![]() ![]() These conditions allowed him to make movies in his own image: his performances and his films have the same mixture of restraint and wild invention the same clean, functional elegance the same sublime understatement. Since 1920, he had lived a filmmaker’s dream, with his own independent studio, Buster Keaton Productions, dedicated crew of gag writers and technicians, and almost complete creative freedom, granted by his producer, Joseph Schenck. But The Cameraman, the first film he made at MGM, was the last time he would enjoy any real control or autonomy as an artist. Crafting these neophyte mistakes was obviously a lark for Keaton, whose actual technical mastery gave him the same seemingly effortless control over images that he had over his acrobatic body. The results are inadvertently avant-garde: double exposures, tilted angles, shots running backward. In The Cameraman, Buster rushes to a pawnshop and trades in his tintype camera for an old, beat-up, hand-cranked Pathé slinging the tripod over his shoulder and turning his cap back to front like the pros, he takes to the streets filming everything in sight. Arbuckle, who became Keaton’s mentor and best friend, said his protégé “lived in the camera.” He took to moviemaking with a single-minded passion, pouring himself into his films the way fuel becomes flame, leaving nothing behind except light. As soon as he stepped in front of the lens, his lucid movements and Swiss-watch comic timing, his astounding athleticism and the subtle expressiveness of his beautiful face, made him a natural creature of cinema. It helped that the camera adored him too. He and the movies had been born the same year, 1895, and from this first encounter he saw where his future lay he tore up a lucrative theater contract, took a job with Arbuckle’s company, and never looked back. Keaton later recalled that the first thing he wanted to do when he got to the studio was to “tear that camera to pieces.” Drawn to all things mechanical, he felt a burning need to know exactly how the film strip traveled through the machine, how the operator controlled the speed, what happened in the cutting room, how the film was assembled and projected. ![]() In 1917, he had been a twenty-one-year-old vaudeville veteran who had never set foot on a film set when comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle invited him to visit Colony Studios on East Forty-Eighth Street in New York and play a scene in the short comedy he was shooting, The Butcher Boy. In this scene, Keaton reenacts a turning point in his own life. The girl, played by the lovely Marceline Day, is a prize he dreams of winning, but the camera-like the locomotive in Keaton’s masterpiece, The General (1926), or the ocean liner in The Navigator (1924)-is his real costar, at once an ornery antagonist and an alter ego. There, with catlike curiosity, he inspects a movie camera, trying the crank and the latch of the film chamber, fingers itching to delve into the mysteries of its shutters and sprockets. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office where she works. Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. ![]()
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