Buster Keaton

b. Joseph Frank Keaton

b. October 4 1895, Piqua, Kansas USA

d. February 1 1966, Los Angeles, California USA

by Dan Callahan

Dan Callahan is a writer based in New York City. He contributes film reviews to Time
Out New York, Stage Press and other publications.

As one of the waxworks playing bridge in Sunset Boulevard (1950), a ravaged Buster
Keaton contemplates a dubious hand. With his customary stoicism, he croaks, “Pass.”
Then, facing up to lousy luck, his face only slightly dejected, he again says “Pass” more
quietly.

This brief appearance in Billy Wilder's mordant classic expresses the essential attitude of
his life and work. It is this attitude that makes Buster an important artist, patronized by
intellectuals who appreciate his profundity and by mainstream audiences who gasp and
giggle at his daring. Dismissing claims to greatness, Keaton insisted again and again that
what he was most interested in was getting the laugh.

Like so many film artists, he needed the freedom to create spontaneously if he was to
function at his highest level. During the 1920s, he put out a phenomenal array of rarified,
perfectly judged features and shorts, a cinematic
jewel-box featuring authentic period detail, is-he-
really-doing-that? stunts and an enduring persona
that qualifies as one of the most poetic reactions to
life imaginable. Restrained, unpretentious, pure
films, they belie his seemingly disorganized working
methods, a series of disparate and largely
unnecessary co-directors and the apparent self-
destructiveness of his own personality.

As a child, he was part of a vaudeville act with his

parents. Buster was billed as “The Little Boy Who
Can't Be Damaged” and Papa Joe Keaton was
flinging him roughly around the stage at the age of
five. Buster understood quite early that he would get
bigger laughs if he retained a serious expression. The

Papa Joe, mother Myra and

little Buster.
Three Keatons were a popular act, though some questioned the knockabout humor,
especially as Buster got older and his father got drunker. At the age of 21, after 16 years
of punishing, trouper-like work, Buster didn't have a penny to call his own. (1)

The effect of such a childhood cannot be overlooked. Because he refused to complain and
would not hear a word against his family, even his abusive father, it is difficult to gauge
just how much and what kind of damage was done. For Buster, it seems as if life from an
early age was all about physical pain and cultivating the endurance to absorb it. Take
your lumps and get the laugh, year in, year out. Out of this experience came the creation
of his artistic persona: you fall hard, you get right back up; the girl doesn't love you, do
what you can and wait until she does. He did not cry and he would not smile. Above all,
even if things worked out, Buster knew that everything would soon fall apart again,
which led to some of the most ruthlessly unsentimental endings in film history. At
bottom, he was a cagey, down-to-earth pessimist who could occasionally liberate himself
through graceful movement up into pure physical abstraction.

Liberation from vaudeville came in the zaftig form of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who
mentored the young comic. In The Butcher Boy (1917), his film debut, Buster compels
the camera immediately with his subtle, very
contained movements. Casually, he puts on what
was to become his trademark porkpie hat and it
sticks—literally—with molasses. At one point, in
one of innumerable pratfalls to come, he falls
backwards onto his neck and does a headstand to get
up to his feet.

He made 14 films with Arbuckle and got his first

taste of directing the action. “I directed when
Roscoe was in the scene,” he reported. (2) In these
shorts, his persona has not fully formed yet, but
many of the familiar characteristics are already
present. Though he's not entirely deadpan, facial
gymnastics are few. The Arbuckle/Keaton shorts are
sloppy and Mack Sennett-hostile; when Buster was Buster and "Fatty" Arbuckle
given the opportunity to make his own films, he did
not settle for knockabout stuff. What interested him was a kind of conceptual humor that
is rather difficult to describe in words, since it depends on visual associations that only
make sense in the moment. Such humor is, needless to say, an acquired taste.

There are some that find Keaton's films dull, preferring Chaplin's flash, his easy laughs
and unearned tears. There is no pressing reason to choose between them, any more than
there is a reason to choose between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Both have their virtues
and failings, depending on your point of view, but Keaton is definitely the more realistic
of the two; when he kicks a villain in the ass, as Chaplin did constantly, his foot gets hurt.

