances in an instant, if he could just figure out how.<\/p>\n Are Keaton\u2019s shorts anything more than way stations on a long, straight comedic track, one that runs from Shakespeare\u2019s A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream <\/em>to more recent romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle<\/em> or The Big Sick<\/em>? What principally makes these two-reelers special is the way Buster\u2019s physical adeptness\u2014his stunts and his burlesque\u2014reveals what it means to walk through the world without being \u201call there.\u201d Buster reminds you what it means to inhabit two places at one and the same time: I\u2019m tying my shoelace\u2014but I\u2019m also proposing. I\u2019m speeding down a crowded road on a motorbike\u2014but I\u2019m also corralling a priest.<\/p>\n Critics from James Agee and Dwight MacDonald onward have praised Keaton\u2019s humor for incarnating the clown\u2019s capacity to fit his body into any situation, no matter how absurd or impossible\u2014to become a bodily response to his situation. The story these critics tell has an appealing simplicity. Once the motion-picture industry had demonstrated the commercial as well as the formal potential of rapidly flickering pictures in the dark, the music hall and vaudeville needed to find a way to thrive on celluloid as well. Enter Joseph Frank Keaton\u2014born 1895, into a traveling stage family, and nicknamed Buster early in life for his energetic pratfalls\u2014who turned his vaudeville training and eager experimentation with camera tricks and special effects into distinctive comic films.<\/p>\n The way I see it, though, Keaton\u2019s films (the features as well as the shorts) succeed by exploring the perpetually timely problem of inhabiting both a social and a physical world; the impossibility of mastering all one\u2019s frames of reference at once. In what may be my favorite two-reeler, <\/em>The Boat<\/em><\/a> (<\/em>1921), Buster is the earnest homemaker who only remembers to hang a picture on his wall when the wall is actually the hull of a boat. The result? Hanging the picture also involves poking a hole in the boat\u2019s side and letting in the ocean. This is a joke that Keaton heightens by zooming in on the painting that Buster has been hammering into the boat\u2019s side: an oceanscape.<\/p>\n Buster\u2019s first reaction when the water starts pouring through is to check the painted waves, as if it were the painting that had suddenly come to life and started leaking. He responds to one frame, but the audience are always aware of another frame, one that Buster himself seems not to recognize. There is no way to grasp one\u2019s world completely\u2014because that seemingly complete world is itself always only a limited frame of reference, traveling through a larger world.<\/p>\n\n In Convict 13<\/em><\/a> (1920), for instance, Buster begins as a clueless bourgeois golfer playing near a state prison that (unbeknownst to him) has had an escape. Moment #1: After being knocked unconscious by a convict who then switches clothes with him, Buster examines himself, sees \u201c13\u201d\u00a0 on his black-and-white-striped sleeve and gives a tiny, beautifully expressive shrug\u2014nu, I\u2019m a convict<\/em><\/a>. Moment #2: After a scene of headbanging chaos inside the prison (Keaton\u2019s films depend a lot on Buster being knocked out and coming to in an altered world), he wakes to find himself wearing a guard\u2019s uniform\u2014nu, I\u2019m a guard.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n The world is full of accidents that turn out for the worst\u2014chance encounters that lead you astray from the path you wanted, the path you really should have taken. Sometimes, though, tying your shoelace can get you the girl; sometimes, motorcycles do run into handy priests.<\/p>\n Buster is certainly not master of his universe\u2014but neither is he purely set adrift on its ebbs and flows. He is endowed with just-perceptible desires and thoughts, difficult but not impossible to express in a world that he partially understands, partially finds flabbergasting.<\/p>\n
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\nThe delight of the films is the truth and untruth of that statement. Everything relies on Buster\u2019s antic kinetic energy (his vaudeville-derived slapstick clowning) suddenly coming into contact with plot, so that shoelace-tying turns into a proposal. Lest we miss the point\u2014that every social situation arises first and foremost from a physical intersection of body one and body two\u2014the couple speed off on a motorcycle that soon careers into (oh, second happy accident!) a street-crossing priest<\/a>. Gathered up on the beloved\u2019s lap, the clergyman is in the right place and time to perform a fortuitous speeding wedding ceremony.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n Deep Focus: \u201cThe Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming\u201d<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
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<\/a>\n \n Olivia Rutigliano <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n