This was the first article I ever wrote for an independent website, commissioned to coincide with a retrospective of Buster Keaton's films at the BFI in the mid-2000s.
In the late ‘60s, when the work of Buster Keaton was “rediscovered”, a debate broke out between cineastes as to who was the true genius – Keaton or Chaplin? Of course, now, the simple answer would be “Why not like them both?” Each enjoyed massive commercial success with a similar blend of slapstick acrobatics and graceful comedy, and – as is often overlooked nowadays – each was an outstanding actor, whose subtlety of gesture contrasted sharply with the histrionic mugging found in most silent film. But such arguments proved useful in understanding what was unique about their work and resurrecting their old rivalry may help us see why Keaton is not just a great clown but a director of our times.
They were born within six years of each other (Chaplin in 1889, Keaton in 1895) into families with a show-business background. Before long, they were inducted into the world of music-hall (or vaudeville, in Keaton’s case) and became experienced stage performers – Keaton actually being thrown round the stage by his father in one act. Somehow their respective career paths brought them within the gravitational pull of Hollywood and to the burgeoning industry of comedy shorts. They worked their apprenticeship – Chaplin at Keystone with Max Sennett, Keaton under Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle – and soon Chaplin was directing his own work and becoming arguably the most popular comedian in wartime (his first film appeared in 1914 and by 1918 he had made over 60 shorts, many under his own direction). Keaton took a while to catch up, but by 1920, he was a fully-fledged filmmaker and, like his rival, soon graduated to features with Three Ages in 1923.
During this time, both stars developed their on-screen personae. Chaplin created the “tramp”, a roving, good-natured though anarchic character constantly getting up the noses of the gentry or the local police while Keaton became “old stoneface”, a guileless and clumsy young man who faced everything the world could throw at him with a stoic, bemused gaze. Both comics employed slapstick routines to amuse their audience, with characters knocking into walls, banging into each other’s heads or getting just a bit too close to that oncoming train. But their approach to these routines varied and here we begin to note the crucial differences in their style.
Chaplin’s gags centre round his own agility and the interaction between him and his hapless opponent. His fights or chase scenes are often mere adaptations – however sophisticated – of business that theatre audiences would have been accustomed to. Furthermore, brilliant though he was in many ways, Chaplin couldn’t break out of the music-hall convention of the stage acting as the audience’s focal point. So the camera is trained in long shot on the business taking place, with the four walls of the screen acting as a frame, just as a stage circumscribes the world for the actors on it.
Keaton, on the other hand, discovered a more acrobatic kind of comedy, where his split-second timing in performing dangerous stunts was as much a source of laughter as his hangdog expression. But in order to describe these stunts clearly, the frame needs to be enlarged. The audience needs to see more of the world around him in order to fully understand the dangers or problems he faces – just how is he going to get from that roof over here into that speeding car over there? Keaton, therefore, is often shown in relation to his environment. Whereas our eyes are telescoped in to focus on Chaplin, with Keaton, the view opens out – we get a panorama, not a close-up.
This may seem a simple variation in method, but it’s the cornerstone of a whole philosophy of comedy that is diametrically opposed to Chaplin’s. The latter’s “close-up” style foregrounds the antics of the “tramp” making him both the site of our amusement and, by extension, the person we identify with, our hero. With Chaplin, we never get away from “Chaplin” – as former Python Terry Jones has said, Chaplin doesn’t allow anyone else to be funny. But as Keaton interacts more fully with the world around him, so other elements naturally attract our interest and provide humour of their own. In this way, Keaton is not so much the hero as just another character struggling to get through life. A wonderful example of this is found in Our Hospitality (1923) where Keaton goes to the aid of a woman being beaten by her husband. Contrary to his and our expectations, she turns and starts beating him instead. This is her affair, nothing to do with him.
