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outubro 29, 2004
Zagha - Buster Keaton - TLS
Buster Keaton's great stone face
Muriel Zagha
28 October 2004
BUSTER KEATON
Tempest in a flat hat
Edward McPherson
288pp. | Faber. 20. | 0 571 21612 9
Most families treasure the memory of the day when a child first smiles or takes a step. In the case of Buster Keaton’s parents, it was the day of his first pratfall, when he was eighteen months old. A bystander (who may or may not have been Harry Houdini, a family friend) watching the child’s spectacular collapse down a flight of stairs and exclaiming, “My, what a buster!”, inadvertently gave Joseph Frank Keaton his performer’s name, “buster” being show-business slang for a fall.
Edward McPherson’s informative new biography, Buster Keaton: Tempest in a flat hat, coincides with a Keaton season at the Barbican Centre and traces the progress of the “intuitive slapstick theorist” from the world of variety theatre, in which he grew up, to the sublimity of his mature Hollywood triumphs. The author’s infectious enthusiasm also succeeds in evoking the distinctive pleasure afforded by Keaton’s films. One particularly enjoyable part of McPherson’s narrative is his vivid, often hilarious evocation of Keaton’s early years, spent travelling the vaudeville circuit of the 1890s with his parents, Joe (an “eccentric dancer” famous for his high kicks) and Myra (“a 4’11”, ninety-pound whisky-drinking bull-fiddle saxophone player”). Keaton joined them on stage in a family roughhouse act entitled, somewhat worryingly, “The Little Boy Who Couldn’t Be Damaged”. The action consisted mainly of Keaton’s father picking him up by a hidden suitcase handle strapped to his back and throwing him about the stage – and occasionally at offending critics in the audience. This hands-on tuition turned Keaton into a wonderful and fearless acrobat, something he would later put to good use in his many film stunts. Moreover, by repeatedly hissing “Face! Face!” under his breath to stop Keaton from smiling when the audience laughed at his antics, Joe Keaton also helped to develop the impassive demeanour that would become his son’s trademark: the Great Stone Face.
On this subject, McPherson distances himself from other biographers and film scholars who have variously interpreted Keaton’s impassivity as the tragic mask of an abused child, a sad clown or an anguished existentialist. In fact, what you see is what you get: Keaton remained expressionless purely for comic effect. Audiences laughed hardest, Keaton noticed, if his character appeared not to react – with the exception of the odd puzzled blink – to the mishaps that befell him. Although he experienced setbacks in later life – alcoholism, the break-ups of his first two marriages – the actor never considered himself a victim of his early training. The violence of the Keatons’ vaudeville act and of later Keaton films simply made the most of its polite audiences’ enjoyment of watching “a good beaning”.
Fittingly, Keaton’s transition from stage to film-set happened under the tutelage of another vaudevillean, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, whose Comique (pronounced Cumeeky) film-making unit Keaton joined in 1917 before setting up on his own in 1920. During this period Keaton evolved his preferred method of “composition”. Shunning anything as predetermined as a script, it relied on the sketching-out of gags during collaborative sessions of comic improvisation. When inspiration eluded them, the whole crew would break off to play baseball. Keaton also worked out gags by shuffling pennies (stand-ins for people) to music on the radio, which helped set up the tempo. Indeed, much of the appeal of Keaton’s 1920s work lies in its infectious sense of pace, the fruit of practical experimentation. The number of frames per second was not standardized in the days of silent movies (this would only become necessary with the advent of soundtracks) and speed was a matter of stylistic choice. The cameraman cranked the film through the camera by hand, shifting speeds according to the action unfolding before him and, when necessary, under- or over-cranking the film to give the illusion of speeding up or slowing down. The exuberant rhythm of the comedy is perhaps best experienced when – as was the case at the Barbican – it is heightened by a live accompaniment. The semi-improvised piano scores by Neil Brand, Phil Carli, Stephen Horne and Andrew Youdell (who have each interpreted the films many times before, and who rely both on favourite musical themes and on spur-of-the-moment inspiration) add another sympathetic layer to Keaton’s aesthetics.
Keaton’s best work combines the actor’s sense of timing with his remarkable physical training to produce dreamlike anti-gravitational feats. In Steamboat Bill, Jr (1928), Keaton battles a cyclone (provided by aircraft engines), leaning against it at a 45-degree angle, crawling, sliding and jumping wildly while a town collapses around him. In a daring one-take stunt, the façade of a house falls on top of him, leaving Keaton standing in the second floor’s open window. (The front of the house, solidly built so as to fall flat and straight, swung on a hinge, giving Keaton a scant two inches’ clearance within the window frame.) In Cops (1921), Keaton escapes the hundreds of police officers chasing him by calmly putting his arm out as a car crosses the frame and being carried away by it.
American vaudeville also shaped the varied talents of Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields and the Three Stooges. What is remarkable about Keaton is how his cinematic sensibility allowed that vaudeville heritage to blossom into such technical marvels as the underwater sequence in The Navigator (1924). Clad in a deep-sea diving suit, Keaton is mending the hull of a boat when he is disturbed by a passing lobster nipping at his trouser leg. With perfectly surreal (if not quite Surrealist) presence of mind, he uses the crustacean as a pair of clippers before releasing it, and then fights a swordfish with another swordfish. The five-minute sequence, shot in the crystalline waters of Lake Tahoe, took more than a month to get right.
