Dana Stevens - Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

Camera Man

Dana Stevens

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Copyright 2022 by Dana Stevens

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First Atria Books hardcover edition January 2022

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Jacket design by James Iacobelli

Jacket photograph by George Hurrell

Author photograph by Sylvie Rosokoff

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stevens, Dana (Film critic), author.

Title: Camera man : Buster Keaton, the dawn of cinema, and the invention of the Twentieth Century / Dana Stevens.

Description: First Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Atria Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021045585 | ISBN 9781501134197 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501134203 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501134210 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Keaton, Buster, 18951966. | Motion picture actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography. | Motion picture producers and directorsUnited StatesBiography. | Silent filmsUnited StatesHistory and criticism. | Motion picture industryCaliforniaLos AngelesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC PN2287.K4 S74 2022 | DDC 791.4302/8092 [B]dc23/eng/20211115

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021045585

ISBN 978-1-5011-3419-7

ISBN 978-1-5011-3421-0 (ebook)

For my paternal grandfather, David Walter Stevens, who, like Buster, was born in 1895, and my maternal grandmother, Shyrle Frances Hacker, who was a chorus dancer with the Fanchon and Marco traveling dance troupe in the early 1930s. The history in this book is their history, too.

I first fell for Buster Keaton twenty-five years ago, when he had just turned one hundred. It was the spring of 1996, and I was spending the year studying at the University of Strasbourg, close to the French-German border in Alsace. Nineteen ninety-five had marked the centenary of Keatons birth, and in his honor the local cinmathque, a little state-subsidized gem of a theater called the Odysse, programmed an extended festival of his silent classics. The Odysse was a block away from my dark basement apartment, and the student discountagain courtesy of the governments largessewas steep, with the result that I went back to see every film multiple times.

My first sustained encounter with the character the French call Malecthe rubber-bodied, poker-faced cipher in a flat felt hat whom Keaton plays in nearly all his independently produced silentsmarked a decisive rupture in my inner life. Who was this solemn, beautiful, perpetually airborne man? From what alternate universe, seemingly possessed of its own post-Newtonian laws of physics, had he been flung? How did he pull off such boggling feats of acrobatic prowess and comic invention, and what became of him after he sailed out of the frame? How could anyone be at once so physically agile, so right-on in his directorial instincts, and so timelessly funny?

The Odysse had a small but excellent film library where I started spending hours a day in an attempt to learn everything I could about this gravity-defying figure. But as riveting as Keatons life story proved to be, no degree of knowledge about it could adequately account for the mystery on display in his work. It was a maddening and seductive paradox: the more I learned about Buster Keaton, the less I understood him. When I got back to the States that summer, I continued to shortchange my dissertation by expanding my research into the period when he lived and worked, an extraordinary span of American history that stretched from the second administration of Grover Cleveland to the first and only full one of Lyndon Baines Johnson, from the year my oldest grandparent was born to the year I was.

I did, eventually, finish the dissertation and earn my degree. But over the next two and a half decades, after I left the academic job path to become a TV and then a film critic at Slate, I would periodically duck down some avenue or other of Keaton-related research. Thinking about him in the context of his time became, in a sense, my hobby; whenever I heard about something that took place between 1895 and 1966, I found myself trying to fit that event or phenomenon into the puzzle of his life and work. Keatons birth and death were separated by a stretch of just seventy years, but in those years the country and the world had been profoundly reshaped by a technology born the same year he was: film. More and more I became convinced that to understand his life was to understand the history of that mediums first century.

That early phase of Keaton infatuation may have peaked one day not long after my return to the US, when, after a burger apiece and a few glasses of wine, a good friend and I decided we should each take out our notebooks and try to write a poem. Not as a competition but just because there are friends with whom drafting a poem while you polish off a bottle feels like the right thing to do. Of course my poem was about Buster, or rather it was addressed to him. It leapt from my brain to the page in as close to final form as anything Ive ever written, and it went like this:

Ever wester

ever faster

Buster, hasten

your disaster.

Scale the mast and list to keening.

Buster, listen: Are you dreaming?

Are you falling? Are you flying?

Buster, cinema

is dying.

Film is falling,

time a twister,

sound unfurling

her noreaster.

Not a whisper.

Never laughter.

Buster, thank you

for disaster.

I know were supposed to wryly disclaim our own juvenilia, but I was far from juvenile by the time this poem was written, and I stand by those fifty words. In fact, though they were written twenty years before I started writing this book, they already contain the germ of its central idea, one that has stayed with me for decades: the image of Keaton as a human projectile hurled into the twentieth century. In order to follow the trajectory of his flight, we need to start with the year he was born.

Still from LArroseur Arros (The Sprinkler Sprinkled)