The shorts Keaton made in the early twenties are

warm-ups for his features, but they have exotic
delights of their own. Filled with topical jokes
about prohibition and the success of women's
suffrage, they exhibit a consistent self-reflexivity,
making them perhaps the first serious films about
films themselves. In One Week (1920), there is a
delicious scene: his newlywed wife is taking a
Sybil Seely and Buster in One Week
bath. She drops the soap and reaches to get it, but then looks at the audience and makes a
“tsk-tsk!” face, whereupon a hand covers the camera lens to hide her nudity. This scene
demonstrates his sophisticated awareness of the nature of the film medium, which would
climax in Sherlock, Jr (1924). Keaton understood, instinctively, the dream-like nature of
films — many of the shorts end with him waking up from a dream-filled slumber.

In Hard Luck (1921), he anticipates Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971) by 50 years—
the entire short consists of various unsuccessful suicide attempts, a gambit that reveals his
ticking time bomb despair. “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show,” he remarks
in The Playhouse (1921), a short in which he plays every one of the people in a theater: a
full orchestra, a conductor, a kid, an old lady, a dowager and her bored husband.
Unbounded surrealism, it is also a dig at the pretensions of Chaplin and others who
wanted to be the be-all and end-all of a film, particularly producer Thomas Ince. In The
Frozen North (1922), he does a wicked take-off on Von Stroheim in Foolish Wives
(1922).

Social issues are often broached, uncertainly but boldly. In The Paleface (1921), he
wanders onto an Indian reservation with a butterfly net. When tied to a stake and set on
fire, he tries to put out the blaze with a few phlegmatic birthday candle blows. Impressed
by his tact, the Chief makes him a member and he soon joins them in a violent fight for
their land. In perhaps his most enjoyable short, Neighbors (1920), he gets stuck in a hole
in the ground and emerges in full blackface, prompting an outraged cop to chase him out
of the neighborhood. Quickly, Buster rubs half of the dirt off of his face, then bewilders
the cop by turning in one direction and then another. When he is white, the cop moves
away. When he is black, he moves to eject him. It all ends in a fury of confusion,
providing a pointed racial commentary only slightly spoiled when he later “spooks” a
black lady by putting a sheet on his head.

The Buster of these shorts is often a sarcastic hothead, but can be wonderfully solemn-
silly when lovestruck. The deterioration of his marriage to first wife Natalie Talmadge is
brutally exposed in the shorts, as attitudes towards hostile women become stoic yet
biting. In 1923 Keaton was promoted to features by his brother-in-law, the aptly named
Joseph Schenck, husband to screen star Norma Talmadge. Schenck made sure to secure
the rights to all of the Keaton films. Thus, in the future, Keaton would not see a penny
from any of his masterworks. Like Joe Keaton, Schenck was an exploiter of the Great
Stone Face, but he did give him the freedom he needed. In the next blessed years the best
of the Keaton features began to unroll.

Keaton's first feature, The Three Ages

(1923), is a ragbag send-up of
Griffith's Intolerance (1916), studded
with odd gags, but purely preliminary.
Our Hospitality (1923), his next effort,
featured the kind of careful period
verisimilitude that would embellish his
best film, The General (1926), and it
ends in some daredevil stunts over a
waterfall. Keaton was learning to take
his time and find his own particular
rhythm.
The Three Ages
With Sherlock Jr, he came up with a haunting little meditation on movies and dreams.
Projectionist Buster falls asleep at the controls and dreams that he can enter the film he is
unreeling. With a series of ingenious visual effects, Keaton gives us a perfect
demonstration of what it would be like to climb up onto a screen and become a part of the
movie we are watching. It's an unforgettable scene. Without self-consciousness, Keaton
brings home the wondrousness of the medium itself, submerging himself in the ocean of
its superb and liquid unreality. When he steps onto the screen, he fulfills something in all
of us.

The Navigator (1924), which followed, is more of a ballet than a film, a dry account of
two rich twits, effete Buster and out-of-it Kathleen MacGuire, stranded aboard a deserted
boat. The gags are cerebral and as mild as you can imagine. There's an aesthetic at work
in The Navigator that is unlike that of any other director, a style that is distinctly Buster.
For once, the girl is just as funny as he is—he and MacGuire make a fine team.