Most groundbreaking of all is The Playhouse (1921), which features a one-man vaudeville revue, in which up to nine Buster Keatons appear on screen at once. Keaton is the orchestra and conductor, the nine minstrels performing on stage and the members of the audience, one of whom declares, “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show”. The innovative effect was obtained by fitting the camera with a lightproof casing whose shutters could be opened one after the other. The cameraman shot through each aperture and rewound the film between takes, meticulously cranking each exposure at exactly the same speed. When projected, the end result – a splintered screen containing different exposures of Keaton – looks like a seamless single frame.
Keaton’s delight in the creative possibilities of film-making is also apparent in his flair for parody (The Three Ages is a spoof of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, and he also lampooned Theda Bara and Erich von Stroheim in The Frozen North), and especially in those works that chose film-making itself as their subject matter. When Keaton’s rookie newsreel cameraman produces his first inexpert documentary effort in The Cameraman (1928), it turns out to be a ghostly double-exposed wonderland in which battleships cruise down the streets of midtown New York. Keaton had gone further in 1924 with the astonishing film-within-the-film section of Sherlock, Junior (which became the inspiration for Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo). Keaton plays a projectionist who falls asleep in his booth and, in the ensuing dream sequence, jumps straight into the film he is screening. (In this scene, the “movie screen” is actually a raised, recessed and furnished stage, lit brightly enough to resemble a projected image in the darkened theatre: Keaton simply hops onto the stage and into the room.) His pioneering special effects are exhilarating because, unlike many of today’s spectacular digital illusions, they retain the tang of the real thing. The fluidity of the film-within-a-film in which a dreaming Keaton cuts from one setting to another (a busy street, the edge of a cliff, a jungle) in Sherlock, Junior was achieved through painstaking measurements of the actor’s exact position before each cut and the careful fades and dissolves produced by Keaton’s cameraman slowly closing or opening the camera’s aperture. The acrobatic Keaton worked without stunt doubles and often incorporated unplanned elements or indeed accidents along the way, such as a missed rooftop-to-rooftop leap in The Three Ages, which he claimed got the biggest laugh when the film was screened.
Keaton wanted to produce a vision so true it “hurt”. This is literally the case with the fight scenes in Battling Butler (1926) – which inspired the realistic style of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull – where Keaton plays an upper-class fop who passes himself off as his boxer namesake in order to impress a girl. It also reflects, more obliquely, Keaton’s keen desire for historical authenticity, in particular when recreating scenes from the American past. His copy of a primitive bicycle (the “Gentleman’s Hobby-Horse”) ridden at the start of Our Hospitality (1923), set in the antebellum South, was so precise that the Smithsonian Institution asked to have it after the film was released.
The pursuit of realism was an integral part of Keaton’s comedy from the plotless slapstick of the Comique shorts to his most famous film, The General (1926). Based on a true Civil War story (the hijacking of a passenger train in Georgia by Union spies who ended up being captured and hanged), The General casts Keaton as the engine driver whose train is stolen (and sweetheart kidnapped) and who sets off in hot pursuit aboard another engine. Although it would be hailed as a masterpiece in the 1950s, when Keaton was first “rediscovered” as an original film-maker, the film was a dismal failure at the box office of its day. Audiences were baffled by this new form of comedy, which was so much more ambitious than a mere series of physical gags. Keaton took pains to recreate the Civil War in the outdoors, using period locomotives and building sets copied from engravings of the time. He was also inventing a new genre – action comedy – where the gags were often subordinated to the geometry of the narrative in which the pursuer becomes pursued, and vice-versa, across the epic panorama of the American landscape.
“Railways”, according to Keaton, “are a great prop.” Apart from the sheer fun (very apparent in The General) of driving an engine, the truth of this statement is perhaps reflected in the many uses of trains as the vehicle of realistic representation in early cinema. The General came in the wake of the 1903 one-reeler The Great Train Robbery (advertised as “a faithful duplication of the genuine ‘hold-ups’ made famous by various outlaw bands in the Far West”). Moreover, the terrified reactions of onlookers (and later spectators) to Keaton’s most expensive stunt, the collapse of a bridge under a passing locomotive that falls into the river below, echo the reception of Louis Lumière’s short film L’Arrivée du train en gare de La Ciotat, which caused spectators to flee the auditorium in a panic in 1895.
McPherson makes a case of sorts for Keaton’s later work, but it is widely acknowledged that his golden age as a film-maker ended in the 1930s. He appeared briefly as one of Norma Desmond’s desiccated bridge partners in Sunset Boulevard (1951), but Keaton’s career, unlike like that of the fictional Desmond, was not destroyed by sound. He had a good voice and continued to make films until his death in 1966. But new technology creates new skills and one of the consequences of the arrival of the talkies was the emergence of a dramatic new use of language in film. While still making silent movies, Keaton, who once said that “a good comedy story can be written on a penny postcard”, had a friendly competition with Charlie Chaplin to see who could make the film with the fewest intertitles. But the talkies created a new genre, screwball comedy, which came with dialogue akin to verbal acrobatics, one dazzling example of which was the 1934 railway comedy Twentieth Century by Howard Hawks, starring the “fast-talking dame”, Carole Lombard. Talents other than Keaton’s were required.
Regardless of what may have been gained or lost with the advent of sound, a longer perspective appears to have increased the seductive appeal of the Great Stone Face. James Agee compared it to the expression worn by Abraham Lincoln, and it captivated Samuel Beckett, whose 1964 Film, which stars Keaton, works relentlessly towards the final appearance of his famous face. Perhaps there is also, as McPherson suggests, something about Keaton that holds the key to a freer and more imaginative way of experiencing the cinema, more akin to reading (or dreaming) than seeing – a way, too, of silently projecting ourselves, like Sherlock, Junior, onto the screen.
Publicado por maria teresa monica às outubro 29, 2004 01:04 PM