The Cameraman (1928) by Buster Keaton & Edward Sedgwick
Sunday, May 6, 1984, 7:30 pm
An Evening of Buster Keaton
“Beneath Keaton’s lack of emotion he was also uninsistently sardonic; deep below that, giving a disturbing tension and grandeur to the foolishness there was in his comedy a freezing whisper not of pathos but of melancholia.” –James Agee, Life, 1949.
Neighbors, 1920, 17 min. Keaton nonchalantly performs acrobatic feats of daring on clothes-lines, teeter-totter boards and telephone poles, before abducting his sweetheart and marrying her in the coal bin of a neighborhood judge.
The Blacksmith, 1922, 21 min. Buster plays a blacksmith who applies assembly line tactics to the outfitting of horses.
The Cameraman, 1928, 69 min. One of Keaton’s finest features, in which he acquires a hopelessly out-dated movie camera and expects to make a living as a news cameraman, but his absentmindedness always dooms him to failure.