On the Shelf
Buster Keaton Books
Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life
By James Curtis
Knopf: 832 pages, $40
Digicam Man: Buster Keaton, the Daybreak of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century
By Dana Stevens
Atria: 432 web page, $30
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Woe betide the creator who, whether or not by design or coincidence, should compete with one other when their two books cowl the identical topic on roughly the identical publication date. The inevitable double critiques may be catnip for critics, however they will drive a zero-sum recreation for the authors: Two books enter, one survives. Thankfully, relating to Buster Keaton, the topic of two compelling and complementary new books, there’s lots to go round.
The epigraph to Dana Stevens’ new guide, “Digicam Man: Buster Keaton, the Daybreak of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century,” is a title card from Keaton’s 1921 two-reel movie “The Excessive Signal”: “Our hero got here from Nowhere — he wasn’t going Wherever and received kicked off Someplace.” It’s a usually self-effacing little bit of Keaton lore. Though it appeared like Keaton entered cinema absolutely shaped, he perfected his craft and his sturdiness in a preferred household vaudeville act over a number of years. As for going nowhere, he would quickly change into a lauded silent comic; right this moment, he's extensively thought-about the best of all of them.
Along with Stevens’ incisive work of cultural criticism, there's James Curtis’ “Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life,” an 832-page biography that leaves no stone unturned. The 2 books work effectively collectively — one a close-up of Keaton as avatar of modernity, the opposite a hefty and authoritative crane shot. That bookshelves have room for each speaks to Keaton’s enduring recognition.
“I’ve not encountered, in print and even in individual, anyone who's concerned within the discipline of comedy that doesn’t have reverence for Buster Keaton,” Curtis says in a cellphone name.
Each books inform the story of a kid prodigy who realized to take a licking as a part of the household act. Keaton’s father, Joe, would toss the child across the stage like a bowling ball. By the point Buster launched into his personal unbiased movie profession, in 1920, he was able to good the death-defying stunts and the underdog persona that made him a 5-foot-5 large of ‘20s movie. Footage like “Steamboat Invoice, Jr.” (1928), by which the falling facade of a home famously comes inside inches of crushing Keaton, stay thrilling to this present day. (You possibly can watch the entire movie on YouTube.)
However his triumph didn’t outlast the last decade. The daybreak of sound and an ill-advised, restrictive contract with MGM mixed to clip his inventive wings. Subsequent a long time had the occasional spotlight, like his efficiency as one in all Norma Desmond’s bridge-playing “waxworks” in 1950’s “Sundown Blvd.,” however his presents by no means actually gained traction within the post-silent world.
To Stevens, the film critic at Slate, Keaton — together with his stone face, porkpie hat and calm acrobatics — was the final word twentieth century man. She begins by trying again to 1895, the 12 months Keaton was born, and spotlighting parallel figures and occasions: Freud’s inspiration to investigate goals, Oscar Wilde’s conviction for “gross indecency,” Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech.
As Stevens writes, “It was as if the 20 th century, already in love with motion, change, and pace, had been reaching again 5 years in time to yank the final half-decade of the comparatively pokey nineteenth forward with it.”
Stevens realizes she may appear to be doing the identical — reaching again a century to yank Keaton into modern tradition. “It was 100 years in the past they usually’re black-and-white silent motion pictures, and we watch them now as artifacts from the previous,” she says by cellphone. “My argument is that he was born forward of his time and he remained forward of his time.”
Stevens sees one thing each well timed and timeless in among the tensions that run via Keaton’s work. There’s the connection between people and know-how he explores in movies equivalent to “The Normal,” “The Navigator” and “The Boat.” There’s the battle between particular person freedom and the calls for of society in “Seven Possibilities” and “Cops.” “He was a modernist,” Stevens says, “like Virginia Woolf or the Surrealists or [Russian experimental filmmaker] Dziga Vertov, in that he was all the time reinventing the medium he labored in.”
Curtis has written biographies of W.C. Fields, Spencer Tracy and Preston Sturges, amongst others. However his connection to Keaton began when he was a child, watching reruns of “The Buster Keaton Present” within the early ’60s on Saturday morning tv. Keaton was on TV lots again then, with visitor spots on “You Requested for It,” “The Eddie Cantor Comedy Theater,” “The Twilight Zone” and different applications. “God is aware of the TV collection wasn’t reflective of his finest work in any respect,” Curtis says. “It was solely later I really received to see his actually great things. After which I used to be actually smitten. The truth that he by no means smiled actually appealed to me.”
For Curtis, what set Keaton other than the opposite silent comedy greats — Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd — had been his instincts as a director.
“Buster noticed the entire body, and he noticed the entire level of the body,” Curtis says. “He additionally knew instinctively that with the movement image digicam, you possibly can do issues that you simply couldn’t do onstage. You possibly can take the digicam wherever and shoot something you need with it. He was well-traveled sufficient and insightful sufficient to know that was a giant deal. And I feel that knowledgeable a whole lot of what he did.”
Each authors warning towards studying an excessive amount of into the bang-bang timing of their books’ launch dates (Stevens lands on cabinets Jan. 25, Curtis on Feb. 15). Each books had been alleged to publish in 2020, however the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them again. There’s no grand confluence that made early 2022 the season of Keaton. “I don’t wish to put the 2 books into competitors with one another in a false means or encroach on the turf of somebody who’s doing archival work like he’s doing,” Stevens says. “I’m not attempting to interrupt new tales about Buster Keaton. I’m attempting to interpret.”
In different phrases, you don’t have to decide on. It's the season of Keaton, and never for any explicit cause however as a result of it’s all the time the appropriate time to revisit an artist who — although sidelined by a altering world — made that world the topic of labor that will by no means exit of favor.
Vognar is a contract author primarily based in Houston.
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