Friday, January 22, 2010
Keaton
The greatest of all of the silent ones: Buster Keaton. What an acrobat! What an athlete he was! There is something which moves me very deeply just looking at him for two seconds. You see a tragic man and you see how he is exposed to the obstacles of the world and you see how funny he is. He moves my heart more than anyone else in the silent era.
--Werner Herzog with Elvis Mitchell on The Treatment 12.2.09
The above remark by Werner Herzog was one of my motivations for seeing a screening of three Buster Keaton films from the early twenties when they were screened at the NW Film Center. Other motivating factors were a rainstorm, rush hour traffic, my new Silver Screen pass, and a need to spend a few hours in town before meeting up with some friends at a concert.
Additionally, I was interested to hear the soundtracks that were prepared for these films by Bill Frisell. Bad canned music, especially honky tonk style piano usually can pull me out of films from the silent era. When viewing silent films at home, I'll give the accompanying track about 5 minutes. If it starts to drive me batty, I'll find something on my CD jukebox to replace it quickly. The Frisell soundtracks with Joey Baron (drums) and Kermit Driscoll were sometimes spirited and plucky but would sometimes also lapse into the undersea aquarium guitar that is a kind of signature for that jazz artist. I think his score worked best with the short feature Go West, which featured a theme that, to my ears, sounded a whole lot like The Pretender's song 2000 Miles
I've never been terribly huge on silent comedies until fairly recently. In the last few months I have become a big admirer of the earlier work of Ernst Lubitsch. His work at Babelsburg Studios in the Wiemar Berlin twenties before coming to the United States were either epics or comedies, and my favorite of these, which I need to view again soon and do a post is Wildcat, truly an epic comedy, with the amazing Pola Negri.
Part of the great joy in appreciating physical comedy is to watch it in a crowd. When Pam and I saw Matt Groening speak a few years ago, he showed the Homer Simpson's jump over Springfield gulch and the gym at Evergreen responded with a kind of pandemonium. When we see that episode or a clip of it even, Pam and I can't help but laugh. Even talking about it makes us smile.
There were moments in the screening of Keaton's One Week, The High Sign, and Go West that were almost as joyful as Homer's freefall into Springfield Gulch. The key to Keaton's comedy is a battle with the laws of physics. The affordances of solid surfaces may turn out to be passage ways or trap doors. In The High Sign, guns are shot and bullets find unexpected trajectories. And in Go West, his adoration for a cow crosses the borderline of absurdity.
But most of all, Keaton, like many great comedians is a master of timing. I don't think it gets much better than the scene from One Week where the train is going to apparently run into the ill-fitted newlywed home that is being moved to its appropriate lot with the help of a couple barrels. Please move your scrubber to the 3:17 mark to witness a truly hysterical moment in film. Maybe almost as good as Homer's skateboard jump.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:38 PM
Comments:
Post a Comment