Tonight, I am trying blogging while screening. I'll update the page with each new note.
I'll be watching Turner Classic Movies from 10pm-4am, Eastern: The General, Our Hospitality, and Closely Watched Trains.
I am a big Buster Keaton fan. TCM has had a day of Charlie Chaplin films. They played some rare ones; Monsieur Verdoux and A King in New York are my favorites. Limelight is always a treat. I do really think Chaplin is my favorite anti-objectivist, anti-Rand filmmaker. He also subverts the bourgeois image of the flaneur and radicalizes both the wanderer and the ragpicker. He is lost in the crowd and forever heading away from the Metropolis: see Georg Simmel. Will write about these ideas later.
Buster Keaton's The General, 1927.
Was not a box office success. Huge failure. Of course, Keaton was not playing the clown anymore: he was attempting to get us to identify with him rather than playing for laughs.
WORK: the stone face, the working, the physical act of constructing the character as he moves through the space-time of the film disrupts the rhythm we might have come to expect if we were his contemporary audience. One need not identify with the man one laughs at. Like Chaplin, Keaton's clown is thoroughly modern, self-aware, cynical/fatalistic at times, knowing. the stone face for Keaton is like a mirror and an indictment--for us, his audience. Chaplin and Keaton stand out from the crowd as individuals, and as individuals they typically pay a price for their difference. And that difference is an identification with their audience. The others are always unaware of the audience and, hence, we are unaware of them.
Self-examination is Entertainment. Self-awareness is comedic.
"I don't want to see you again until you are in uniform." The ridiculous demands we make for our lovers & partners.
"Charlie's tramp was a bum with a bum's philosophy...lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a workingman, and honest.''
A famous passage from Marx & Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, comes to mind:
For example, consider Keaton's work to keep his train moving, on the tracks, on the right tracks, in the right direction as a metaphor for an individual's relationship with the market in everyday life. In other words, one's real conditions of existence. Why continue? Keaton's The General is supposedly based on a real event and he obviously wanted the film to be authentic. He had a love for trains, any machines and gadgets, really. So, my metaphor may be a stretch for the task of completing a film about an event from the Civil War as imagined by an actor; nevertheless, the plot and setting aside, Keaton's predicaments are common to almost all of his films. He is the clown with "sober senses," see his Stone Face.
Keaton makes use of the ready-at-hand...come to think of it, I really see with Keaton, Chaplin too, the makings of a director like Werner Herzog. A director who is so physically, viscerally, involved with the making of film. Herzog's films take place in the wilderness, for the most part. The General is a film set in the wilderness, the American Wilderness.
Once again see Lawrence's Spirit of Place.
On cultivation: from props to sets to story. Moving Pictures.
On the Aesthetic: Aristotle linked comedy to the ugly; Keaton links comedy to the beautiful, or the aesthetic. Chaplin did this as well. This is the mark of modernity maybe. The Actor v The Machines: Keaton's body is differentiated from the trains and the work his body accomplishes is individual, singular, free, when compared to the trains working on their tracks. This is Hegelian, possibly, since the working of the body is art for Keaton and Chaplin. And art is the expression of the Absolute Mind. Art illustrates thinking, the work of the intellect, and permits thinking to be perceived. This again has to do with AIR and all that is solid melting into AIR. When the body's work, such as Keaton's work/acting, is used to illustrate thinking, that does something to the objectivity of work and bodies working in the marketplace. Through Keaton's acting, we/viewers are encouraged to think about our relation with History, in the case of the General, as well our relationship with our everyday conditions of existence. This is also made possible by transforming everyday or mundane objects into specialized tools of/for the moment.
Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality, 1923:
One of my favorite scenes, Keaton playing with hats. On a train ride into the mountains he attempts to place his large, period hat on inside the train car. It is too tall a hat for the cramped space. He removes it and replaces it with his smaller hat that we have all come to know as part of his uniform. There is a uniformity to the actor, the artist, throughout Keaton's oeuvre: he is most comfortable in his uniform. The joke is a nice reminder that he is the artist not the character and we are again reminded of his work and his place within it and for it.
This appearance of Keaton within the narrative also serves to reflect the story's authenticity. The objects--trains, carriages, homes, guns, outfits--are all authentic and part of the time of the story. Keaton in his porkpie hat is distinguished enough from the other characters, and as other he represents a certain thinking, or coming-to-be. This coming-to-be is a modern character displaced in time--20th Century Keaton in the 19th Century--his exchanging hats, or coming out of costume and betraying himself as other is one way, negatively albeit, to be able to critically assess his situation, to be able to think, to freely think, about his situation. And Keaton's audience is encouraged to identify with him, the outsider, and become engaged more thoroughly with the tale through his difference.
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