Seven Chances (1925), which Keaton considered one of his worst films, is actually one of
his best, and certainly his most under-rated. Perhaps Keaton didn't like being tied to such
a definite plot; it's the old Belasco chestnut about the man who must marry before the day
is up if he is to receive seven million smackers. Buster has something of Cary Grant
about him in this, an off-kilter sexual charge, a snarky urbanity. Trying to find a bride
fast, he tangles with a young, dark-haired Jean Arthur for a blissful moment or two. There
are a lot of far-out jokes in Seven Chances, the kind of situations that you can't unravel
with words—described point by point, they wouldn't sound as funny and strange as they
are. In the lunatic climax, an amazingly sustained live action cartoon, hundreds of
potential brides chase him across the countryside, an avalanche of unleashed feminine
rage. As he runs, a real avalanche starts, with boulders that get bigger and bigger.

In Go West (1925), Keaton toys around with Chaplin-like pathos, but tempers it by going
as far out into Zen-like stoicism as you can possibly go while still retaining a pulse. In a
defining moment here, during a game of cards, a gunslinger commands, “When you say
that, smile!” Buster cannot, of course, comply, though he does force the ends of his
mouth up with his fingers, a sweet nod to Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms (Griffith,
1919). At the end of Go West, Buster goes off with a charismatic cow named Brown
Eyes, the most appealing of his leading ladies.

Battling Butler (1926) was

reportedly a favorite of his.
It's probably his weakest
feature, though Martin
Scorsese has praised the
realism of the long boxing
sequence at the end. Far more
impressive is the film many
consider his masterpiece, The
General, which was based on
a true occurrence during the
Civil War. Keaton spent a
great deal of time and money
to get the film exactly as he
Battling Butler wanted it, and this care shows
—it is meticulous in its
period recreation. Buster's engineer hero, Johnny, loves both his train and his girl. When
saying goodbye to the latter, he waves grandly, trips, then resumes his dignified farewell.
Dreaming about her, he sits on the wheel of his train and fails to notice that it has started
to move forward, a sublime image of romantic preoccupation. When things don't work
out as he intended, his frozen yet fidgety annoyance is priceless. The stunts on the train
are awe-inspiring, but the other great moment, praised by Andrew Sarris, is when he
rings the neck of his ditzy sweetheart then kisses her, all in one fluid gesture. It is his best
film and he knew it, but The General closed quickly, a costly flop. Keaton could never
understand why, but perhaps the film was, as Pauline Kael later pointed out, too perfect.
(3)

After this pinnacle, he slipped somewhat with College (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr.
(1928), but both of these works have enchanting moments. The first, his most audience-
friendly film, finds him trying to impress his girl by taking up athletics. As could be
expected, the stunts dominate, and the movie has a likable calm. In an ending of
breathtaking morbidity, the usual happy fade-out is extended with dissolves, to
domesticity, to crotchety old age and, finally, to a shot of matching tombstones. The
studio system would not take kindly to such dangerous instincts.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. was his last really fine feature. His face is older and sadder, but he
still exhibits humid romanticism, sniffing a girl's hair as if in a trance. The gags play with
expectations and build suspense; in one perfect moment, though knocked out and stuffed
upside down in a car, Buster still manages to cross his legs jauntily.

These last few films are the most refined expression of his art, unafraid to draw out
situations to the point of, and even past, tedium. They are something like Beethoven's last
string quartets: heaven for the specialist, alienating for the casual viewer. After this
achievement came the downward spiral, all-too-familiar for those who deal with the more
fragile and intransigent of the great American film directors, like Griffith, Von Stroheim,
Welles and Nicholas Ray. These artists, along with performers such as John Barrymore,
Bette Davis and Marlon Brando, were forced, through business pressures, to either
compromise themselves, satirize what made them unique, or give up work altogether. In
Keaton's case, the trajectory of events that led him from his own unit under Schenck to a
prison-term contract at MGM is especially sickening.

