Buster Keaton and Silent Film
First a Note from Jana:
It is my eXpeIience that modern audiences often have a hard time with silent film. Mostly, they
compare silent to modern film and say, "It is different than what I know. Therefore, it is worse.
Therefore, I don't like it."
I find this way of evaluating silent film even more interesting when I note that often the people who
like silent film comedies the most (beyond film scholars, of course) are younger children. My own
theory for why is as follows: They (children) are less initiated into a particular type of film making and
less verbally astute, so they react delightedly to the Visual and physically comic nature that successful
silent film comedies offer.
It seems to me, then, that since we have the capacity to enjoy silent film but have taught ourselves
(through exposure and acclimation to sound cinema) not to like it, that we can also reteach ourselves
(through an examination of our existing film expectations made possible by contextualization and
exposure) to like it. Obviously there are well and poorly made silent films, just as there are sound films,
but if a lot of people thought at some point that something was good, it behooves us to take a closer
look at the thing.
This is one reason why I start the semester with silent film. Another reason is because I myself like
it so much. Keaton is quite delightful. To help explain that delighfulness, I've included several
excerpts from a wonderful book The Comic Mind, by Gerald Mast (full citation available at end of the
excerpts), which attempts to identify comic genius and explain why it is so.
Later in the semester, there will be another reading from The Comic Mind as well, to help
contextualize comic film even further. The excerpts from this week, however, are especially for Keaton
and Silent Film.
The Comic Mind
by Gerald Mast
Silence and Sound Films
The great silent comedies revolve about the body and the personality of its owner; the great sound
comedies revolve about stmcture and style--what happens, how it happens, and the way those
happenings are depicted. Film comedy, as well as film art in general, was born from delight in physical
movement. The essence of early filmmaking was to take some object (animate or inanimate) and
simply watch it move. The essential comic object was the human body, and its most interesting
movements were running, jumping, n'ding, colliding, falling, staggen'ng, leaping, twirling, and flying.
The early comic filmmakers soon learned that to make better comic films, they needed better comic
bodies that could do interesting and surpn'sing tricks. They needed athletes, not wits; men who could
tum in the air and take a fall, not tum a phrase. The university for such athletes was not the legitimate
stage but vaudeville, burlesque, the music hall, and the circus...
The silent clown began with magnificent physical control. Although he usually tn'ed to look funny,
it was what he could do with his body that really counted. Ben Turpin's crossed eyes were his
trademark, but Turpin could take tremendous falls, turn his legs into mbber bands, or, conversely,
stiffen his frame into an unbendable plank... This physical control explains why many sound comedies
that try to evoke the Sennett spin't fail. They may use Sennett's undercranked camera; they may
manipulate pace and nonsense and nonsequitur; they may conjure up chase after chase after chase. But
they (Kramer's It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, for example) must depend on funny-looking
personalities rather than human pretzels, balls, and rubberands.
The sound comedy is far more literary. Given the opportunity to use the essential tool of literature,
words, as an intrinsic part of the film's conception, the filmmaker did not hesitate to do so. In silent
films, the use of words in titles was intrusive, a deliberate interruption of the cinematic medium and a
substitution of the literary one. We stop looking and start reading. But the sound film provided the
means to watch the action and listen to the words at the same time. Whereas the silent performer was a
physical being--and only through the physical an intellectual one--the sound performer was both
physical and intellectual at once.
Another difference is that because he could talk, the sound performer was more like an ordinary
human being in society than a specially gifted comic-athlete-dancer-gymnast-clown. Further, the Visual
interest in sound films was not the physical motion of the performer but the Visual juxtaposition of the
people with their social and physical milieu. Images and imagery replaced movement. All such shifts
were in what can be termed a “literary” direction, making the film far more like a play or novel. And
as in the play or novel, the underlying unity of such comedies was provided by structure--what the
characters did, what happened to them as a result, contrasts between the characters, conflict between
the characters and the social milieu, stylistic contrasts, oppositions, parallels, and balances (p23-26).
Buster Keaton: His Comedy and his Films
Almost all the great Keaton gags reveal this synthesis of impossible nonsense and pragmatic sense.
In the short Cops (1922) Buster thrusts out his hand to signal for a left turn. A dog bites his wrist. Next
time, Buster signals with a boxing glove hooked onto an expandable towel rack. Another very sensible
machine. Unfortunately, the boxing glove smashes a traffic cop in the face. Later in the same film,
Buster wants to light a cigarette. An anarchist tosses a bomb onto the seat of Buster's wagon. Buster
calmly picks up the bomb, lights his cigarette with the burning fuse, and then tosses the “match” away.