Now, contrast this female with the doe-eyed, down-on-their-luck girls that populate Chaplin’s films. These simpering misses need Charlie, in his cack-handed way, and his naïve wooing of them is meant to charm us. We are manipulated into a shamelessly sentimental empathy with the romantic couple, most notably in the climax of City Lights (1931). Nowhere is the difference with Keaton more marked than in his treatment of women. Keaton never expresses passion or fondness for his intended – she’s his girl, he has to marry her, that’s that. Time and again, their union seems completely arbitrary – in Seven Chances (1925), he decides to wed only because he stands to inherit a fortune if he ties the knot by five o’clock that afternoon. When his chosen bride declines in disgust, he simply advertises for another. And Keaton is clueless when it comes to the arts of love. At the end of Sherlock Jr (1923), he has finally won the girl but stands gormlessly beside her, unsure of his next move. It’s only thanks to a romantic scene playing on the cinema screen in front of him that he understands what’s required and finally kisses her. But he’s just going through the motions, doing what should be done, not necessarily what he wants to do. When the screen fades to black and cuts to a shot of the now married couple with children, he seems utterly bewildered.
Herein lies the essence of Keaton’s world-view – that the universe is made up of a series of arbitrary laws that just have to be followed. Characters are motivated not by desire or psychology but by proscribed rules. In Our Hospitality, a long-running feud has built up between Keaton’s family and his Southern neighbours. Blissfully unaware of this, he allows himself to be escorted along the street by one of his enemies. At every doorway, the man excuses himself, goes inside and asks for a pistol, while Keaton politely waits outside. The situation is absurd but both man are acting perfectly logically according to the rules allotted them. Later, when Keaton unwittingly becomes a guest at their house, they must indulge him because of their own code of hospitality, but if he so much as puts one foot outside the door, then he can be shot.
Thus the mute acceptance of arbitrary laws until other laws come along and push them out of the way. Take Buster’s response to authority. Chaplin invites us to laugh as he challenges his betters and boots them up the bum, but Keaton is prepared to do as he’s told until one rule becomes more important than another. Thus, in Steamboat Bill Jr (1928), his meek, little student thinks nothing of trying to jail-break his father because that’s just what a son has to do. This arbitrariness applies to the world in general. For Keaton, the universe is hostile in as much as it takes no note of human needs and moves to its own tune (he reached this conclusion years before the existentialist writers of the ‘40s and ‘50s). That’s why there is no more perfect Keaton sequence than the cyclone at the end of Steamboat Bill. Here, the laws of physics are torn apart – houses can blow up into the air and literally come down round Buster’s ears, trees can uproot themselves and fly (as they do in one of the most magical moments in cinema history), jails can float off into the river. Each time, Keaton simply has to adjust and deal with the situation at hand. As in Sherlock Jr, when his car crashes and drifts into the middle of a lake. Quick as a flash, he makes the soft-top hood into a sail – a favourite gag – and immediately adopts the pose of a sea captain. At each point, the crisis defines his role.
For Buster, then, the source of his humour comes from the perils of the space around him. Chaplin parachutes his tramp into a story and watches him create havoc. Keaton lets the havoc come to him. That’s why the milieu of his films is so important and often so beautifully evoked. Think of the detailed recreation of the American Civil War in his most revered film, The General (1926), or Our Hospitality’s gorgeous never-never land of the South, with its early steam engine rolling over improvised tracks like a clumsy, oversized toy. It’s also why Keaton’s gags arise naturally from the world he inhabits. Chaplin contrives routines and makes them into a performance piece, Keaton builds them into the narrative flow by having characters interact with the mise-en-scene. Is there anything more beautiful in silent film than the moment in The General where, lost in thought, Buster sits on the wheels of his train and remains totally oblivious to its sudden movement, being circled round and round as the engine heads into a tunnel? It is a purely cinematic effect. In comparison, Chaplin’s slapstick feels stagey.
And Keaton’s use of cinema extends to the exploitation of the one asset it lacked in the 1920s – sound. Trains will suddenly appear from the edge of the screen and nearly knock Buster over. The fact that normally he must have heard them coming is part of the gag. He’s building comedy into the very nature of the medium, playing tricks on the audience that pull them in and out of the narrative.
Curiously, then, it is Keaton that emerges as a rule-breaker, restructuring film as a director, oblivious to law and emotion as a character. Whereas Chaplin seems conventional - anarchic in spirit, but demanding of our sympathies and hidebound by his own theatrical prowess. And that’s why Chaplin’s work feels more of a chore as the years go by while Keaton’s feels fresh and modern, as if it’s of our time.