In the October 20, 2022 issue of The New York Review of Books, an esteemed critic, Geoffrey O'Brien, praises a short two-reel comedy written and directed by Buster Keaton. The 1920 picture is called "One Week" and O'Brien's praise is lavish -- he says that the movie is so good that you could watch it forever. Of course, this extravagant opinion triggered my interest in seeing the film. Often, the best thing that a review accomplishes is encouraging the reader to seek out, and experience, the artwork reviewed. I was only vaguely aware that Buster Keaton produced two-reelers, although, of course, this should have been obvious to me -- all silent film comedians worked in this form. Keaton is famous for his full-length productions, movies such as The General and Sherlock Jr. and, until the advent of You-Tube, his two-reelers were difficult to see. Repertory houses didn't program them and many videos and DVDs featuring these pictures reproduced the films in badly degraded and half illegible prints. But the movie is readily available on You-Tube in a clear print (there's even a colorized version that looks a bit like a faded early 20th century post-card) with a good score. And, so, if you want to watch the movie forever, as O'Brien recommends, you can do so. Of course, the movie is a masterpiece but also profoundly alien to modern sensibilities -- these old two-reel comedies have something of the mystery and enigma about them of archaic Greek sculpture: they're awe-inspiring with a faint mocking smile, but the pictures emerge from an imagination that we can't really comprehend any longer -- they are epics about geometry, gravity, the implacable relationship between things. Because such films are often fantastically realistic in their locations, filmed, it seems, on vacant lots and anonymous commercial streets in Los Angeles' nondescript suburbs, these pictures have a hyper-reality about them -- unlike most Hollywood feature films of the era, these movie's simultaneously document material existence in the first few years after the Great War while also subverting and undercutting that reality by showing that it is erected on a base of raw, impoverished chaos. About a minute into "One Week," there's a shot of a man waiting for a newly married couple in an open sedan. For some reason, the shot reaches out through the screen and grabs you by the throat: this is exactly the way people and their possessions looked one-hundred and two years ago and the effect is revelatory, even, visionary.
Buster Keaton and his new bride (neither are named) emerge from a church. The preacher stands sternly at the top of the stairs while a crowd of onlookers throws rice. The rice somehow turns to shoes -- how and why this happens is not clear. The onlookers vanish after this opening shot. Old two-reel comedies are lonely, with streets often as desolate and dreamy as the lanes you see in paintings by de Chirico. The malicious driver of the sedan, apparently the film's villain, transports the couple across the bleak and empty town. At one point, just to stage a spectacular stunt, the couple depart the sedan blithely stepping into an adjacent vehicle that is speeding down the road. Buster gets caught between the two vehicles and, just as he is spread-eagled in the air with a foot on each running board, a motorcycle zips between the cars and carries him several hundred feet down the road before crashing. It's an astonishing stunt, although I assume it was accomplished by substituting a mannequin for Keaton, although, if this is the case, the shot is so seamless and the stunt appears to be implemented so effortlessly that it takes your breath away. Keaton and his bride have purchased a pre-fab house that comes in boxes. The villain mislabels the boxes turning 1 to 4 and 3 to 8. This results in a home that is towering with huge empty rooms and a totally non-Euclidean facade -- there are no right angles and doors open into empty space and windows serve as skylights on the shingled roof. The structure is extremely flimsy and has some of the characteristics of buildings in cartoons of the era -- it's has balloon-like walls and ceilings that are soft and springy and the home isn't really rooted in the earth but sits on a platform that is like a turntable. Keaton navigates a bunch of perilous gags involving ladders and collapsing walls as he builds the house. When he tries to hang a chandelier on the ground floor, the ceiling drops down like a heavily burdened trampoline and, then, releases, propelling someone on the second floor up through the roof so that his head shows in hole punched through the shingles. Keaton has to put a chimney on the house's strangely angled roof and this leads to some more dangerous-looking gags. A huge burly guy carries a piano to the site strutting around jauntily with the instrument on his shoulder. Of course, the piano ends of squashing Keaton and, later, when it is hoisted into the living room more chaos ensues. There's a home-warming party. It begins to rain and the sieve-like roof admits torrents of water into the house. The wind begins to blow and the house spins on its foundation, rotating rapidly -- Keaton tries to stop the house from spinning and this vain effort yields another set of hair-raising stunts as he clambers on the huge structure as it rotates. Ultimately, everyone gets thrown out of the house, exiting through the windows and doors. No one gets hurt, although people take horrific falls, and everyone seems to accept the home's obvious and grotesque defects with equanimity -- for instance, it has its kitchen sink and kitchen shelves on the outside of the structure. The house is fantastically flimsy and its walls and doors are continuously falling off or being dismantled. It turns out that the home has been built on the wrong lot (66 not 99 -- the sign was upside down.) Keaton tries to use his car to drag the building to the nearby lot, but this simply results in the destruction of his car. He uses what seems to be beer kegs as wheels and begins to push the ungainly, towering structure across a barren strip of land that is crisscrossed with railroad tracks. A brutish locomotive appears and threatens to run over the house stalled on the tracks. There's a siding invisible to the camera next to the house and the locomotive roars past leaving the rickety structure unscathed. Just as Buster and his perky long-suffering wife are uttering a sigh of relief, a locomotive enters the frame from the other direction and reduces the home to a heap of rubble and lathe. Keaton puts up a For Sale sign next to the heap of wreckage and, then, as an afterthought leaves the instructions for building the home tucked into the sign.
The little movie is about 20 minutes long but conceived on an epic scale. It's one of Keaton's first films after striking out on his own (he was earlier a protegee of Fatty Arbuckle). The picture is full of dangerous-looking stunts and ends with a spectacular train wreck. (Of course, the last feature film that Keaton directed and controlled, The General, ends with a large-scale train wreck.) I don't find Keaton's movies particularly funny but they are massively impressive and ingenious and have an immanent quality that gives them a particularly grave solemnity -- it's all Newtonian mechanics, acceleration, deceleration, the force of gravity, F = m (a). In one scene, Keaton's wife is taking a bath and drops some soap on the floor -- to reach it, she will have to expose her breasts to the camera. She leans forward to reach for the soap and someone puts the palm of his hand over the camera to protect her modesty. There is an iconic image in the movie: a locomotive is aimed like a projectile at the camera and roars forward; Keaton is riding on the cowcatcher and, after riding a few hundred yards, the huge iron machine stops only a few feet short of the lens dragging the actor into a big close-up -- here the peril is to the camera and it's a startling image.
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