Buster's voice did not really suit his silent persona—it was low, hoarse and sometimes
cracked, a drinking man's voice. But he probably could have made the transition if MGM
had allowed him freedom to create the way he needed to. In many ways, Buster was the
Godard of the twenties, the Rossellini of slapstick—he needed to improvise. He was
unable to come up with a cut-and-dried script—that just wasn't the way he worked. The
studio system crushed him, indifferently. After some financially successful but
embarrassingly poor talkies, he was fired by MGM in 1933, ostensibly because of his
now-severe alcoholism. Washed-up in films, divorced by vindictive Natalie Talmadge, he
lost his huge mansion, his children, his career, his life.

Buster thought of himself as a failure for a long time and he took what he could get—
grim shorts at Columbia and Educational Pictures and gag man jobs at MGM. He turned
up in bit roles in the forties, a woeful, deteriorated face in the crowd, the ruined remains
of one of life's most beautiful faces. Later, television sustained him financially.
“I never thought we'd come to
this,” he says to Chaplin in
Limelight (Chaplin, 1952), both
of them past their prime,
irrelevant in sound, longing for
youth and silence. In the early
'60s, he did a series of
commercials for Simon Pure
Beer and the like, as well as
three beach party movies with
Frankie and Annette. Older,
heavier, his timing long gone,
he minced and mugged. The
years 1930 to 1966 are quite a Buster and Chaplin in Limelight
trial for those who admire his
silents. But they are important too if we want to take the measure of the man.

Like Chaplin, he had a native gift for movement, but, unlike the Little Tramp, he had
very modern instincts that propelled him far ahead of any of his contemporaries. For so
long, he was thought of as just a forgotten pie-thrower with stone face and porkpie hat.
Today he is revered for that stream of pure movies from the twenties, a sequence of work
that has improved with age and speaks to us all from the viewpoint of an artist who is
both burned and purified, numb and serene, hopeful but cynical. Buster was just getting
the laughs. We got the rest.

© Dan Callahan, September 2002

Endnotes:

1. Meade, Marion, Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, Harper Collins Publishers,
1995

2. Ibid
3. Kael, Pauline, 5001 Nights at the Movies, Henry Holt & Company, 1982

Filmography
Buster Keaton's two-reel shorts with
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle:
All films directed by Fatty Arbuckle and starring Fatty
Arbuckle and Buster Keaton.

The Butcher Boy (1917)

The Roughhouse (1917)
A Country Hero (1917)
Oh, Doctor! (1917)
His Wedding Night (1917)
Coney Island (1917)
The Bell Boy (1918)
Moonshine (1918)

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle

Out West (1918)
Good Night, Nurse! (1918)
The Cook (1918)
The Hayseed (1919)
Back Stage (1919)
The Garage (1919)

Buster Keaton silent shorts:

The High Sign (1920) Co-directed with Eddie Cline

One Week (1920) Co-directed with Eddie Cline
Convict 13 (1920) Co-directed with Eddie Cline
The Scarecrow (1920) Co-directed with Eddie Cline
Neighbors (1920) Co-directed with Eddie Cline
The Haunted House (1921) Co-directed with Eddie Cline
Hard Luck (1921) Co-directed with Eddie Cline
The Paleface (1921)
The Playhouse (1921)
The Goat (1921) Co-directed with Malcolm St. Clair
Cops (1922) Co-directed with Eddie Cline
My Wife's Relations (1922)
The Frozen North (1922) Co-directed with Eddie Cline
The Electric House (1922) Co-directed with Eddie Cline
The Love Nest (1922) Co-directed with Eddie Cline

Buster Keaton features:

The Three Ages (1920) Co-directed with Eddie Cline. 80min
Our Hospitality (1923) Co-directed with Jack C. Blystone. 87min
Sherlock, Jr. (1924) 56min
The Navigator (1924) Co-directed with Donald Crisp. 78min
Seven Chances (1925) 80min
Go West (1925) 87min
Battling Butler (1926) 80min
The General (1926) Co-directed with Clyde Bruckman. 95min
College (1927) Co-directed with James W. Horne (uncredited). 85min
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) Co-directed with Charles F. Reisner (uncredited). 77min

Buster Keaton later shorts:

