shadowplay

Two Buster Keatons a week apart: OUR HOSPITALITY in Bo’ness last Saturday, and THE GENERAL in Portobello yesterday. Attended that one with Fiona and my mum and dad, who live locally. All of us enjoyed it. My mum hadn’t really seen any Keaton and loved it — as a western fan, the Civil War is an area of interest for her. Nobody seemed to mind that the story takes the wrong side’s point of view. So does DAS BOOT.

John Sweeney played piano for OH, while TG had Jane Gardner on keyboard, a last-minute substitute as the originally-scheduled accompanist got sick. Both were excellent, as we’ve come to expect.

The contrast between the two films was striking: THE GENERAL, as Richard Lester says, is a film you can’t take anything out of: remove one shot, the scene is damaged, remove a scene and the sequence is damaged, remove a sequence and the structure is damaged. People generally don’t make films that way: supposing something doesn’t work? Your whole movie is wrecked. Keaton’s distinctive working methods (not unheard-of in the silent era, impossible thereafter) — shooting endlessly until something worked perfectly, reshooting if required — made this approach practical.

(Of later Hollywood movies, IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER strikes me as similarly unified. No coverage, all masters. I guess that evolved from the way musical sequences were usually done, Donen & Kelly simply extended that precision to the whole movie.)

The earlier OUR HOSPITALITY, though still precise, is positively loosey-goosey compared to the later masterpiece. Almost every time a cute baby or animal appears, it gets a closeup. Shots that aren’t essential to the narrative but are there because it’s assumed the audience will enjoy them. The occasional scenic view as well. In THE GENERAL, a film bursting with pictorial splendour, these are always integrated into dramatic sequences, each of them making a specific narrative point, a piece of the puzzle. In THE NAVIGATOR, a cannibal falling from the deck of the ship gets a dramatic high angle to display his plunge — sort-of useful to the story, but a luxury that THE GENERAL would probably have dispensed with.

I’m not sure I’d noticed the glass shot in OH. The near building is real but the Great White Way is painted. Developing on from the FX shots in THREE AGES. Or that the dam blown up can be seen — I think — as part of the huge miniature landscape constructed as background for Buster’s waterfall climax. Is it the SAME model, or is the dam reconstructed as part of the miniature purely to enhance the film’s geographical consistency?

The exploding dam looks EXTREMELY realistic, but they can’t, surely, have shot it full-scale?

Nearly everything in TG is real and life-size, famously. But this view of the northern encampment utilises a glass-painted sky —

The stars seem to twinkle, an easy enough trick to manage. It COULD be that the more distant tents are also painted, but the two distant, silhouetted figures are real people, so the tent behind them is also genuine. The tree branches at top of frame don’t move, and overlap the sky, so they’re part of the painting. You can’t see the join.

When Buster realises his mission to rescue his train is also a mission to rescue his girl, the POV shot through a burned hole in a tablecloth resembles an old photographic vignette — I’ve read of it being described that way. A connection I’d never made is that Marion Mack is first seen as precisely that kind of image —

Finally, I can’t rememver if I’d noticed before that when a group of Northern officers gets drenched by a defective water tower, Joe Keaton Sr is the one who draws his sword belligerently to answer this insult. THE GENERAL is a film in which you can keep discovering new details for decades, and also it’s so full of stuff that you can’t retain every detail, so you can also REdiscover them.