🇺🇸Buster
Keaton

He was three years old when he first appeared on stage with his parents, and the act required him to be thrown across the stage and into the scenery. He did not cry. He did not smile. He looked at the audience with the exact expression that would make him famous: calm, attentive, unimpressed, entirely contained. The audience laughed. He had discovered, at three, without being able to articulate it, the central principle of his art: that the absence of emotional expression in the face of escalating chaos was funnier than any reaction could be. Buster Keaton spent the next sixty years proving this principle across vaudeville, silent film, television, and personal appearances, performing stunts that broke his neck, his ankle, and his wrist without complaint, without drama, and without ever allowing his face to register that anything unusual was happening. He is the greatest physical comedian in the history of cinema, and he began his training at three.

Joseph Frank Keaton VI was born on October 4, 1895, in Piqua, Kansas, to two vaudeville performers, Joe Keaton and Myra Cutler. The family story holds that the illusionist Harry Houdini, a family friend, gave the infant the nickname "Buster" after watching him fall down a flight of stairs without apparent injury and pronounce himself fine. Whether or not this is literally true, it captures something essential: Keaton's body, from earliest childhood, seemed constitutionally resistant to damage from falls. His parents' vaudeville act, the Three Keatons, incorporated Buster into the performance from the age of three. Joe Keaton was a physical comedian of considerable violence; his act involved throwing Buster into the footlights, into the orchestra pit, and into the wings — stunts that were brutal by any standard and that child welfare authorities in several cities attempted, unsuccessfully, to prohibit. Buster loved it.

The Three Keatons performed across the United States for years, and Buster developed a physical vocabulary — the ability to fall, roll, land, and recover in exactly the way the comedy required — that was the equal of any trained gymnast or acrobat, combined with an improvisational intelligence that allowed him to generate new variations on a theme instantaneously. He could do a pratfall and make it look exactly as painful as needed, or exactly as painless. He could take a fall down a flight of stairs and land in a pose that suggested he had meant to arrive there. He joined Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's film unit in 1917, at twenty-one, and immediately recognized the camera as a tool that made possible things that even vaudeville could not. The camera could be placed anywhere. Distances could be manipulated. The geometry of space and time could be arranged to serve the comedy with a precision that no live performance allowed.

His peak years, from 1920 to 1928, produced a body of work that is among the most extraordinary in the history of any art form. He wrote, directed, and starred in a series of short films and features — One Week, The Playhouse, Cops, Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, The General, Steamboat Bill Jr. — in which the formal possibilities of cinema were explored with a rigour and inventiveness that has never been surpassed. The General, released in 1926, is a Civil War comedy built around a train chase that Keaton staged with actual locomotives on actual tracks at actual speed. Every stunt was performed by Keaton himself. The film cost $750,000 — the most expensive film of the silent era — was a commercial failure at the time of its release, and is now considered by most critics to be the greatest silent film ever made. Sherlock Jr., released in 1924, contains a sequence in which a cinema projectionist dreams himself into the film he is projecting and must navigate a world that keeps cutting to a different location — a meditation on the nature of cinema itself that influenced filmmakers from Fellini to Woody Allen to Michel Gondry.

In 1928, Keaton made what he later called the worst mistake of his life: he surrendered his independence and signed a contract with MGM, which removed his creative control. The films he made under the studio system are competent and occasionally funny; none of them are Keaton. He suffered a breakdown, struggled with alcoholism, and spent two decades in a professional wilderness — writing gags for other films, making short subjects in France, appearing in small roles. He was rediscovered by a new generation of filmmakers and critics in the late 1950s — Chaplin called him "the greatest director I've ever seen" — received an Honorary Academy Award in 1959, and spent his final decade working with genuine pleasure and appreciation in films by Samuel Beckett, in television appearances, and in a collaboration with the Cirque Medrano in Paris. He died on February 1, 1966, of lung cancer, at seventy. He had been performing, in one form or another, for sixty-seven years.

His influence is ubiquitous and often uncredited. Every action star who performs his own stunts, every physical comedian who understands that the face is most expressive when it is most still, every filmmaker who has built a comedy sequence around the precise geometry of a character moving through space — all of them are working in territory that Keaton mapped, on a vaudeville stage, before he could read.