![]() If you wanted cities, deserts, the Atlantic Ocean, Persia, or the Rocky Mountains for your scenery and background, you merely took your camera to them.” On the stage, even one as immense as the New York Hippodrome stage, one could only show so much. “…the greatest thing to me about picturemaking was the way it automatically did away with the physical limitations of the theatre. #Buster keaton movieHis is an ordinary character moving through ordinary settings, who in so doing finds himself caught up in extraordinary circumstances, situations and manners of embodying space.Īs he migrated from vaudeville stage to movie set, Keaton realised the comedy itself did not need changing, though the opportunities afforded by the camera could extend the world in which the spatial interplay he had developed since childhood took place. Keaton, in contrast, can be read as an artist interested in spatial rather than social relationships. This is in part due to how the Tramp character draws attention to social relationships, inequality and the politics of place. First National Pictures, 1922.Īmong the great and early slapstick actors, Chaplin has attracted the most critical notice, not least from Adorno, Benjamin and Kracauer. ![]() “My, what a buster!”, his retriever said to Joe Keaton as he returned his son to him, and the name stuck, a suitable moniker for someone who would forge a legendary career by falling, crashing, making ‘mistakes’ and collapsing-but always recovering-over a period that straddled the shifting of mass entertainment from vaudeville to burgeoning film industry. ![]() Here was a boy, after all, who had taken his very name from a problematic interaction with domestic architecture: at six months old, he had been picked up by a family friend after tumbling to the bottom of a staircase, mercifully unscathed. It is possible his unexpected extraction from the sanctity of his bedroom sowed the seeds of Buster’s personal mistrust towards the surface solidity of the built form an understanding that, however permanent, controlled and purposeful the architecture of the home was, it was always fraught with a potential for the accidental and the absurd. He was eventually deposited a block away from home, where he was rescued by a man who took him to the shelter of a cellar. #Buster keaton crackedClambering out of bed, he went to investigate, cracked the window open, and was suddenly sucked out of his room by a cyclone. The brick came hurtling back at him-without the peach-, splitting his head open.įor the second time that day, the doctor was brought in to stitch him up, and Buster was sent back to sleep until he was awoken, yet again-as if through fairytale logic-by a swirling noise banging against the window. Catching sight of a beguiling peach up in a tree, he decided the best means to bring it within reach would be by throwing a brick at it. He returned to bed, crying, and after waking up a second time, he pottered back into the yard. It did, as advertised, draw moisture, though in his case it was in a flood of tears that failed to resolve until after the doctor had to rush in to amputate his finger from the last joint. ![]() Curious at the rotating machinery of a mangle as it squeezed water out of his family’s clothes, he wandered from his Kansas boardinghouse room and stuck a finger in, to see what happened. It wasn’t a great day for the three-year-old Buster. ![]()
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