75. Artist: Robert Beavers film and Buster Keaton biographies, reviewed by Cheryl S.
Mme Beach has come and gone from our States, but as usual she has left behind lovely things for Sandy and myself, gift books which we have devoured, implied suggestions for new ballets, and that lingering foreign fragrance which she leaves in her wake when she departs, whether for the West Coast, China, or Paris. Sandy and I saw her only briefly on Skype since she was busy with real estate matters in New Jersey, but she sent Sandy two new biographies of Buster Keaton, and to me she Amazoned a novel by Brigid Brophy (The Snow Ball) and a beautiful volume of costume and fashion designs by Adrian, famous for his creations for the glamorous MGM movie stars. So, of course, I grabbed the Keaton bios, and Sandy couldn’t wait to settle down with the Adrian tome (predictably), so perverse and inconsistent we must appear to others. But Sandy understands me, and I know him, or at least I like to think so. We’ve been trading books and videos through the Covid years at the Tower, and our tastes have formed themselves in tandem, which is something of a mystery in itself.
I have to guess at Mme Beach’s motive for pairing the designer and the novelist for me – I have now finished studying both volumes – but perhaps she had in mind a rococo ballet, something frou-frou (yet substantive!) for her French ballet company Le Swing. My problem is that the Brophy Snow Ball concerns the dilemmas of a woman entering middle age, and I’m not sure I’m the one to deal with such a fraught topic, at least not yet. And how to come up with a dance equivalent of Adrian’s MGM creations? An Adrian costume fantasy is so thoroughly comestible. But then look at this description of decorative cherubs from the Brophy novel: “In fresco, the babies had the sugariness of meringues, their bottoms whipped but only as white of egg was whipped and left, standing up stiff, in a spiraled dollop. They represented a confectioner’s notion of a sea urchin.” I enjoyed Brophy’s fiction thoroughly, but how to make it dance? I also admire some of Adrian’s costumes – especially those pants and boots worn by Garbo in the 1933 Queen Christina -- but does that mean I’m committing to trouser roles in a future ballet for the Parisians?
Sandy says that Vincente Minnelli must have regarded Adrian as a waking fever dream! My friend especially loved Queen Garbo’s parting comment to Adrian when her man left MGM after years of their collaboration: “Goodbye. I am sorry you are going, but I must say I never did like very much the clothes you made me wear in my pictures.” How forthright. Now Sandy is deeply into the Keaton volumes, which ought indeed to inspire him to make a dance.
If I don’t get there first. Especially now that I’ve read the two biographies of this extraordinary artist who is a unique combination of mime-gymnast, a poet of physical comedy, and a consummate filmmaker. Camera Man by Dana Stevens (Atria Books, 2022) is subtitled Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. Stevens leaves the reader with no doubt that the genius of Keaton is worth the years which she has put into the research for her book. The result is a mini-bio combined with maxi-cultural history, information which fills in the background to many features of a career now distant from readers in 2022. For example, when Stevens reaches Keaton’s period of rampant alcoholism, she compares his problem with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hollywood years of big studio slavery and compensatory booze-binging. We learn about Alcoholics Anonymous. When a Keaton film comedy features a pancake house as a setting, we are given a little history of such period emporia. When the Keaton short One Week features a mail-order, prefabricated home, we learn how popular such readymix domiciles were in the culture. I found such information to be fascinating, like visiting another planet and discovering it related to ours after all. The information increases your sense of Keaton’s exploitation of his milieu, of his cultural appropriations, of his sense of the early twentieth century’s love of innovation and process. Far from removing the mystery of Keaton’s art, the book increases our sense of his comic opportunism, his stylistic super-realism. I plan to reread Camera Man while I slowly and happily work my way through the shorts and feature-length works. This is something you can now do on the internet for free. Many of the films are available there, often in prints that have a silver nitrate beauty.
The big new biography by James Curtis, Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life (Knopf, 2022) will doubtless become the Bible of Keaton lore and will remain so for some time to come. The book contains a useful list of all of the films, both the Fatty Arbuckle shorts and Keaton’s early independent works, the full-length Keaton classics, and those MGM and educational movies that represent the downside of his career: the coming of sound, his confronting a major studio’s emphasis on melodrama rather than comedy, and Keaton’s alcohol addiction.