What else do you do with an unlighted cigarette and a handy bomb? Unfortunately, he tosses the
“match” into the midst of a policeman's parade. Keaton, of course, has no control over the
consequences of his sensible actions. A pragmatic maneuver can produce unforeseen and disastrous
results. Conversely, a simple pragmatic maneuver can have monumentally effective results far beyond
the intention of Keaton's strategy--as in The General. Such disproportion between act and result,
intention and consequence is anotehr blend of sense and nonsense. A man can control his actions, not
their consequences.
The plots of Keaton's features usually juxtapose the sensible and the impossible. Buster performs
the ultimately impossible by merely performing the ordinary--step by step, bit by bit. Eventually a
series of steps mounts to a heroic plateau; indiVidual moments of sense add up to one impossible sum.
The first two reels of the Keaton features set up some character trail in Buster that makes it seem
even more impossible for him to accomplish such feats: weakness (Go West, The Three Ages, Our
Hospitality, Battling Butler, College, Steamboat Bill Jr.) and/or bungling incompetence (Serlock Jr.,
The Navigator, Seven Chances, The General, The Cameraman, Spite Marriage). Buster, without
erasing the general in adequacy established in the opening reels, shows how he can still perform
impossibly heroic acts. Thus, the Keaton features begin slowly. Unlike the Chaplin films, which can
start with a Charliesque bang of a gag, the early reels of the Keaton feature must establish the character
Buster plays. Then the Buster character faces what might be called “the Keaton imperative.” Buster
must do something--something that the character he plays would never do, yet somehow must. The
imperative can be thrust on him specifically; you must marry by 7:00pm of your twenty-seventh
birthday to receive $7,000,000 (Seven Chances, 1925); you must become an athlete before you can woo
the pretty girl again (College, 1927); you must be a tough physical bmte to wed the daughter (Battling
Butler, 1926). Or the imperative can be simply a problem that Buster walks into and carmot possible
walk away from (and continue to exist): saving himself from murder and the girl from the falls (Our
Hospitality, 1923); steering an ocean liner (The Navigator); taking a whole herd of cattle to market (G0
West, 1925); saving his locomotive (The General); saving his father from a cyclone (Steamboat Bill Jr,
1927); saving himself and his wife from gangsters (Spite Marriage, 1929).
Buster's successful accomplishment of the Keaton imperative reveals how close the Keaton comic
world is to melodrama, and how influenced Keaton was by the master of melodrama, D.W. Griffith.
Many of Keaton's films culminate in variations on Griffith's last-minute rescues (Our Hospitality,
Seven Chances, Sherlock Jr., College, Steamboat Bill Jr;, Spite Marriage)....(pl34-l35)
Although [Keaton's] features are playful, they have an underlying moral edge. When Shakespeare
parodies both classical heroism and medieval romance in Troilus and Cressida, he raised the serious
and disturbing question of whether any Virtuous human action is possible in a world where both love
and honor are reduced to nonsense. Although Keaton consciously dealt in the completely comic, his
films suggest serious human issues that carmot be laughed away. The artificiality of the code of honor
in Our Hospitality, which demands on the one hand that the Canfields treat the guest in their home with
courtesy and, on the other, that they murder him as soon as he steps out the door, is certainly the basis
of many ingenious Keaton gags--coy and subtle attempts to stay inside the house, disguising himself in
a dress to leave it. But that code of honor is Vicious as well as comical. It is inhuman, respecting
abstract forms rather than the human spirit. The word “honor” in the film is no more than a word,
divorced from the realities that created both the word and the concept.
That a human being's worth is defined in so many of the films as physical prowess or material
success is also central to Keaton's observation of the separation of form and essence. Like Chaplin,
Keaton contrasted surfaces with more important realities. Where Chaplin's contrasts invariably center
on social definitions of human respectability and success, Keaton's center on personal definitions of
human integrity and accomplishment. . ..
The consistent Keaton motif is the ridiculing of all inhuman definitions of human worth. To define
a man by his uniform, wallet, muscles, or family name is not to define him as a person. In his
denigration of the value of clothes (despite his elegance in wearing them) and surface characteristics as
a means of defining a man, Keaton is the opposite of Brecht (A Man’s a Man) and, therefore, of
Chaplin (whose tramp's clothes are the tramp). What Buster accomplishes often has little to do with
social and literary cliche's about what certain types of men can accomplish. The Keaton character
consistently shows how much a little, unheroic, unromantic man can do simply by going about his
business in his own way, exercising his individual human abilities and will (p136-137).
Work Cited
Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comecb) and the Movies. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1979.