Film Club: Limelight

I greatly enjoyed my first film club chat with Allison of Nerdvampire and was ecstatic when she picked a real blind spot in my movie watching with Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, the last of his American productions before Hoover effectively exiled him. I think I liked this conversation even more than the first, and it was a pleasure not only to see a Chaplin film I hadn't previously viewed but to discuss its charms fully with someone else. So without further ado, I present out discussion below.

Plot synopsis: A washed-up vaudevillian, Calvero (Charlie Chaplin), saves a young dancer (Claire Bloom) from committing suicide and resolves to nurse her back to health. But as Thereza recovers, Calvero only slips further into obscurity. Also features Sydney Chaplin as the charming, young, American composer Neville and Buster Keaton in a show-stopping climax with Chaplin. More somber than Chaplin's classic silents, Limelight nevertheless stands as the best transplant of the auteur's trademark sentimentality into the talkies.

Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924)

Sherlock, Jr.'s self-awareness sets into the film instantly, the intertitles that establish each character also listing the actor's name as if it were the character's name. This has the effect of player and performance, the first blur between reality and artifice. Seen today, Sherlock, Jr. looks like the first mainstream American form of surrealism, but this is less by deliberate design on Buster Keaton's part than the inevitable outcome of a film about film, the most inherently surreal artform of them all.

Some express surprise that the film was, in its time, Keaton's least-grossing feature, and its whittled length was the result of negative feedback prompting the artist to cut out chunks of footage. But the sheer strangeness of the movie, its self-reflexive, forward-thinking structure and narrative, must have alienated audiences unprepared to deal with its implications and technical prowess. The General may be Keaton's masterpiece, but it is this movie, even more unjustly ignored by initial audiences, that best proves how ahead of his time the man truly was.

Keaton Shorts: One Week, The Boat, The Paleface, Cops

"It was Keaton's notion that cutting, valuable as it was in a thousand ways, must not replace the recording function of the camera, must not create the happening. The happening must happen, be photographed intact, then be related by cutting to other happenings."

—Walter Kerr

I like to space out my Buster Keaton viewings, giving myself just enough time between films that I surprise myself with his genius with every binge. I find the whole "Chaplin vs. Keaton" debate more than a bit tedious, though obviously both are divergent yet titanic enough to warrant comparison. I will say, though, that for the undeniable mastery of the two of them, Keaton is the who, to me, best exemplifies comedy, not simply between them but in all of cinema. His cutting, camera technique, scripting, design and performance capture the flow of comedy better than I've seen anyone else do since.

The above quote gets at part of his skill at crafting movies: despite the obvious construction of the setpieces and the distancing effect of silent film pantomime when viewed through a modern prism (neither of which I intend as criticism), Keaton's movies feel so in the moment, so spontaneous, that I not only continue to marvel at his skill but feel surprise at the payoffs. Roger Ebert gets at that in his own praise of Keaton's work, saying "Another of Keaton's strategies was to avoid anticipation. Instead of showing you what was about to happen, he showed you what was happening; the surprise and the response are both unexpected, and funnier." I'm not the most devoted Keaton disciple, but I've seen some of this stuff more than once, and I almost forget what happens because Keaton does such a great job moving escalating every moment on its own terms without telephoning the next gag over the one that's currently playing.

I've been meaning to pick up Kino's Blu-Rays of The General and Steamboat Bill, Jr., and I'm ecstatic that the company is releasing his early shorts on Blu-Ray on my birthday (gift ideas, people). To get myself ready for that essential purchase, but mainly because it had simply been a while, I decided to visit (and revisit) some Keaton shorts.

Steamboat Bill, Jr.

The universally accepted wisdom dictates that Buster Keaton is the greatest of the silent comedians, but I've always preferred Chaplin, basic camera setup and all. Of the two, Chaplin is the better filmmaker, but I will side with the conventional wisdom and say that Keaton is both a better director and a better actor. A month or two ago I sat down with my first Keaton picture, his official masterpiece The General, and was too wowed to laugh. Oh, there were gags aplenty, but I found myself more drawn to the incredible skill involved than the humor. I suspect I need another viewing to fully appreciate its comic side as well as its technical aspects, but I experienced no such problem with my second Keaton picture, Steamboat Bill Jr.

The plot, as with all silent comedy, is simple: our titular protagonist takes over his father's steamboat fresh out of college. Along the way, he falls for the daughter of his father's business rival. By comparison, The General is Rashomon. Normally such a simple plot exists as a loose narrative on which to hang various gags, but Keaton surprisingly makes the story genuinely relevant.

Not to say that the gags aren't great, though. Keaton, the master of deadpan, starts off small: he hops of a train wearing a carnation so his father can pick him out of the crowd, loses the carnation, and walks up to people shoving his lapel in people's faces to get them to notice the flower that isn't there. Then, it ramps up into classic slapstick: people get punched, fall into the river, etc. But Keaton's deadpan sells everything; silent film generally features a lot of overacting by today's standards, but no duh. Without sound, of course the actors resorted to pantomime. Keaton, however, walks through his films with a look of mild puzzlement, as if he'd just fallen into this black-and-white world and convinced himself he was just in a dream.

Even though the film concerns his trials and tribulations aboard the steamboat and his romantic quest, undoubtedly the film's most memorable sequence is the destruction of the town by a cyclone. Keaton's crew designed breakaway buildings and streets, and flung him about the place on a cable as if being hurled about by the twister. The scene is certainly funny, but again I found myself more amazed at the fact that such a trick could exist in 1928.

The sequence climaxes in the most recognizable image from any of Keaton's oeuvre, a shot so endlessly parodied and referenced that by all accounts it should have lost all its power. I'm speaking of course of the moment where Keaton stops in front of a house as the wall breaks apart and falls towards him, only for him to survive as he's standing exactly where the window ends up. It's utterly brilliant even today. Just think: he had one shot to get all this right, and he had to stand exactly in the right spot. There was no CGI or fail-safe to stop the wall if it looked like it was falling wrong; a few inches off the mark and Keaton would have been pancaked. Some people will do anything for a laugh, indeed.

At its heart, it's a simple tale. Like The General, this film doesn't set out to really teach us anything, which is A-OK in my books. Granted, I already stated I prefer Chaplin and his sentimentality, but even I have to admit he crosses the lines into preaching in more than one spot in more than one movie. Keaton just wants you to have a good time, and damned if you won't. Even after 80 years, Keaton's films hold up, and that's pretty impressive. Steamboat Bill, Jr. marked a transitional point for the filmmaker: after this he went to work for MGM, put out one last accepted classic (The Cameraman) and then lost creative control of his work. Where Chaplin defied the talkies for over a decade, Keaton found himself thrust into the new medium, and he never recovered. Cherish, then, this film, for it's one of the last gasps of genius from one of the best filmmakers of all time.