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...