As a kid, he loved to make people laugh by taking the fall-a formative time for his physical comedy. Joseph, Myra, and Buster were known as “the Three Keatons,” with Buster as the main attraction. It wasn’t long before he became one of the nation’s premier vaudeville stars. Another traveling performer, Harry Houdini, witnessed the tumble and reportedly said to Joseph and Myra, “That’s some buster your kid took.” (“Buster” at the time was a common word for a fall.) From then on, young Joseph went by Buster. As legend has it, when he was six months old, he fell down a set of stairs, amazingly without a scratch. As Stevens, a film critic for Slate, notes, at some point in that year, Louis Lumière is said to have proclaimed, “The cinema is an invention with no future.” It’s no small irony that this is when our hero-the man who proved him wrong-emerged.īuster’s parents, Joseph and Myra, were comedic performers in a traveling vaudeville show.
Joseph Frank Keaton was born in the small town of Piqua, Kansas, in 1895, the same year the Lumière brothers made their first films. Indeed, a quick scan today of Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok yields an endless stream of gags that carry influences from Buster-even if their makers don’t realize it. And yet he was stunningly ahead of his time.
Keaton’s life essentially coincided with the first 70 years of film. In many ways, his experience in vaudeville and silent film equipped him perfectly to reach audiences on a smaller screen, who were harder to capture without the inoculations a theater provides from the outside world.Īs Dana Stevens writes in her new book, Camera Man-an impressive confluence of biography, film criticism, and cultural history-Keaton’s trajectory tells, in its own way, the history of modernity and the evolution of film technology. Then, after a lost period, he was at the cutting edge of television comedy in the 1950s. None were as good as the ones he made in the 1920s. MGM fired him.Īfter an extended bout with chronic depression and alcoholism, he made his way back into pictures. He went in and out of rehab and nearly lost everything. The move, he said, was “the worst mistake of my life.” Around the same time, he was drinking excessively. Unfortunately, though, like all things, Keaton’s incredible run came to an end in 1928, when he joined MGM Studios and lost his creative control. “Stuntmen,” he once said, “aren’t funny.” Two of Keaton’s most famous rules were to never fake a gag and to never use a stuntman. “The middle will take care of itself,” he would say. He would devise a compelling beginning and a satisfying finish. With the exception of The General, he never worked with a completed script. Keaton loved the comedy of action and the ability of the camera to fool the eye. (1928) when a wall falls down on him, but he’s saved by standing on the perfect spot to pass through the attic window. To this day, Keaton’s shots are among the most imitated, like the house collapse in Steamboat Bill, Jr. It’s a joke that requires hardly any technical trickery it works because he knew where to put the camera. We are then left with Buster, his body encased helplessly in rubber next to the curb. Once the car drives away, however, we see that the spare tire is not, in fact, attached rather, it’s part of a display for a tire store. In his short film The Goat (1921), for instance, Keaton tries to escape from the police by hiding in a spare tire attached to the back of a car. His gags worked not only because of his physical courage and prowess-he did his own stunts, often in one take-but because of his ingenuity with the camera. At the dawn of the medium, Keaton figured out visual storytelling like none other. During that decade, he churned out 10 silent feature films-including his most famous, The General-and a collection of shorts that created the grammar of cinema. The vaudeville child star turned filmmaker had a run in the 1920s that makes him, as Roger Ebert once declared, arguably the greatest actor-director in the history of movies. His life’s greatest tragedy was that, once he gave up that freedom, he could never get it back.
In fact, in the history of motion pictures, there might be only one other filmmaker who could make films of such consequence and majesty with complete creative control: Buster Keaton. Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the 2oth Century
0 kommentar(er)
