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Stan Carey

If you're a fan of Buster Keaton (and if you're not, why not) or early film history, this book is such a treat

Cover of Dana Stevens's book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. It features a photo of Keaton, sitting backstage, facing away but looking at the camera in a small circular mirror, the expression on his face serious, focused, a bit melancholy. The reflection is in black and white but the rest of the photo is tinted blue. A blurb from Mark Harris says, 'This book is an exhilarating new way to view the man, his life, his art, and his genius.'
Text from the book, slightly abridged: "Looking back from an era in which genres have grown ever more clearly defined, not to say calcified, what's remarkable is how many of our current cinematic forms he worked in and helped to create. Sure, his movies are packed with gags & stunts & chases & falls. But he also made romantic comedies like the all-time classic two-reel short One Week. He made topical spoofs like Three Ages, which parodied DW Griffth's gigantic white elephant Intolerance, or The Frozen North, which sent up the sentimental western star William S Hart so skillfully that Hart, a friend of Keaton’s, held a grudge against him for years. (“You can’t spoof a bum act, only a good one,” Keaton insisted, and Hart came around.) He made a Civil War epic, The General; a boxing picture, Battling Butler; and a maritime adventure, The Navigator. He made special-effects extravaganzas, period romances, and a heartwarming father-son reconciliation story. This genre experimentation didn't spring from some desire to build his résumé or, God forbid, expand his artistic range. Right into old age he insisted that all he was out for was a laugh. The breadth of his output over those dozen or so years was the natural result of being a consummate craftsperson and a singularly gifted entertainer at a time when the new medium was at its most malleable. His curiosity and ambition grew to fit what the movies were becoming, and the form, in turn, expanded to make space for what he could do."
#books#reading#BusterKeaton
Sep 04, 2023, 04:43 PM·Public
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