![]() ![]() ![]() That’s soon subsumed with a crowd, and battling movie cameramen, rubbernecking over a visiting celebrity, who happened to be, in news footage, Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. Keaton’s archetypal nebbish-hero is first seen as an itinerant tintype photog, hawking the old novelty on the sidewalk. Oddly, the metafictional possibilities of the film’s primary setup-breaking into the nascent dog-eat-dog world of newsreel photography, that is, struggling to turn life into images in a manner that, in 1928, was newer to earthlings than the iPod-are only hesitantly explored. The Cameraman may not be a tour de force in the manner of Sherlock Jr. or The General, but take care to appreciate its variegated charms and achievements, from the proto-Jackie Chan stunts clambering aboard the outside of moving vehicles, to the subtle (and, for Keaton, rare) explorations of contemporary social-sexual mores. Keatonians will not blink at the hyperbole. Maybe we could look at it that way: Buster was sacrificed, his career as an auteur essentially over by the time he was thirty-three, destined to play out the remainder of his decades in Hollywood as a grumpy ghost of the Way It Once Was, for the simple sake of a clutch of the most daring and graceful silent comedies ever made. John, and his first handful of solo shorts), Keaton masterminded eleven elaborate features and a dozen or so shorts, each of them still a gift to us in any time of great need. In any event, The Cameraman caps a small wedge of cinematic legacy we should always be thankful for: in a breathtaking five-year period (1923–1928, following his two-reeler apprentice stint with Fatty Arbuckle and Al St. The nimbus of fate that surrounds Keaton, making him a figure that Billy Wilder absolutely had to include in the cemetery lineup of Sunset Boulevard, is inseparable from the dazzling inventiveness and precise heroism of his best films, like the wistful disappointments of adulthood that give the memories of youth their golden hue. He survived the ensuing decades by making B-movies, shorts produced by an industrial film company, taking cameo bits and even a gig as a gag writer, in 1950, for the Red Skelton redo of The Cameraman, Watch the Birdie.Īll of which can, if we let it, lend The Cameraman a sense of sadness and apprehension-how we all might wish for an ideal alternate cinema history, where Keaton had not reaped the mediocre box office that was often his fate, had not gone to MGM (“the biggest mistake of my career,” he later said), was not sacrificed to the caprices of talkies (which, however, might’ve been inevitable, given Keaton’s unique performative register), and did in fact thrive for decades, perhaps in the way Chaplin did, with infrequent but beloved passion projects that ferried his silent-clown persona into the new era.Īh, well. ![]() ![]() MGM’s head man, Irving Thalberg, liked it well enough, but the political structure of MGM, plus the coming of sound, sounded the death knell right at Keaton’s peak. You’d never know it, but The Cameraman was a bitch of a movie to make, being the first Buster Keaton made under his new contract at MGM, and the first with which he had to suffer the dumb know-nothing interference of a now-forgotten middleman producer (Lawrence Weingarten). You can read the program essay for our 2012 screening of The Cameraman here ![]()
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