Parisian Interlude:
The Very First Buster Keaton Retrospective

busterlove1895, Buster sharing a smoke at the Cinémathèque Française, 1962

CatsandJammer, Grandpa Buster being his goofy self during a visit to Cinémathèque Française in 1962

orsons, Paris, February 1962: Buster Keaton examines the first film projector made by the Lumière brothers at the Cinémathèque Française.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/155866837094964843 gettyimages.co.uk US film director and actor Buster Keaton listens to film director... US film director and actor Buster Keaton listens to film director Abel Gance, on February 23 in Paris where he came to present a new version of his film “The General”, directed on 1926.

Below is an interview recorded on audiotape. I wish we had the original audiotape, because I guarantee you that what appeared in print is not what Buster really said. Journalists put words into other people’s mouths and correct what they think are errors, and then copy-editors do more than smooth out the utterances; they employ wholesale rewrites. FOUR TENSES by Buster Keaton I. — REMOTE In 1899, at the age of three, I went on stage. My father and mother created a vaudeville act with me in which acrobatics played a large part. So I’m a child of the ball. It was only at the age of twenty-one that I started in cinema. I started out working with Fatty Arbuckle. In those days, we worked without a definitive script, so that’s how I learned my trade. Neither Chaplin nor Harold Lloyd, nor any of us, ever followed a script, never shot according to a rigorous work plan. When we started a film, we started with an idea whose starting point we knew, we always tried to find the outcome fairly quickly and our principle was to let the middle take care of itself. I once asked the studio to build, at great expense, a dining room set that looked good, because I was planning to shoot a long scene there and then, in the middle of filming, I realized that the scene which was to take place in the dining room would get a lot more laughs if we filmed it in the pantry. And so we stayed in the pantry. We never tried to follow a script, to force things, to shoot in that damned dining room, if things didn t look so good there. First of all, there was the era of two-reel films, with their mix of satire, burlesque, farce, anything goes. I didn’t shy away from crazy, impossible gags, of the kind later used by cartoonists. But when it came to feature films, I abandoned these gags, because I needed to be more rigorous if I wanted the audience to believe in the story I was telling. I always tried not to rehearse each shot too much, especially in action scenes, to prevent the whole thing from becoming too mechanical. Generally, we discussed the scene thoroughly before shooting, then simply walk around and occupy the different places we were going to be during the shot, and, from the first actual rehearsal, the camera was rolling. And we rarely did multiple takes. For these action scenes, we never undercranked. I sometimes modified the frame rate to obtain the effect of speed, a train speeding through the countryside, a car rolling down a slope. But, in the scenes with actors, never, because it would no longer have seemed real, and I always wanted to remain as realistic as possible. If you have a good dramatic situation, a believable story, convincing characters, it is all the easier to make people laugh. For example, I would have been incapable of filming a farce, because the situation, the plot of the farce are always close to the impossible and it would therefore have bored me prodigiously. I know of only one exception to this rule, Some Like It Hot (Certains l’aiment chaud). We know well that, when two men dress as women, we descend into farce and that it is difficult to make such a story benefit from the virtues of realism. But there, for once, the cross-dresser became serious and just had to walk like one for the public to be convinced. As a child, I’d been taught the hard way. It left me with a gift for acrobatics, so that falls and feats of strength were just a game to me. But these were not the only traits of my character. Let’s take Charlot: he was always a vagabond, a bum. When he found work, whether as a digger or a sales clerk, he remained a bum, working only as long enough to earn two or three meals, and then he found himself on the streets. Harold Lloyd, on the other hand, was the type of teenager fresh out of college, convinced that he’s a good-for-nothing, and always with an eye on a girl. I was neither a bum nor a misfit: When I found work, my rule of conduct was to do my best to give satisfaction, as if I intended to do this job for the rest of my days. If I had to drive a locomotive, I’d to my best to do it right. Charlot would have driven it to the nearest siding and given up. This was the fundamental difference between my character and the others, whatever the setting or storyline. [Here the interviewer obviously asked Buster about his “auteurism”:] I have not always been the director, or the sole director, of my films. But I was actively involved in developing the scenarios, of the selection of gags, and that is why all my films have, I believe, a family resemblance. When I worked with a co-director, he would stand next to the camera and follow the filming of the shot whose details we had worked out beforehand and then tell me whether everything had gone according to plan, or whether, somewhere in the background, without my noticing, something had gone wrong. That was his rôle. II. — CONTINUOUS Several of the co-directors who worked with me were particularly concerned with the construction of the story, with continuity, which was a crucial element of the film. Because there is nothing worse than an inappropriate gag. This can ruin a whole scene even if the gag itself is funny. There were thus gags I couldn’t use, which I told to Harold Lloyd who liked them and used them for himself. I did the same with Chaplin who, in turn, offered me gags which he couldn’t use but which suited my character. These exchanges of gags were commonplace. Buster Keaton, with Lionel Barrymore, Gwen Lee and John Miljan in Free and Easy (1930). Then came the advent of talkies and the end of the golden era of shooting without a script, because now you had to have one, since dialogue had to be