Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Thoughts on Keaton
Seeing Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr tonight reminded me of several things:
(1) The movie is a skilled homage to the vaudevillian world of his parents and his youth. The pace is fast, the characters familiar, and the effects phenomenal.
(2) Sherlock Jr, along with the wider corpus of Keaton's work from the 20s, established a grammar of film comedy, whose influence is unmistakeable, even to the present day.
(3) Like all great art, Sherlock Jr is at its core about our shared experience of being human; something that, when described, can sound so simple, but in practice ends up being anything but.
(1) The movie is a skilled homage to the vaudevillian world of his parents and his youth. The pace is fast, the characters familiar, and the effects phenomenal.
(2) Sherlock Jr, along with the wider corpus of Keaton's work from the 20s, established a grammar of film comedy, whose influence is unmistakeable, even to the present day.
(3) Like all great art, Sherlock Jr is at its core about our shared experience of being human; something that, when described, can sound so simple, but in practice ends up being anything but.
