Buster Keaton wrote, starred in, and directed movies when the movies were still in awe of themselves and their very gift for movement. Keaton's kinesis happened also to coincide with the crisis of mimesis in other narrative forms, the growing doubt about story's responsibility toward that "real" world which cinema had so recently learned to simulate and resee. The art of duplication had turned dubious. In the process it had also turned in on itself to discover why. Perhaps the most analytically disposed of all the silent film-makers outside the Russian school, certainly among American directors, Buster Keaton was quick to avail himself of film's position at the fountainhead of modernism. As the period's greatest exegete, Hugh Kenner, points out, the epoch of literary modernism was still in the process of arriving when film emerged as a narrative art, and movies could therefore readily indulge themselves in modernism's reflexive vantage: "Keaton's great creative period was 1921–1927, the age of Ulysses and 'The Hollow Men.' In being his own subject he was equally Joyce's and Eliot's contemporary." Indeed, some of Keaton's finest films "might almost be subtitled portraits of the artist as a young man, with a complexity of symbolic displacement hardly to be matched by the auto-inspection of earlier craftsmen." These movies are also portraits of their art form as a young medium. Near in time to the genesis of their form, Keaton's films frequently convert that proximity into subject by foregrounding in the narrative a fascination with their own origins, wittily intent to differentiate the screen image from its predecessors in drama, plastic art, still photography, even mirror reflection. This explains the critical truism that Keaton is a "film-maker's film-maker," his a "pure cinema"; yet while obsessing over their own formal properties, Keaton's films are often guided by self-interrogation toward a larger question about the relation of art to technology, dream to machine. (pp. 348-49)
[Cinematic self-definition is] richly explicit and extensive in Keaton's minor masterpiece of 1924, Sherlock Jr. … When its hero jumps before our incredulous eyes through a two-dimensional nickelodeon screen into the inner sanctum of cinematic space, we are spectacularly taken aback by Keaton's epistemological modernity and critical wit. In a single leap of reflexive faith, his film enters upon, and its hero with it, an inquest into its own constitution and—because it is all a dream—into the vexed connection between cinematic art and the unconscious. (p. 349)
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