Thoughts on Buster Keaton

I don't remember how old I was exactly when I first saw a Buster Keaton film. I do remember the first film I saw of his was "The General" since it was the only one my local video store carried (you see back then it was known as video). I knew right away I was enamoured by the film and by Keaton's persona. There was something about him I could identify with and root for.

What made Keaton so appealing was how he was always the underdog but he never let that stop him. He really never let anything stop him to reach his goal. Through his films he would learn to adapt to the things around him and be able to solve problems his own way. If you put film in a mathematical sense, you might say D.W. Griffith discovered the basic math of it, while Buster Keaton was advanced calculus. His way of film making was to make the impossible look possible. My favorite gag in "The General" has to be where Keaton is about to fire a canon at the train engine ahead of him, but after hitting a bump, the canon aims directly at him instead. However in a stroke of dumb luck, Keaton's train just happens to turn a corner on the tracks which makes the space clear for the canon to hit the other train instead. In real life it might be hard to believe something like this could really happen, but in Keaton's skilled hands, it comes off seamless.

An even bolder statement of unreal circumstances seeming real was in his masterpiece "Sherlock Jr." it is with this film where he truly demonstrates the possibilities movies have. In it Buster plays a film projectionist who daydreams of becoming a world famous detective, and while dozing off in a movie house, he dreams that he is now in a film playing the main detective. By doing this Buster now has free reign in his world, and it plays by his rules. In Keaton's world it becomes perfectly logical for a man to jump out a window into a dress to disguise himself from his enemies. It's also logical for him to jump through another man's chest and and also go through the wooden fence that is standing behind him. (I'm still not sure how Buster achieved this certain gag, and part of me never wants to know because it is one of those genuine magic moments that amazes me each time.)

If you ever go to Roger Ebert's website entitled www.rogerebert.com and go to his great movies list, you will find a wide number of classic movies to choose from. However when it comes to Buster Keaton, Ebert makes an exception. Instead of listing a number of his films individually such as "Sherlock Jr.", "Our Hospitality", "Go West", and "The Navigator", Ebert instead packs them all up into one category which he entitles "The Films of Buster Keaton". (The only exception is "The General" which he had on his list when he first started it.) Ebert does this because Buster Keaton's films act more as a whole body of work rather than individual films, and that is the only way to view them.

I have a special spot for the classic comedians most of whom got their start in vaudeville and made some of the most memorable comedy films in history. If I'm ever down and out, I could just pop in The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, or Keaton's silent movie rival Charlie Chaplin and feel better again. But Buster Keaton was the true film maker above all of them, he helped change film language and showed us its various possibilities. After reading Keaton's autobiography "A Life in the World of Slapstick", Keaton modestly states that he did what he did in his movies because he thought it would be funny. Well if that's all he felt his movies were then I'm grateful for that, and I hope he would've been grateful that it also meant so much more to to so many others.