The Gold Ghost (1934) Co-directed with Charles Lamont
Allez Oop (1934) Co-directed with Charles Lamont
One Run Elmer (1935)
Tars and Stripes (1935) Co-directed with Charles Lamont
Hayseed Romance (1935) Dir: Charles Lamont (performer)
Grand Slam Opera (1936) Co-directed with Charles Lamont
Blue Blazes (1936) Co-directed with Raymond Kane
The Chemist (1936) Dir: Al Christie (performer)
Mixed Magic (1936) Co-directed with Raymond Kane
Jail Bait (1937) Dir: Charles Lamont (performer)
Ditto (1937) Dir: Charles Lamont (performer)
Love Nest on Wheels (1937) Co-directed with Charles Lamont
Pest from the West (1939) Dir: Del Lord (performer)
Nothing But Pleasure (1939) Dir: Jules White (performer)
The Taming of the Snood (1940) Dir: Jules White (performer)
Film (1965) Dir: Alan Schneider, written by Samuel Beckett (performer)
The Railrodder (1965, Canada) Co-directed with Gerald Potterton

Film about Buster Keaton:

Buster Keaton Rides Again (1965, Canada) Dir: John Spotton

Select Bibliography
Benayoun, Robert, The Look of Buster Keaton, St. Martin's Press, 1984

Bengtson, John & Brownlow, Kevin, Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the
Films of Buster Keaton, Santa Monica Press, December 1999

Blesh, Rudi, Keaton, Macmillan Publishing, 1966

Dardis, Tom, Buster Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down, 1979, Reprint Edition,
Proscenium Publishing, 1988

Dyer MacCann, Richard, The Silent Comedians, Scarecrow Press, 1993

Edwards, Larry, Buster: A Legend in Laughter, McGuinn & McGuire, 1995

Horton, Andrew (ed.), Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr, Cambridge University Press, 1997

Kael, Pauline, 5001 Nights at the Movies, Henry Holt & Company, 1982

Keaton, Buster and Samuels, Charles, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, 1960, Republished by
Da Capo Press, 1988

Keaton, Eleanor & Vance, Jeffrey, Buster Keaton Remembered, Harry N. Abrams, 2001

Kerr, Walter, The Silent Clowns, Random House, 1975

Kline, Jim, The Complete Films of Buster Keaton, Citadel Press, 1994

Knopf, Robert, The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton, Princeton University Press, 1999

Meade, Marion, Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase, Harper Collins Publishers, 1995

Miller, Blair, American Silent Film Comedies: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Persons, Studios and
Terminology, McFarland & Company, 1995

Mitchell, Glenn, A-Z of Silent Comedy: An Illustrated Companion, Brasseys, Inc., 1999

Moews, Daniel, Keaton: The Features Close-Up, University of California Press, 1977

Oldman, Gabriella, Keaton's Silent Shorts: Beyond the Laughter, Southern Illinois University
Press, 1999

Rapf, Joanna and Green, Gary L., Buster Keaton: A Bio-Bibliography, Greenwood Publishing
Group, 1995
Keaton
Shorts
by Adrian Danks

Adrian Danks is President of the

Melbourne Cinémathèque and
lectures in cinema and cultural
studies at RMIT University,
Department of Communication
Studies.

The Scarecrow (1920 USA 16mins)

Source: NLA/CAC Prod Co: Keaton Hard Luck

Productions released through Metro
Pictures Corp. Prod: Joseph M.
Schenk Dir, Scr: Buster Keaton,
Eddie Cline Phot: Elgin Lesley

Cast: Buster Keaton, Sybil Sealey, Al St John, Joe Roberts.

Hard Luck (1921 USA 18mins)

Source: NLA/CAC Prod Co: Keaton Productions released through Metro Pictures Corp. Prod:
Joseph M. Schenk Dir, Scr: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline Phot: Elgin Lesley

Cast: Buster Keaton, Virginai Fox, Joe Roberts.

