This article was written for Lady Clare (2008) Clare College, Cambridge's annual magazine. Here it is complete with its original first paragraph which had to be cut from the final publication due to length.
Luis Buñuel once described Buster Keaton’s 1927 film, College, as ‘beautiful as a bathroom, vital as a Hispano.’ I don’t really know what this means, but as a sample of the abundant surrealist praise for Keaton’s films in the twenties, it signifies his unique place in 20th century art—universally appealing to the modern consciousness, but perpetually obscured by those who want to juxtapose their aesthetics onto his. In a short film from 1920, The Goat, Keaton is accidentally photographed instead of a notorious serial killer who subsequently escapes from prison. In the place of Dead Shot Dan, Buster is plastered all over town and printed in the newspapers—one glance at his incriminating face and ladies flee in terror, bounty-hunters shoot their guns at him and the traditional automatic cops raise their truncheons. Poor Buster, he’s not the man they think he is.
Yet, it is no coincidence that Buster Keaton has been used, misused, reshaped and stolen by the most important artists of the last century, from the Breton to Beckett. Garcia Lorca’s early surrealist ‘play’, El Paseo de Buster Keaton (1925), follows ‘Buster Keaton’ through a promenade of infanticide, floating bicycles, straw-hat-eating black men and a woman with ‘celluloid eyes’ and crocodile shoes. It is an ‘impossible’ scenario, more of a reverie than a play, and its extrusion of gravity and logic, such as a one-dimensional bicycle that ‘can go into books and stretch itself out into bread ovens,’ reads like a pataphysical parody of Keaton’s grounded use of physics. Lorca’s marriage of Keaton with surrealism was undoubtedly inspired by films like The Playhouse (1921), which uses spliced shots to create nine performing Busters, and Sherlock Jr. (1924), perhaps one of the most important films of the 1920’s, in which he walks into a cinema screen. But both of these films, as unreal and inventive as they are, exploit the trickery of the medium rather than create illusions. Like the clay horse that he sits on to hide from his pursuers in The Goat, Keaton’s work is predominantly ruled by gravity and will collapse, however fantastically, within the physical logistics of reality.
His most categorical tryst with gravity is the famous “Falling Window” gag. Steve McQueen won the 1997 Turner Prize for his film, Deadpan, which recreates the sight of a wall that falls on the unsuspecting clown, saved by an aptly positioned window-frame. This iconographic trick, used in three of Keaton’s films, has been variously replicated such as in Disney’s Aladdin and, most recently, in the US-sticom, Arrested Development. From a sting-and-pulley operated dinner table in The Scarecrow (1920) to a miraculous and heroic transformation of domestic objects into a rapid assortment of sporting tools in College, Keaton proved himself to be a master of the fantastic and the ridiculous, but in a way that remained truthful to reality, the objects and the spaces his characters encounter.
In Neighbours (1920) the majority of the film’s action takes place in a symmetrical environment—two tall houses with a fence and a telephone pole in between them. The plot revolves around the musty comedic trope of young lovers whose parents violently disapprove of their romantic entanglement, but by creating a space that mirrors the conflict of the plot, Keaton welds the film with an extra layer of physical meaning. As he leaps out of a window, to escape from his fiancé’s Neolithic father, Buster slides away on a clothes line back into his house. But on re-entering the house he finds himself diving headfirst down a stairwell, out through the ground-floor window and onto another clothes line, propelling him back to where he started, hurtling into his future father-in-law’s stomach. The brute force of patriarchal aggression has trapped the rebellion of youth into a perpetual whirligig of graceful hazards, if they’re ever to get married they must escape. And they do, on top of a human ladder formed by two friends who appear simultaneously out of the windows.
As with all of Keaton’s films, it is this intricate, dangerous and fantastically realised dance with bodies, objects and spaces that tells stories and makes us laugh. Antonin Artaud once described Keaton’s ‘excitement of objects and forms’ as ‘the convulsions and surprises of a reality that seems to destroy itself with an irony in which you can hear a scream from the extremities of the mind.’ More technically ingenious than Chaplin, Buster Keaton, with his melancholic, deadpan face, plots a silent world that infuses reality with wonder, the banal with the fantastic and without an ounce of sentimentality, reveals the ceaseless machineries of human desires and impulses through his earnestly comic art.
No comments:
Post a Comment