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BUSTER KEATON/ 2012
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 3 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0246 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"Well, I'd say that the minute sound came in, it was everybody talking their heads off and going for dialogue laughs. All your writers did the same thing. Once that started, it took years to ever get anybody even to touch that old type of material again."
- Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton -
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer.[1] He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".[2]
Buster Keaton (his lifelong stage name) was recognized as the seventh-greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.[3] In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Keaton the 21st-greatest male star of all time. Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929, [when] he worked without interruption on a series of films that make him, arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies."[2]
Orson Welles stated that Keaton's The General is "the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made."[4]
A 2002 worldwide poll by Sight & Sound ranked Keaton's The General as the 15th best film of all time. Three other Keaton films received votes in the magazine's survey: Our Hospitality, Sherlock, Jr., and The Navigator.[5]
Silent film era:
In February 1917, Keaton met Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios in New York City, where Arbuckle was under contract to Joseph M. Schenck. Joe Keaton disapproved of films, and Buster also had reservations about the medium. During his first meeting with Arbuckle, he asked to borrow one of the cameras to get a feel for how it worked. He took the camera back to his hotel room, dismantled and reassembled it. With this rough understanding of the mechanics of the moving pictures, he returned the next day, camera in hand, asking for work. He was hired as a co-star and gag man, making his first appearance in The Butcher Boy. Keaton later claimed that he was soon Arbuckle's second director and his entire gag department. Keaton and Arbuckle became close friends.
In 1920, The Saphead was released, in which Keaton had his first starring role in a full-length feature. It was based on a successful play, The New Henrietta, which had already been filmed once, under the title "The Lamb" with Douglas Fairbanks playing the lead. Fairbanks recommended Keaton to take up the role for the remake five years later, since the film was to have a comic slant.
After Keaton's successful work with Arbuckle, Schenck gave him his own production unit, Buster Keaton Comedies. He made a series of two-reel comedies, including One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), Cops (1922), and The Electric House (1922). Keaton then moved to full-length features, his first starring role in a full-length being The Saphead.
Keaton's writers included Clyde Bruckman and Jean Havez, but the most ingenious gags were generally conceived by Keaton himself. Comedy director Leo McCarey, recalling the freewheeling days of making slapstick comedies, said, "All of us tried to steal each other's gagmen. But we had no luck with Keaton, because he thought up his best gags himself and we couldn't steal him!"[15] The more adventurous ideas called for dangerous stunts, performed by Keaton at great physical risk. During the railroad water-tank scene in Sherlock Jr., Keaton broke his neck when a torrent of water fell on him from a water tower, but he did not realize it until years afterward. A scene from Steamboat Bill Jr. required Keaton to run into the shot and stand still on a particular spot. Then, the facade of a two-story building toppled forward on top of Keaton. Keaton's character emerged unscathed, thanks to a single open window which passed directly over him. The stunt required precision, because the prop house weighed two tons, and the window only offered a few inches of space around Keaton's body. The sequence became one of the iconic images of Keaton's career.[16]
The film critic David Thomson later described Keaton's style of comedy: "Buster plainly is a man inclined towards a belief in nothing but mathematics and absurdity ... like a number that has always been searching for the right equation. Look at his face — as beautiful but as inhuman as a butterfly — and you see that utter failure to identify sentiment."[17] Gilberto Perez describes "Keaton's genius as an actor to keep a face so nearly deadpan and yet render it, by subtle inflections, so vividly expressive of inner life. His large deep eyes are the most eloquent feature; with merely a stare he can convey a wide range of emotions, from longing to mistrust, from puzzlement to sorrow."[18] Keaton even inspired full academic study.[19]
Aside from Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), Keaton's most enduring feature-length films include Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock Jr. (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The Cameraman (1928), and The General (1927). The General, set during the American Civil War, combined physical comedy with Keaton's love of trains, including an epic locomotive chase. Employing picturesque locations, the film's storyline reenacted an actual wartime incident. Though it would come to be regarded as Keaton's proudest achievement, the film received mixed reviews at the time. It was too dramatic for some filmgoers expecting a lightweight comedy, and reviewers questioned Keaton's judgment in making a comedic film about the Civil War, even while noting it had a "few laughs".[20] The fact that the heroes of the story were from the Confederate side may have also contributed to the film's unpopularity.
It was an expensive misfire, and Keaton was never entrusted with total control over his films again. His distributor, United Artists, insisted on a production manager who monitored expenses and interfered with certain story elements. Keaton endured this treatment for two more feature films, and then exchanged his independent setup for employment at Hollywood's biggest studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Keaton's loss of independence as a filmmaker coincided with the coming of sound films (although he was interested in making the transition) and mounting personal problems, and his career in the early sound era was hurt as a result.[21]
References:
1. ^ Obituary Variety, February 2, 1966, page 63.
2. ^ a b Roger Ebert: The Films of Buster Keaton.
3. ^ Greatest Film Directors and Their Best Films.
4. ^ Orson Welles interview, from the Kino Nov 10, 2009 Blu-Ray edition of The General
5. ^ "bfi:Sight & Sound: Top ten". Retrieved November 18, 2005.
15. ^ Maltin, Leonard, The Great Movie Comedians, Bell Publishing, 1978
16. ^ "Reviews : The General/Steamboat Bill Jr". The DVD Journal. Retrieved February 17, 2010.
17. ^ Thomson, David, Have you Seen...?, Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, 2008, p. 767.
18. ^ Perez Gilberto 'The Material Ghost—On Keaton and Chaplin' 1998
19. ^ Trahair, Lisa. "The Narrative-Machine: Buster Keaton’s Cinematic Comedy, Deleuze’s Recursion Function and the Operational Aesthetic". 2004. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/33/keaton_deleuze/
20. ^ "Moving Pictures: Buster Keaton’s ‘General’ Pulls In To PFA. Category: Arts & Entertainment from The Berkeley Daily Planet - Friday November 10, 2006". Berkeleydaily.org. Retrieved February 17, 2010.
21. ^ a b "Buster-Keaton.com". Buster-Keaton.com. Retrieved February 17, 2010.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Keaton
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