The Electric House (1922 USA 21 mins)

Source: CAC/NLA Prod Co: Buster Keaton Productions Prod: Joseph M. Schenck Dir, Scr:
Buster Keaton, Eddie Kline

Cast: Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Keaton

Battling Buster

It is possible to argue that to love the work of Buster Keaton is to love the cinema, or at
least a certain kind of cinema of movement, mise en scène and limitless visual invention,
and that alternately exhibits a kind of masterful control and freefalling abandon. Keaton's
is a cinema that is driven by a highly articulated style and a passing respect for the
regulating realm of classical narration (just look at the command of narrative exposition,
classical style and genre in a film like Our Hospitality [1923]). This is partly illustrated
by the ways in which Keaton plays with romance and the idea of heterosexual coupling
(observe how Keaton treats his female stars, and they treat him, in Sherlock, Jr. [1924] or
The General [1927]). In this respect, The Scarecrow and The Electric House are
contrastive works that do not focus equally on the trappings of classical storytelling, nor
on the key agents of this storytelling, characters. Although they were made less than two
years apart, one can see the radical development of Keaton's storytelling prowess in the
progression from the relatively discrete gag structure of The Scarecrow to the more fully
integrative form of The Electric House (which inventively fashions its story around one
basic concept).

Keaton's is a materialist cinema, so it is unsurprising that his films routinely address the
'materiality' of early twentieth century modernity and its impact upon the human body,
mind and spatiality. In many respects his films plot the fate of characters becoming
competent to new technologies, objects and environments. For example, in The Electric
House Buster quickly learns to adapt to his new profession as an electrical engineer (after
getting his diploma mixed up) and eventually utilises the seemingly out-of-control
mechanical house to help defeat the actual engineer who is trying to seek revenge. But
Keaton is also a pragmatist and his films routinely show characters responding to
problems in simple, physical and 'logical' ways. Thus, on encountering the problem of
how to electrify a house, Buster simply reads an introductory book about harnessing
electricity.

Technology abounds in Keaton's cinema, but this technology is of a particular kind. In

Modern Times (1936), Chaplin emphasised the alienating qualities of the machine, its
ability to transform its human operators into a mirror image or function of itself. Keaton's
view is very different as he regards and celebrates the cinema itself as such a technology
or machine. But he also utilises this quality to produce openly artificial but also
wondrously pragmatic effects (and, of course, wonderfully funny jokes). Thus, the sun
that quickly rises at the beginning of The Scarecrow is both magical and self-consciously
phoney or material (a similar effect is often produced through the transition between one
place and another in Keaton's films, an effect parodied in Sherlock, Jr.). Nevertheless,
what is often most beguiling about Keaton's films is the sheer level of invention and
ingenuity that is on display. In the opening scene of The Scarecrow, Buster and his flat-
mate are shown living in domestic harmony, with each element of the house's interior and
the film's frame revealing an ingenious piece of adaptation, optimisation and duplication
(for example, the record player also serves as a stove). But it is also important to point
out that the labour-saving devices in both films are plainly ridiculous, a parody of the
transformative devices that were then starting to flood the American home. The
technology of The Scarecrow neatly fits its rustic and ostensibly working class context,
relying upon levers and pulleys and stolen gas rather than the decadent squandering of
electricity highlighted in The Electric House (used to electrify a pool, pool table, stairs
and a dumb waiter). Nevertheless, it is the more difficult and less humanised technology
of The Electric House that requires the more extreme forms of adaptation.

The Scarecrow is a more episodic film than The Electric House. It is less integrated and
relies more fully on conventional comic forms such as the slapstick chase and the
contested pursuit of a love interest. Thus, despite the ingenuity of the film's opening
scene (in which Buster and his house-mate show off the clever industry of their
mechanised home), it bares only a passing relationship to the more conventional high-
paced hi-jinx of the rest of the film. It encounters speed rather than fixates on technology
(thus, although cars and motorbikes appear in the film the characters also run and ride
horses, with no hierarchy insisted upon). The Electric House is a more concentrated,
developed and existential film (a quality partly related to the impasse of emotion more
clearly registered on Buster's face). Although the electrified technology provides most of
the film's gags, the film also relies upon these elements to hint at the dislocation between
characters and the spaces they find themselves in. Thus, the romance in the film - Buster
takes up the job of electrifying the house to woo his employer's daughter - is purely
perfunctory and merely a justification for the actions Buster performs. The place of this
'romance' is signified in the film's conclusion. In trying to save his life, the girl actually
flushes Buster out through the sewerage system, mechanically jettisoning him from the
plot that was itself nothing other than a mechanism - a perfectly functioning machine to
showcase a series of ingenious gags and situations.

