With the exception of The General, he never worked with a completed script. Keaton loved the comedy of action and the ability of the camera to fool the eye. (1928) when a wall falls down on him, but he’s saved by standing on the perfect spot to pass through the attic window. To this day, Keaton’s shots are among the most imitated, like the house collapse in Steamboat Bill, Jr. It’s a joke that requires hardly any technical trickery it works because he knew where to put the camera. ![]() We are then left with Buster, his body encased helplessly in rubber next to the curb. Once the car drives away, however, we see that the spare tire is not, in fact, attached rather, it’s part of a display for a tire store. In his short film The Goat (1921), for instance, Keaton tries to escape from the police by hiding in a spare tire attached to the back of a car. His gags worked not only because of his physical courage and prowess-he did his own stunts, often in one take-but because of his ingenuity with the camera. At the dawn of the medium, Keaton figured out visual storytelling like none other. During that decade, he churned out 10 silent feature films-including his most famous, The General-and a collection of shorts that created the grammar of cinema. The vaudeville child star turned filmmaker had a run in the 1920s that makes him, as Roger Ebert once declared, arguably the greatest actor-director in the history of movies. His life’s greatest tragedy was that, once he gave up that freedom, he could never get it back. In fact, in the history of motion pictures, there might be only one other filmmaker who could make films of such consequence and majesty with complete creative control: Buster Keaton. Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the 2oth Century
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