written in advance. Shortly before the advent of sound, I’d made a mistake — I’d left my own little independent company to join that monstrous giant, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, for good. I’d only made two silent films for them, The Cameraman (L’Opérateur) and Spite Marriage (Le Figurant), when talkies came along. Suddenly, the entire film industry was turned upside down. In New York, producers were snapping up playwrights, songwriters, and even theater directors at a premium. I had to deal with these people and with the studio to persuade them not to let us be consumed by sound, to speak when necessary like everyone else, but, given the nature of my comedy, to concentrate our efforts on scenes that didn’t require too much dialogue, where we’d be content with background music and where we’d rediscover the comic strength of the silent era. Even today, I still come up against the same problems with producers, scriptwriters, and directors. But I did manage to make several TV shows based on this principle: a bit of blah-blah to set the scene, tie up the plot, and, in the last part, the last fifteen minutes, more dialogue and gags. The result was often satisfying. III. — FUTURE On the other hand, about two years ago, we saw a film called When Comedy Was King. It was a montage film in which, alongside clips of Harold Lloyd, Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Mack Sennet, etc., there were some short scenes from some of my old films. The film having been a commercial success, a Munich businessman contacted me to see if I still had some presentable copies of my old silent films, in which case he would be willing to distribute them in Germany. I went to see him, stopping off in London and Paris on the way, and contacted various distributors who were also interested in the idea and encouraged me to take the plunge. So off I went to sign my contract in Munich. We decided to release The General first. On reflection, rather than doubling every third frame to compensate for the difference in speed between sixteen and twenty-four frames per second, I preferred my films to run at a slightly accelerated speed — I find they don’t suffer too much, at least not as much as with the other system. [The interviewer, translator, and copy-editor misunderstood what Buster had said. Apparently the interviewer asked about slowing the film down by stretch printing, and Buster said no, 24fps is fine. The interviewer, surely a youngster who had not been around in the silent days, tried to make sense of Buster’s statement and distorted it.] On the other hand, there was the problem of the soundtrack. I left the old-fashioned subtitles in my film: Not a single word is uttered, there is no sound effect, simply musical accompaniment, not by some disheveled pianist, but by a good symphony orchestra of forty-eight musicians, as in the past, when my films were shown in large cinemas. I think I have thus avoided distorting the flavor of films from the silent era. And nothing is simpler to solve than the problem of copies, no dubbing to do. All you have to do is remove the German subtitles and replace them with French subtitles for the French release, put back the English subtitles for the English release, and so on. This can be done overnight. [Was that true about the 48-piece orchestra? If that was true, what orchestra, what conductor, what composer, and where is the score? If such a score was ever created, nobody ever heard it.] I was asked to come to Germany for the release of The General, hoping to help with the advertising launch. But the film was scheduled in Munich a week before my arrival and I was then surprised to learn that the cinema did normal business for the first two days, but that by the third day it was sold out at every show. And this has been going on for four weeks now. I also toured a dozen cities in Germany and I’ve been delighted to discover that, everywhere, my best audience is made up mainly of students and young people. My German distributor intends to re-release a second of my films in the fall: It will probably be Steamboat Bill, Jr. (Cadet d’eau douce). This will be followed by The Navigator (La croisière du Navigator) and Our Hospitality (Les lois de l’hospitalité). The General should be released in Paris in a few weeks, as well as in London. IV. — PRESENT We lived through a prodigious era for comic films. In addition to Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, there were people like Max Linder, whom I loved dearly and of whom, unfortunately, I’ve only seen one film; AND W.C. Fields, with whom I worked when neither of us was making films, and for whom I’ve always had a very high regard. The Marx Brothers, and especially Red Skelton, were burlesque actors who didn’t care much about the story they were telling; it was just a pretext for their flights of fancy. Their style was undoubtedly far removed from my own — I’d never have dared to do what they did, and, had I ventured to do it, I probably wouldn’t have succeeded. Yet they have contributed as much as I have to the art of the comic film. But, nowadays, the comedian is a very handicapped man. In the past, we could multiply our experiences in the burlesque theater, in vaudeville, in the circus (not so long ago I worked at Médrano). Today, burlesque and vaudeville have disappeared, the circus is dying. What’s left? Television and cabaret. And the comedians come and stand in front of you to tell jokes. This or that will make me laugh, but I heard four others this week who seemed just as funny to me. How can you enrich your personal experience amid such monotony? At the moment, I can’t think of anyone better than Jacques Tati — he’s created a character that’s funny depending on the situation he finds himself in, and he’s right back where we left off some forty years ago. I believe that not only comedians, but all performers find themselves in the same impasse. Remember all those character actors we used to enjoy seeing in film after film, those Jews, those Englishmen, those Germans, those Frenchmen, those Irishmen, those Americans? Where are they today? They’ve disappeared and haven’t been replaced. It’s rare to find a good character actor these days. And it’s just as hard now to become a good performer as a good comic. Buster KEATON. (Remarks captured on a tape recorder.)