Word: keaton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That face can be seen in a remarkable Buster Keaton retrospective soon to go on a U.S. tour. In it are 21 two-reelers and ten features, many unseen for decades. The show, produced by Film Curator Raymond Rohauer, began one afternoon in 1954, when Keaton, then 59, invited Rohauer to inspect his garage in Los Angeles. "I want to put some electric trains in here," said the man who had never grown up. "You want this stuff?" The "stuff" turned out to be Keaton's masterpieces, filmed on ancient-and explosive-nitrate stock. "I begged...
...Keaton had a coat of arms, that phrase would have been his motto. His father, Vaudevillian Joe Keaton, took Buster into the family act in 1898 at the age of three as "the human mop." Pop literally swept the floor with him. The kid became a great stone pebble, and made hazard a part of his persona...
...Savoring Keaton's films, the late James Agee once wrote: "Barring only the best of Chaplin, they seem to me the most wonderful comedies ever made." The comparison is inescapable; the two geniuses dominated silent comedy. The difference in their styles was marked: Chaplin, the gothic Pagliacci, wore his art upon his sleeve. Much as he wanted laughter, he craved significance more. Keaton was too busy with sight gags to realize that he was a major surrealist...
...Keaton's career crisis was the overfamiliar chronicle of the silent-screen star undone by talkies. Alcoholism and poverty followed the decline. It was not until the '50s that he was rediscovered and merchandised in Ford commercials and films like Beach Blanket Bingo. Such travesties are happily omitted from the Rohauer restoration. Instead, there are the fabulous originals, now preserved on celluloid stock -works like The General, a Civil War comedy which could have been photographed by Mathew Brady, and the complex and hilarious Navigator, deservedly Keaton's biggest moneymaker...
This course will survey the development of the narrative film, emphasizing the relationship between film aesthetics and meaning. The films that will be shown represent a history of genre as much as of film itself (Comedies, musicals, and drama will be shown). Classics like Keaton's "The General" and Von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel" will be shown along with more esoteric films such as G. W. Pabst's "Kameradshaft" and Carl Dreyer's "Day of Wrath." Students might question the complete absence of any New Wave films whatsoever and the presence of such films as Reed's "The Third...