Buster Keaton in The Goat (1921)
Perhaps you should know from the outset that your reviewer is reading a book called Buster Keaton’s Crew. By Lisle Foote, it surveys the lives of the men who were technicians on his films. It’s possibly the only book about Buster Keaton I’d not yet read. So when Frank Woodley stepped onstage at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Saturday night to discus Keaton’s work and confessed “It’s unhealthy how much I love him,” I knew exactly how he felt.
Returning to the Melbourne Recital Centre for this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, the Blue Grassy Knoll invited Woodley to share his love of the silent era’s most inventive clown, in between three shorts: One Week, The Goat and Cops.
Buster’s first independent short, made in 1920, One Week is a gloriously surreal chronicle of the construction of a DIY house by newlyweds, with the added hazard of a jilted admirer switching the numbers on the boxes containing the house’s various parts. The result is a twisted structure which in a tornado spins on its foundations like an expressionist merry-go-round. The film is perfection, without one wasted moment; filled with laughs but also with the intelligent pathos that is Buster’s most endearing quality.
This quality is also beautifully played out in The Goat, where as a hapless chap mistaken for an escaped murderer he shifts around the edges of moral behaviour, at first just running, then actively attempting to murder the cops chasing him. Tragedy is always pretty close by in any Buster Keaton film. In Cops the film actually ends with Buster’s “death” – and it’s hilarious.
Woodley speaks eloquently, if a little loosely, about Buster’s genius, comparing the dignity he brought to broad physical comedy with other physical clowns such as Jerry Lewis and Don Adams, who were more often grotesque. There is a balletic quality to Buster’s physical stunts, matched by his elegance and expressiveness in quiet moments. Chaplin parodied, brilliantly, the sad comedian. But Buster’s films “have a lovely seriousness to them … that’s what lifts his work to a mesmerising level.” Woodley says. It is what links us to him, because “we all want to be taken seriously.” (Buster himself once said: “Life is too serious for farce comedy.”)
“Analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog,” Woodley also says, quoting E.B. White. “You learn some things, but you kill the frog.” Acknowledging this, he returns in the second half to do a bit of dissection, and leaves me wishing he’d done more, as much as his love poem was disarming. Especially where Buster Keaton is concerned, the stories behind the magic are magic in themselves.
Taking the famous collapsing wall gag – in which Buster survives the falling wall because he happens to be standing where the window lands – Woodley shows its origins in the “Fatty” Arbuckle / Keaton short Back Stage, then Buster’s elaboration in One Week, then the ultimate execution in his feature Steamboat Bill Jr (1928) – where Buster was in “genuine jeopardy”. The gag lives down the years in shows like Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, and Woodley’s own homage in his (much underrated) Woodley show. In Frank’s homage, the gag itself is very funny – a ladder falls across a line of fairy lights on the ground, the rungs somehow managing to miss them all. A classic Buster-esque near-miss, a balletic moment of graceful chance. What Frank adds is poignant – he tries to repeat it, to show off, and of course this time all the lights break.
Buster’s influences on Woodley are also charmingly explained: his hat, worn throughout the Lano and Woodley years, and his hand flutter – created because he tried to find the stillness that Buster could find in the eye of a storm of action, but he “couldn’t cope” with the moment.
Blue Grassy Knoll have been performing live scores to Buster Keaton films since 1996. Their recent score for The General with a full orchestra took that film experience from the sublime to the ridiculously sublime. They have become so seamlessly entwined with many of Buster’s films – One Week in particular – that they ‘disappear’ during the performance.
Silent movies were never intended to be silent – all cinemas of the era had live music accompaniment, and the audience participated in the soundtrack, booing the villain, cheering the hero – but Buster’s films were also never intended to be filled with bells and whistles. He was not a fan of the Foley.
There is a shot in The Goat which is, in its simplicity and cinematography, perfect genius; perfectly Buster. On the run, Buster jumps a train, and loses the cops by decoupling the carriages. The next shot is a long shot from the center of the train track. The train is racing towards us, getting bigger – Blue Grassy Knoll is matching the buildup – the train reaches the camera revealing Buster, sitting out front of the engine, face impassive and determined, eyes straight ahead – the train slows to a stop with his face filling the screen – the music also halts. Quiet. Buster stands, pulls out a cigarette and lights it on the hot engine. It is a simple, beautiful little gag and Buster gave it plenty of space. Yet this time, as he drops down off the train, there is a voice from the stage giving a Flinders Street Station platform announcement. It is funny. But it jerks me out of the world of the film. It’s the only time I’ve ever heard Blue Grassy Knoll step over a gag with their own.
Not that the band don’t deserve our attention. Their musicianship is tight, they are perfectly in tune with the films’ emotional and physical moments, and they can, at the right time, swing with spontaneity. It is a part of their charm that they do occasionally, with subtle instrumentals, draw our attention. But it is precisely because of their serious attention to both the action and the stillness, that they become fully a part of Buster Keaton’s art. That is when I can hear Buster laughing.
Rating: 4 ½ out of 5 stars​
Blue Grassy Knoll: Buster Keaton’s Cops, One Week and The Goat
With Frank Woodley
Melbourne Recital Centre
18 April 2015
