The Great Buster. (PG.)
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich.
RELEASE POSTPONED
Featuring Buster Keaton, Dick Van Dyck, Mel Brooks, Quentin Tarantino, Bill Hader and Johnny Knoxville and narration by Peter Bogdanovich. 101 mins.
Q&A previews (Picturehouse Central on Weds 11th March with Paul Merton + David Macleod and DocHouse on Weds 18th March with David Macleod and Phil Concannon.) Opening for a run at the DocHouse cinema on March 20th and then rolling out to further sites throughout April and May.
This is A Celebration made by the man who used to be the future of cinema, of the man whose work was, is and will always be one of the benchmarks of moviemaking. Back in the early 70s, after Targets and The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich was up there with Coppola and Scorsese in the race for greatness but his reputation quickly fell away when it became clear that all he had to offer was the past. He was so enthralled by the silver screen and its history that he felt compelled to repeat it and 70s audiences soon stopped going to his rehashes of John Ford and Howard Hawks. Still, he's clung on in there and now he's turned out a very fine documentary about the greatest of silent movies stars. Perhaps this is the film he was born to make.
The great thing about making a film on Buster Keaton is that there is no weaselling or twisting required. Most portraits of successful people work hard to assure audiences that their subjects were remarkable individuals whose achievements were an inevitable result of their specialness. In this culture, we are constantly being pushed the delusion that success is always deserved rather than being the result of dumb luck and timing. Anybody skirting the peripheries of fame will be written up as exceptional in some way by the hapless reporter.
Buster though was a genuinely remarkable man. If he'd been running a small, dictatorial pariah state reliant on a cult of a personality for survival, there would have been no need to make up stories about him hitting eleven holes-in-one the first time he played a round of golf, controlling the weather with his mood or memorizing the phone numbers of everybody in the country; he could just show the masses footage of him grabbing onto a passing car at full speed or breaking his neck without realising it and carrying on with the stunt and guarantee their subservience. He was as tough as old boots, seemingly indestructible and good at everything; except drinking alcohol and getting married, though eventually he even got the hang of those two.
Joseph Frank Keaton was miraculous almost straight from the womb, joining the family vaudeville act before he was one year old, supposedly being given the name Buster by Houdini and becoming a star long before puberty. Bogdanovich splits his film into two sections. The last third is devoted to an appreciation of the ten classic feature films Keaton made in the twenties. Before that the first two-thirds of the film is a straightforward biography and probably the most interesting stuff is his life before and after the twenties.
The Three Keatons family vaudeville act sounds like a ferocious thing, so violent it often nearly saw his father being arrested for child abuse. We all know that there is going to be a tragic part to the story, the moment when sound comes in and he suffers a dramatic and almost instantaneous fall from fame thanks to a combination of heavy drinking, a failing marriage and his business partner, the magnificently named Joe Skank, persuading him to sign up with the joyless beancounters at MGM.
What was new to me though was how much work he did in the sound era. From the clips we see here he looked like if he'd been a little luckier he could've adapted well to sound. His speaking voice sounds fine, certainly better than Chaplin's.
As is the norm, a chorus of the great and good are on hand to offer their views and their more welcome and insightful than is usually the case. Mel Brooks reflects on how the man who was called the Great Stoneface was actually pretty expressive. Tarantino marks out Keaton as one of the first action hero, a fearless man always taking on people twice his size.
The best parts though are, of course, the clips of the man himself. He made up the gags that made the whole world reel and people have been recycling them ever since. Apart from the scratches on the celluloid, Buster's work is timeless.
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich.
RELEASE POSTPONED
Featuring Buster Keaton, Dick Van Dyck, Mel Brooks, Quentin Tarantino, Bill Hader and Johnny Knoxville and narration by Peter Bogdanovich. 101 mins.
Q&A previews (Picturehouse Central on Weds 11th March with Paul Merton + David Macleod and DocHouse on Weds 18th March with David Macleod and Phil Concannon.) Opening for a run at the DocHouse cinema on March 20th and then rolling out to further sites throughout April and May.
This is A Celebration made by the man who used to be the future of cinema, of the man whose work was, is and will always be one of the benchmarks of moviemaking. Back in the early 70s, after Targets and The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich was up there with Coppola and Scorsese in the race for greatness but his reputation quickly fell away when it became clear that all he had to offer was the past. He was so enthralled by the silver screen and its history that he felt compelled to repeat it and 70s audiences soon stopped going to his rehashes of John Ford and Howard Hawks. Still, he's clung on in there and now he's turned out a very fine documentary about the greatest of silent movies stars. Perhaps this is the film he was born to make.
The great thing about making a film on Buster Keaton is that there is no weaselling or twisting required. Most portraits of successful people work hard to assure audiences that their subjects were remarkable individuals whose achievements were an inevitable result of their specialness. In this culture, we are constantly being pushed the delusion that success is always deserved rather than being the result of dumb luck and timing. Anybody skirting the peripheries of fame will be written up as exceptional in some way by the hapless reporter.
Buster though was a genuinely remarkable man. If he'd been running a small, dictatorial pariah state reliant on a cult of a personality for survival, there would have been no need to make up stories about him hitting eleven holes-in-one the first time he played a round of golf, controlling the weather with his mood or memorizing the phone numbers of everybody in the country; he could just show the masses footage of him grabbing onto a passing car at full speed or breaking his neck without realising it and carrying on with the stunt and guarantee their subservience. He was as tough as old boots, seemingly indestructible and good at everything; except drinking alcohol and getting married, though eventually he even got the hang of those two.
Joseph Frank Keaton was miraculous almost straight from the womb, joining the family vaudeville act before he was one year old, supposedly being given the name Buster by Houdini and becoming a star long before puberty. Bogdanovich splits his film into two sections. The last third is devoted to an appreciation of the ten classic feature films Keaton made in the twenties. Before that the first two-thirds of the film is a straightforward biography and probably the most interesting stuff is his life before and after the twenties.
The Three Keatons family vaudeville act sounds like a ferocious thing, so violent it often nearly saw his father being arrested for child abuse. We all know that there is going to be a tragic part to the story, the moment when sound comes in and he suffers a dramatic and almost instantaneous fall from fame thanks to a combination of heavy drinking, a failing marriage and his business partner, the magnificently named Joe Skank, persuading him to sign up with the joyless beancounters at MGM.
What was new to me though was how much work he did in the sound era. From the clips we see here he looked like if he'd been a little luckier he could've adapted well to sound. His speaking voice sounds fine, certainly better than Chaplin's.
As is the norm, a chorus of the great and good are on hand to offer their views and their more welcome and insightful than is usually the case. Mel Brooks reflects on how the man who was called the Great Stoneface was actually pretty expressive. Tarantino marks out Keaton as one of the first action hero, a fearless man always taking on people twice his size.
The best parts though are, of course, the clips of the man himself. He made up the gags that made the whole world reel and people have been recycling them ever since. Apart from the scratches on the celluloid, Buster's work is timeless.
