Keaton’s ingenious gags and stunts in his silent two-reelers and features confirm his timeless appeal as a commentator on the human condition who was drawn to the dreamlike and the all-too-real.
Read full descriptionSherlock Jr. will be Keaton’s most enduring commentary on the art of cinema. Buster plays a projectionist who dreams his way onto the screen and into a movie in which he resolves the conflicts of his own life. With The Frozen North and The Playhouse.
Buster is heir to an Appalachian estate and, along with it, a Hatfield-McCoy-type feud. Our Hospitality, an American masterpiece, at once lyric and frenetic, is a sly satire. With The High Sign.
Keaton plays a Civil War–era railroad engineer in love with both his girl and his train in this masterpiece of silent comedy. With The Goat.
A selection of silent film comedy gems placing Keaton in context with contemporary innovators Roscoe Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Bert Williams, who appear behind and in front of the camera with weird and wonderful results.
In his most self-reflexive film, Keaton plays a New York City newsreel cameraman whose love life is as jumbled as the mixed-up footage he shoots. With Cops.
One Week, The Scarecrow, and The Electric House, three two-reelers for all ages, reveal Keaton’s comic ingenuity through three houses as only he can imagine them.
Set on the Mississippi River, Steamboat Bill, Jr. seems to have a direct line to Keaton’s youth and soul in the tale of a sensitive lad trying to figure out the mettle of manhood in his overbearing dad. With The Boat.
Lipman’s fascinating kino-essay examining a 1965 collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton, “testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema” (New York Times). With the original Film by Samuel Beckett.