Fifty-two years ago, in a seminal work of film criticism published in Life magazine, James Agee wrote of the movies of Buster Keaton: “In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the only point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face.
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“Keaton’s face ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful, yet it was irreducibly funny; he improved matters by topping it off with a deadly horizontal hat, as flat and thin as a phonograph record. One can never forget Keaton wearing it, standing erect at the prow as his little boat is being launched. The boat goes grandly down the skids and, just as grandly, straight on to the bottom. Keaton never budges. The last you see of him, the water lifts the hat off the stoic head and it floats away.”
Agee’s tribute to the genius of Keaton was one of many rediscoveries that this great film artist has enjoyed since the end of his golden age of work in the 1920s.
A career captured
Keaton, who died in 1966, lived to enjoy some of his renaissance, watching new generations of filmgoers roar at the classic comedies of “The General,” “Sherlock Jr.,” “One Week” and “Our Hospitality.” All of his films have been preserved and issued on video (“The General,” in a beautiful laser disc edition of a few years back, looks as if it had been shot yesterday); and film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill splendidly saluted him in their three-part television documentary “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow.”
Through this month, the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute is presenting eight programs devoted to the features and shorts made by Keaton from 1920 to 1928. The series’ first program, to be screened at the Film Center, 164 N. State St., at 6:15 p.m. Thursday, contains his 1924 “Sherlock Jr.,” as good an introduction to the magic of movies as you can find. Later on, at 6:15 p.m. Friday and 4 p.m. Saturday, there is “The Cameraman,” made in 1928; and at 6 p.m. Saturday and 6:15 p.m. Sept. 13, the movie is “The General,” Keaton’s crowning work and a masterpiece of moviemaking.
In its meticulous presentation, the Film Center is showing the movies in 35 mm, all of them screened at the proper projection speed and some of them in the full-frame aperture of silent films that was later reduced to make way for the talkies’ soundtrack. Many of the shows will have live piano accompaniment by David Drazin.
Martin Rubin, associate director of programming for the Film Center, who assembled the cream of Keaton’s crop for the September series, believes that of all the silent comic actors, Keaton is the most modern. “He dates the best,” Rubin says, “perhaps because he has the most modern temperament. He’s more a creature of the 20th Century machine age than Chaplin is. He’s cool; he doesn’t have Chaplin’s Victorian sentimentality. He’s visually accomplished and sophisticated, and, of course, he’s very funny. Watch that sequence in `The Boat’ where he sinks, and you just have to laugh.”
Even in still photos, Keaton is amazingly amusing. His legs planted firmly on the ground, he straddles a tiny horse in “Our Hospitality.” Fake mustache planted and magnifying glass held in one hand, he stares intently at his book on “How to Be a Detective” in “Sherlock Jr.” Head cupped in his hand, he sits forlornly amid the wreckage of the massive locomotive that was destroyed in the great train wreck of “The General.”
These images, and more, can be found in “Buster Keaton Remembered” (Abrams; $45), a handsome volume composed by Keaton’s wife, Eleanor, and film archivist Jeffrey Vance.
Mrs. Keaton, who died in 1998 at age 80, just after she had completed her work on the book, was the guardian angel of her husband’s life. As Vance states, the book “is her final tribute to the man she adored, the artist she admired, and the legend she devoted her adult life to advancing.”
Behind the scenes
Her contribution to the book, in addition to a charming recollection of her life with Buster, comes in the many family candids and snapshots she had accumulated over the years. There are lovely photos of her and Buster at home on their ranch in Woodland Hills, Calif., and there’s even a rare picture of Buster smiling, on their wedding day.
Eleanor Norris was a dancer in her early 20s in 1940 when she married Keaton, who was then 43 and, after a bout with alcoholism, all but washed up. She saw him through those rough years of obscurity, rarely leaving his side and protecting him from harm’s way.
I was a high school kid working as an apprentice at the old Chevy Chase Theatre in Wheeling when Keaton came there in 1949 to star in a summer stock production of “Three Men on a Horse,” and I still remember Eleanor Keaton’s gentle guardianship of him. She looked after his well-being in every way, right down to putting together a couple chairs to form a bed for his nap when he was offstage during rehearsals.
When he was buried, in a famous gesture of tenderness, she placed a rosary in one pocket of his suit and a deck of cards in the other. “That way,” she said, “wherever he was going, he was ready.”