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 mo...

The Boat has all the resilience, pig-headedness, and strangeness of the best Keaton films. It ends perfectly; but if it were to go on one has no doubt that this extraordinary family (wife and children behave like extensions of Keaton himself) would next be found setting up some ultra-ingenious desert island shack. The survival power of the Keaton character is never seriously in question. But the element of melancholy … still bites. Keaton's humour is seldom destructive except at his own expens...

Keaton has never been forgotten, but he has been comparatively neglected. That comparison is, obviously, with Chaplin. Now some points seem clear. As performer, Keaton is certainly Chaplin's equal. As director, he is Chaplin's superior, more flexible in his camera movement, more sensitive to pictorial quality as such. As producer of whole, organic works, he is not quite as good as Chaplin. As manager of his career, he is not remotely in Chaplin's league. Chaplin had great business and p...

One of Buster Keaton's inimitable images is worth a thousand words of explicatory prose…. This kind of hyperbolic heraldry gets me into trouble with people like Walter Kerr, who chides me … for describing Buster Keaton as "cerebral." I stand by my opinions, however, as I would much prefer to have people see Keaton's movies than sob over his memory…. But if any group can be credited with saving Keaton, it is that body of European intellectuals and academics wh...

Where the goals in Chaplin's films are social, physical, and explicit, those in Keaton's are metaphysical and implicit. Chaplin's art is rooted in a period which could believe in social solutions, while, for Keaton, there are no solutions—or rather, the solutions, like the problems, lie somewhere just outside the frameline, somewhere beyond the film's conclusion. His films, unlike Chaplin's, end happily, his ambitions and those of his girl meeting finally at one poi...

Keaton's character in "Sherlock Jr." is very much Buster's. Sherlock is cultivated, well dressed, virtuous, and fortunate. He is the forerunner of the well-heeled central figure of "Battling Butler" (1926), of the posh college son of the old captain in "Steamboat Bill, Jr." (1928), and, most of all, of Rollo Treadway, the augustly decorous hero of "The Navigator" (1924, but later than "Sherlock Jr."). In the beginning of his...

Keaton at his best as in The General, College, and the first two reels of Spite Marriage, has real merit. His humour is dry, exceptionally well constructed and almost entirely mechanical in execution. He has set himself the task of an assumed personality, which succeeds in becoming comic by its very sameness. He relies, also, on the old method of repetition, which when enhanced by his own inscrutable individuality becomes incredibly funny. His comedies show an extensive knowledge of the contrast of shapes a...