antipopper

Lena and I felt a bit ill last night, and couldn’t sleep, so we decided to watch a Buster Keaton video I bought at a $2 shop over Christmas. The man walks on water! I hadn’t seen any of Keaton’s stuff for ages (a few years ago we saw Our Hospitality with a live bluegrass accompaniment — unbelievably good), and I had my mouth open the whole time. (Lena sometimes has to reach over and physically close my jaw when I watch movies.)

We saw Sherlock Jr, which has the most incredible movie-within-a-movie sequence, which gets carried away with itself and runs for half the film! Keaton plays a movie projectionist, wrongly accused of pickpocketing his beloved’s father. Dejected, he falls asleep on the job, into an astral-travelling state. He walks up the aisle of the cinema, towards the screen, onto which is projected a quickly intercut sequence from the movie he’s been projecting. In the middle of that sequence, which in the wider shot is continually framed by the “real” cinema location, he jumps into the on-screen world. If that weren’t enough, he’s unprepared for the shot-to-shot cuts. {Bang}, he’s in the middle of a busy street. {Bang}, he’s in a garden. All seamlessly done, with his position tracked accurately. Each shot gets successively heterotopic, too — a forest, the ocean — and felt like the meditative, “aspect to aspect” panel cuts in manga that Scott McCloud studies in Understanding Comics).

Watching this work of intense playfulness, I realised that the usual, bankrupt, highbrow dismissals of “contemporary” Hollywood blockbusters — that movies have recently become a thin excuse for action setpieces and showcases for visual effects — could all be appallingly applied to Keaton’s work in the 1920s, which really is about setpieces and effects, rather than character development and coherent plot. The thing is that Keaton’s work, like a lot of excellent contemporary Hollywood blockbusters — lives through those “superficial” things to brilliant effect. Which is what a lot of the experience of film should be about. Then I realised that Lena was alseep.