THE REDISCOVERY OF BUSTER KEATON
After the great age of silent comedy ended, Charles Chaplin remained the most revered of the era’s clowns. Although he controlled the rights to most of his features and refused to circulate them, most of his dozens of short comedies were commonly available. By contrast, few of the films of Buster Keaton circulated. As a result, a great deal was written about Chaplin, and he was generally ranked as much better than Keaton or Harold Lloyd.
The balance shifted dramatically in the mid-1960s, when Keaton films began to surface. Distributor Raymond Rohauer made new prints of most of Keaton’s silent work. These were shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1965, where Keaton appeared to tremendous applause. That same year the British Film Institute presented him with a special award. Interviews and retrospectives followed. Keaton lived just long enough to enjoy this acclaim. He died in 1966, shortly before the publication of Rudi Blesh’s biography, Keaton (New York: Macmillan, 1966). Blesh documented the decline in Keaton’s career during the 1930s and helped revive interest in his early work.
Critics and historians recognized that Keaton had been a major director as well as a brilliant performer. His ability to arrange complex gags all within a single long-shot framing, his compositions in depth, his careful use of motifs, and the balanced structure of his scenarios all received attention.
For a description of Keaton’s appearance at Venice and an interview with him, see John Gillett and James Blue, “Keaton at Venice,” Sight & Sound 35, no. 1 (winter 1965/1966): 26-30. Studies of Keaton done in the wake of this revival include J.-P. Lebel’s Buster Keaton (New York: Barnes, 1967) and David Robinson’s Buster Keaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). Further information and sources can be found in Joanna E. Rapf and Gary L. Green, Buster Keaton: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995).
REFERENCES
1. Advertisement, Paramount Pictures, Photoplay 19, no. 4 (March 1921): 4.
2. From the New York Times, quoted in Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), p. 174.
FURTHER READING
Bernstein, Matthew, with Dana R White. “‘Scratching Around’ in a ‘Fit of Insanity’: The Norman Film Manufacturing Company and the Race Film Business in the 1920s.” Grif{ithiana 62/63 (May 1998): 81-127.
Bowser, Pearl, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, Oscar Micheaux & His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Bowser, Pearl, and Louise Spence. Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Canemaker, John. Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World’s Most Famous Cat. New York: Pantheon, 1991.
“Frank Borzage: Hollywood’s Lucky Star.” Entire issue of Griffithiana 46 (December 1992).
Koszarski, Richard. An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928. New York: Scribners, 1990.
____. Von: The Life and Times of Erich von Stroheim.
New York: Limelight, 2001.
O’Leary, Liam. Rex Ingram: Master of the Silent Cinema. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980. Reprint, London: British Film Institute, 1994.
Reilly, Adam. Harold Lloyd: The King of Daredevil Comedy. New York: Collier, 1977.
World History