The deadliness of today’s typical film books – endless production detail, no real critical focus – is generally avoided here. We are given background information on many of Keaton’s great achievements – Sherlock Jr., Go West, The General, The Cameraman – with informed comments on themes that migrate from movie to movie. We learn the names and backgrounds of Keaton’s brilliant gag men: the writers and humorists who helped him create the comic world that we think of as Keaton’s creation. (Keaton was the source of many of the gags himself, and it was also his challenging task to convert them into spectacle, to fix them on celluloid.) Equally eye-opening is the book’s full treatment of Keaton’s post-MGM career, when he contributed gags himself to other directors’ feature films, appeared in guest spots in several of them, and then shifted the bulk of his performances to television and occasional music hall and musical comedy engagements. (He also appeared in Paris at the Cirque Medrano.) We follow him to the later rediscovery of his art by cinephiles such as James Agee, the last-minute rescue of aging prints of the movies, and his late appearance at the Venice Film Festival, where the screenings honored him and inspired an ovation.
Although Keaton’s film persona could not have been more defined, it is remarkable how little prose has grappled with the task of describing its elements and their ramifications. Not only was “Buster” a stoic, a trickster, and a fantastic in his incredible physical feats, he was a projectile in the Heideggerian sense, a being thrown into our universe and capable of bouncing right back with an improvisatory reflex. He shows a Houdini-like spontaneity in scrapes and entrapments, and the immediacy with which the film camera catches him exudes a joy and vitality which suggest that the physical act can be thought’s full realization, a victory over stolid matter. Laughter at a Keaton choreography is both a gasp and a huzzah! Keaton is never self-cherishing, as Chaplin’s Tramp can be. Keaton doesn’t have time for such dampening assessment. He’s on to the next challenge.
One of the most moving moments in Curtis’ book is a scene at the end of Charlie Chaplin’s life, at one of those lavish dinners which he gave for distinguished guests at his Swiss home. At the table, a noted film director praises Keaton fulsomely. Afterwards, Chaplin is found in deep depression, and he remarks to his daughter Geraldine, “But I was an artist. . . . And I gave him work.” (Chaplin is referring, of course, to the film Limelight.) Keaton never described himself with such a term. And, unlike Chaplin, he never stopped working. Retirement was not for him. Curtis’ book makes that clear.
From the age of two, Keaton was “on”. He learned how to make an audience laugh, and he took pride in the accomplishment. He learned how to build a gag sequence on stage and then on screen. Curtis reports in how many ways Keaton could throw a custard pie. He learned early to present himself as a poet of gymnastic movement and to achieve what appeared to be a near-instinctive triumph over gravity and common physics. This dance-like magic achieves a kind of native surrealism in its sustained fantasy, as in Sherlock Jr. Only George Balanchine served the human body’s movement physics with such equivalent delight.
Let me use an example to explain why I make such a claim. In the Keaton short One Week, at one point the married couple’s off-kilter house begins to rotate like a merry-go-round, inspiring Buster to rush into its front door and then be swept into a circuit around the building’s interior and out of the door again, all in one swift action. The sequence creates a sensation equivalent to a virtuoso enchaînement for the danseur in Balanchine’s Rubies, where the man uses his emboités en tournant to take him off the stage in a growing accelerando whirl that questions whether he will make his exit by the climax of the musical cadence. (The dancer must turn and yet simultaneously progress toward the wings while also increasing the speed of his turns.) Both Keaton and Balanchine are demonstrating and testing the laws of physical motion. Both passages are a thrilling form of visual wit and virtuoso control.
Keaton’s filming and editing of such sequences has its choreographic aspect because he must imagine his trajectories not only on the location during filming but how the recorded movement will be framed later in the editing – its context within the building of the gag or the rhythm of the action. I am always fascinated at the calm with which this performer’s movements are recorded. There is a stillness in the heart of even the most athletic of Keaton’s feats – and their recorded imagery -- that allows editing to clarify or amplify. The French would recognize this as a type of panache. The Italians would find sprezzatura in such triumphs. An American says: “It’s Buster Keaton.”
