Buster Keaton, The Silent Clown
Who is Buster Keaton?
Buster Keaton real name is, Joseph Frank ‘Buster’ Keaton, and he was an American actor, comedian as well as a film director. The thing that he is best known for is the silent fils that he produced during the 1920s, these were so significant before he performed physical comedy and inventive stunts that were unfamiliar during the 1920s. He earned the nickname “The Great Stone Face” because of his deadpan facial expressions that became known as his trademark.
Buster was born into a vaudeville family, in which his father had a travelling show called the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, and they performed on stage and sold patent medicine on the side. At the age of 18 months, buster acquired the nicknames Buster after he fell down a long flight of stars without any injuries. Keaton grew up performing on the stage.
Buster Keatons works are shown in other filmmakers work beause of how influential he was, for example in the works of Wes Anderson, his acrobatic and stunts in Jackie Chan as well as his deadpan posture in Bill Murray. Buster Keaton was the ‘greatest of all the clowns’, even nearly one hundred years later there is still so much that can be taught from Buster about visual comedy. Keaton was a visual storyteller however, he never liked it when other filmmakers told their story through the title cards, he believe in the visuals to portray the information. The average total of title-cards was around 240 titles and the most he ever used was 56. He avoided title cards through theatre and pantomime, he makes it explicitly obvious of what is going on, on the screen. Buster Eaton believed that what he had to say had to be communicated to the audience in only one way, through action.
Keaton also believed that the same gesture should never be done twice and that it should be unique from the ones prior. ‘Every single fall, was an opportunity for creativity’.
Visuals gags generally work best from one particular angle, and if the angle changes then the gag changes high could mean the angle does not work as well. Buster Keaton’s style of film king also begs the question of what the rule is in this world. Buster’s world is flat and governed by one law, meaning if the camera can’t see it neither can the character. In Busters world the characters are limited to the size of the frame, so what is visible to the audience, this is effective because it allows Buster Keaton to do jokes that makes sense visually but not logically. Buster Keaton also found humour in geometry, he often placed the camera further back so you could see the shape of the joke, staging like this encourages the audience to look around the frame and create humour for themselves, some are designed to play like magic tricks.
Keaton called these magic tricks gags, ‘impossible gags’, these were some of his most inventive and surreal jokes, however, to Buster Keaton as a storyteller he found this tricky some of the time because it broke the rules of his world. When Buster began to make feature length films, he had to make the gags believable otherwise the story wouldn’t hold up. This pushed him to focus on something called the natural gag, this was the ‘joke that emerges organically from the character and the situation’. For visual comedy Buster believed that you had to keep yourself open to improvisation, he said:‘As a rule, about 50 percent you have in your mind before you start the picture, and the rest you develop as you’re making it.’
The final thing about Buster Keaton and himself as a filmmaker, and something that was also known to be his most famous rule as to never fake a gag, in his eyes there was only one way to convince the audience that what they were seeing was real and by this he would actually do it, he was so strict on this that they actually did it and if they didn’t do it in one shot the gag would be thrown out and this is one of the reasons why Buster Keaton himself is still s significant even nearly 100 years later, for not only his skill but the integrity he put into his filmmaking.