The National Film Theatre Buster Keaton Centenary Season
October 1995

Programme Introduction

It gives us much pleasure to celebrate Buster Keaton's centenary (he was born in October 1895), especially as the last NFT season was about ten years ago. And what a lot there is to celebrate: Keaton's golden years of the 1920s include one masterpiece after another and seeing them together is a prospect not to be missed. Keaton's handsome, gaunt, unsmiling face hides a myriad of emotions: his persona is that of a fighter, combating all kinds of perils, both human and mechanical, with a cunning steadfastness which always has an audience cheering him on.

He was the finest craftsman of 1920s comedy, working judiciously with his co-directors and technical staff who produced his wonderful settings; he possessed a directorial eye always aware of the right camera set-up and the correct distance between object and camera. Apart from these skills as actor, acrobat and director, there is also an indefinable quality which can only be described as poetic. Keaton may be continually embattled and pursued, but there is still time for moments of repose and an ineffably tender, caring feeling for his heroines.

Keaton the actor/comedian appears in all the reference books; this season is designed to highlight his achievements as a master director and, in many ways, an important innovator. Always alive to the possibilities of the moving camera, his flamboyant travelling shots (even in the early work) give the films a wonderful rhythym and freshness even when seen many times. His feeling for Americana in films like Our Hospitality and The General raise them to the level of elegant period pieces.

One word of advice: don't arrive late and miss the shorts, because many of them are equal to the features in subject and ideas. Keaton could pack a lot into 20 minutes and the comic invention in The Playhouse (where he plays all the parts) and the extraordinary dark comedy The Boat all add something to the totality of his achievements in the '20s. Welcome back, Buster.

John Gillet
 

 
Selection From The Programme Notes

Every film screened at the National Film Theatre is accompanied by a printed set of 'Programme Notes'. This one (or two) page sheet contains cast and credit details for the film(s) being shown, together with a review/magazine article/book extract about the film. The selection below is from the Programme Notes that accompanied The Navigator (1924).

The Navigator

In contrast to the character that Lloyd created, Keaton would resemble the classic simpleton of legend and fairy story were it not for a quality in him which might be described as metaphysical madness. As the art historian, Erwin Panofsky, has pointed out, he is imperturbably serious, inscrutable and stubborn, and acts under the impulse of an irresistible power comparable only to the mysterious urge that causes birds to migrate or avalanches to come crashing down. That this impulse is generally focused on a girl (of no particular attractions) matters as little as the fact that Don Quixote performs his exploits for the sake of Decline: it is not by accident that the only kiss in The Navigator is applied to the thick glass shield of a diver's helmet.

Thus Keaton movies in the mechanized world of today like the inhabitant of another planet. He gazes with frozen bewilderment at a nightmare reality. Inventions and contrivances like deck-chairs and railroad engines seem insuperably animate to him, in the same measure as human beings become impersonal. Without friends or relatives, he is generally incapable of associating with his fellow-beings on a 'human' basis, but mechanical devices, though often inimical to him, are, on the other hand, the only 'beings' which can 'understand' him. They are the real 'co-stars' in his films (the big liner in The Navigator, a pre-historic railroad engine in The General): and while they often introduce an element of confusion or Positive terror, as in the scene where a self-started gramophone plays 'Sailor, Beware', or in the macabre opening of the twenty doors of twenty uninhabited staterooms, there is, on the other hand, the unforgettable moment when Keaton, by a tender tap, expresses his gratitude to a little cannon which, in the very nick of time, has decided to kill his enemy.

He always wins in the end; not, like Chaplin, by romantically escaping from the world of machinery into a realm of human freedom, but, on the contrary, by fatalistically throwing his humanity into the whirlpool of mechanical forces. He is a hero by the grace of Un-reason and Un-feelingness, and in this respect a very modern hero indeed.

The 'plot' of The Navigator is particularly amusing in that it restates the problem of Robinson Crusoe with an inverted sign, so to speak; where Robinson Crusoe, on a deserted island, has to create the rudiments of civilisation, Keaton, finding himself and his girl marooned in an over-technicalised environments has to create the rudiments of natural existence. Robinson Crusoe cannot boil an egg because he has neither fire nor kettle - Keaton cannot boil an egg because the available apparatus is only fit for boiling three hundred.

Bulletin of The Museum of Modern Art, Vol XVI, Nos 2-3