Camera Man: Buster Keaton

December 4–21, 2022

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.

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Sherlock Jr.
Our Hospitality
Good Night, Nurse!
The General
The Cameraman
Notfilm

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Sherlock Jr.
Buster Keaton
United States, 1924
Sunday, December 4 5 PM
Wayne Barker on Piano
Sherlock 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.
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Our Hospitality
Jack Blystone, Buster Keaton
United States, 1923
Friday, December 9 7 PM
Judith Rosenberg on Piano
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.
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The General
Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton
United States, 1927
Sunday, December 11 5 PM
Judith Rosenberg on Piano
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.
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Keaton in Context: Silent Comedies by and with Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle, and Bert Williams
Wednesday, December 14 7 PM
Introduced by Dana Stevens; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
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.
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The Cameraman
Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton
United States, 1928
Friday, December 16 7 PM
Introduced by Dana Stevens; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
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.
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Family Matinee: Buster Keaton’s Marvelous Houses
Sunday, December 18 3 PM
Introduced by Dana Stevens
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.
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Steamboat Bill, Jr.
Charles F. Reisner
United States, 1927
Sunday, December 18 5 PM
Introduced by Dana Stevens with book signing to follow the screening; Judith Rosenberg on Piano
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.
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Notfilm
Ross Lipman
United States, 2015
Wednesday, December 21 7 PM
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.
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Camera Man: Buster Keaton

December 4–21, 2022

“Those who care for Keaton cannot care mildly.” —James Agee

“There are many ways and many reasons to care for Keaton—first, foremost, and forever, those sublime Buster Bits (as William Nestrick calls them), the ingenious gags and stunts that keep us laughing through our awe. Absurdity reigns in Keaton’s two-reelers, which, apart from being marvelously entertaining in themselves, were fertile experimental ground for gags, stunts, and techniques that show up in pristine form in the features that Keaton variously directed and produced. In all, he is the actor as auteur.” Judy Bloch wrote these words for our 1995 Keaton retrospective. Almost thirty years later, we present a selection of Keaton’s films to mark the publication of Dana Stevens’s Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. In her innovative, illuminating “zigzag biography,” she places this man “from Nowhere,” born in 1895, the year of the first film screening, in the context of the time in which filmmaking was being invented and roles were fluid. Keaton’s life in vaudeville and silent film through the years of early television is detailed, interspersed with portraits of other early shapeshifters of the medium: Roscoe Arbuckle and his Comique Studios, Mabel Normand as an early woman director, and Bert Williams, who helped integrate both the Broadway stage and film screen, sometimes performing in blackface (as did Keaton). Their films are featured in our program Keaton in Context. “As a commentator on the human condition, drawn to the dreamlike in the all-too-real,” Bloch concluded, “Keaton is timeless as well. His character is the perennial outsider who tries to enter the world of white male privilege on its terms, and winds up slipping through the cracks (and thereby the door) on his own.”

We are delighted that Dana Stevens—author, Slate’s film critic, and cohost of its weekly cultural podcast—will join us for four film screenings. Her book will be on sale in our bookstore, and we will host a book signing on Sunday, December 18, after the 5:00 screening of Steamboat Bill, Jr.

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Film Series Sponsors: Rod Brown and Peter Washburn

Curated by Kathy Geritz, with thanks to Dana Stevens. Cosponsored by San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

With special thanks to Tim Lanza, Cohen Film Collection; Maria Chiba, Lobster Films; and Katie Trainor, MoMA Department of Film, Loans.