When asked about his ability to find a shape for a film, Keaton once compared the plot of a movie to a clothesline and its story to the clothing hung out to dry on the line. Let’s follow the analogy a bit further. (Here’s where I take over from Keaton the aesthete.) Keaton’s style of filmmaking – the fluidly assembled details of the comic narrative – would be like the breeze that stirs the laundry and dries the clothes. And Keaton’s taste and economy, his asperity of statement, would be like the sunshine that warms and contours the exposed fabrics and eventually imparts to them that fresh-washed fragrance. There you have it: plot, story, style, and film form as a daily duty.
Master Raro took me to a private screening of a beautiful new Robert Beavers film: The Sparrow Dream. In remarks before the screening, Beavers indicated that his new movie has its relation to at least two preceding works: Pitcher of Colored Light (2007) and Listening to the Space in my Room (2017), so in a sense it is the third in an unofficial trilogy of non-narrative cinema. Dream is a half-hour juxtaposition of the filmmaker’s formative and current domiciles, in Massachusetts and in Berlin, in youth and maturity, as a son and as a husband. We visit his late mother’s home, and the camera catches her napping in gentle afternoon light some years past. We are allowed glimpses of Beavers’ wife, the German filmmaker Ute Aurand, today. In Beavers’ family house near Weymouth, the camera scans illustrations in an edition of Homer, and thus the theme of homecoming from distant lands is evoked. Beavers has a way of making such emblems new in their employment. At first you think, “How naïve, how obvious.” And then you grasp how the trope is folded into yet other correlations, which are all connected in ways that are complex and not at all naïve. The discovery of those ties – and their sophisticated imbrication through editing – becomes the unique shape of the film. In The Sparrow Dream such montage is particularly fleet. I was reminded of the sense of freshness and transparency in a fresco, where the colors are laid on quickly, with a sense of spontaneity in the invention and fixing.
There is indeed a birdhoused chickadee glimpsed briefly in the new film, and initially I wondered if the title refers to recent scientific discoveries that birds not only teach their songs to their young but they also rehearse their musics in their sleep? (Brain-waves have revealed this to neural researchers.) Perhaps Beavers sees his new film as a series of mnemonic promptings to be shared with his audience. In his movie's narration, the filmmaker reports a dream in which a sparrow spoke to him. The vocalizations of sparrows are noted for their decorative features: their musics employ sustained trilling. At first, you might see Beavers’ far-gathered imagery as elaboration, mere decoration. But then you realize from the film’s tight construction that it contains little that could be termed ornament. According to The Sparrow Dream's narration, Beaver's discovered mantra is “Sleep. Thought. Memory”. I was reminded of a passage in E. A. Poe’s Marginalia in which poetic invention is produced by Sleep-Fancy-Memory (M150). Beavers uses the birds in his film for poetic effect, reminiscent of the tutelary avians in the verse of Thomas Hardy and Walter de la Mare. So the new movie is not only like a dream; it is a lyric outpouring that has been achieved through rigorous practice. The musical effect of the editing reminded me of the work of Alain Resnais, where that director-editor’s lyrical flights test the limits of narrative cinema.
Beavers’ movies are alchemical constructs of light and color, and this Dream is particularly elemental in some of its imagery. We see the wind tossing the limbs of trees. There is a body of water at what appears to be a parkland or spa. There are references to soil in shots of gardening. And hands build a fire in a wood stove in what seems to be the now empty maternal house. Certain of the individual photographic shots are unforgettable.
As a non-narrative film, a Beavers “plot” would be the exposed subject seen as a personal, achieved realization in the process of movie-making. His “story” would be found in those juxtapositions and interrelations which editing discovers among visual and sonic materials sometimes gathered over much time. The style of the film can be found in every choice and detail which impel its eventual shaping, small to large. And “film form” here is that imprint which we intuit as we watch and which we take away in accumulated memory.
You undoubtedly see where I am going. The magics of a Keaton and a Beavers are rather like equivalent intensities in choreography. Film and dance are very close. A good dance leaves one imprinted and haunted by memory. Plot? George Balanchine said in one interview that in a good dance, “Something has to happen.” Story? That would be the structure of the dance movement, the facture that we follow in its surface display. Style? Every dance detail counts and must be extracted freshly to retard the forward flow of momentum and also force the dance to continue. And dance form? As in Beavers and Keaton, the shaping of the work must maintain and unfurl its relation to its source: the poetic idea.
Clothesline, laundry, breeze, sun! All in a day’s great work.
C.S.
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