Amongst the most remarkable aspects of Keaton's cinema can be found in his use of
framing, mise en scène, and on- and off-screen space. Thus, his mise en scène is often
extremely detailed, the field of the image fully exploited, and the four sides of the frame
equally corruptible, and yet, his films are routinely fluid and easily readable. Similarly,
much of what I have said might suggest that Keaton's films are overly constructed,
perhaps lifeless. But, similarly to the work of Jacques Tati, this meticulous attention to
detail also opens up a degree of freedom and life. Thus, Keaton's careful working out of
where to place himself, what to put in the frame, and how to interrelate objects and
characters, also enables the audience to watch 'unimpeded' and learn to scan the total
surface of the image.

The Electric House is often discussed in relation to the injury Keaton sustained during its
initial filming (the film was subsequently postponed for almost a year). This injury, a
broken ankle sustained while performing one of the stunts on the electrified stairs, tells us
quite a deal about the nature of Keaton's cinema and its incipient realism. Despite the
artifice and trickery of Keaton's films, we also perceive that what we see is indeed going
on in front of the camera, is being captured as it unfolds, and is to a large extent real.
Thus, despite The Electric House providing a parody of new technology and its effects on
domestic life, the film performs a very real encounter with a particular location and the
transformative nature of this technology (and how the film itself adapts by quickly
editing to a shot outside the house of Buster diving from the top floor into the outdoor
pool). The Electric House was in fact restarted from scratch, the house rebuilt in order to
make it safer for the combustible nature of Keaton's comedy. But rather than see this as a
sign of conservatism, it is more accurate to regard it as indicative of a process of
adaptation, refinement and mechanisation - an acceptance of the mechanistic or
materialist nature of cinema and Keaton's own variation upon it. Thus, the film itself has
learned and adapted, and more keenly found ways to combine technique, style, narrative
and performance. It is not surprising that within six months Keaton had moved
exclusively on to the more expansive canvas of the feature film.

© Adrian Danks, March-April 2001

The Narrative-Machine:
Buster Keaton's Cinematic Comedy,
Deleuze's Recursion Function
and the Operational Aesthetic
by Lisa Trahair

Lisa Trahair is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales. Her book
Laughing Down Silence: Sense and Nonsense in Early Cinematic Comedy will be published in
2005.

Official directorial credits for films starring Buster Keaton are not given in this article; see the
Great Directors entry on Keaton for a full filmography.
Buster Keaton's two-reeler My Wife's Relations (1922) is prefaced by an intertitle
which reads: “In the foreign section of a big city – where so many different
languages are spoken, the people misunderstand each other perfectly...” Following
this, alternate montage connects two utterly disconnected situations. In the first
situation, Keaton, playing a sculptor, vigorously absorbed by the demands of his
work, accidentally collides with a postman. In the second situation, a couple
“speaking” Polish call a celebrant on the telephone to ask if he is available to marry
them forthwith. In the first situation, Keaton's collision with the postman has two
outcomes, both of which drive the narrative on. Keaton is left with a letter whose
addressee is encrypted in the smudged details on the envelope, and the postman
throws something at Keaton which, like the letter, misses its destination, and breaks
the window of a neighbouring building – the building, no less, where the celebrant of
the second situation awaits his clients. Keaton's attempt to flee the scene of the
crime is obstructed by a big fat burly beast of a woman who has witnessed the flying
projectile, assumed Keaton to have been responsible for it and marched him in to
face the wrath of the owner of the property. Because the celebrant doesn't speak
English, he in turn assumes they are the couple desperate to make their vows and
marries them accordingly.

Keaton's new wife takes him home to her father and brothers, all of who mistreat
him terribly. His would be the lot of an overworked “Cinderfella” had the father not
found the misappropriated letter, opened it, read of an inheritance and assumed the
beneficiary to be his son-in-law. Accordingly, the family reverses its treatment of him
and all, together, begin to live the life of Riley. That is, until the family of the letter's
real addressee determines to revenge itself upon those who have taken what does
not belong to them.

In My Wife's Relations, the play of contingency and misinterpretation provides the

means by which Keaton (the director) connects disconnected events. What he dubs
the perfection of misunderstanding in his hands becomes both an admirable
description of the film's comicality and the basis of narrative structure.

In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze describes this connective aspect

of Keaton's aesthetic in terms of the recursion function (1). The English edition of
Cinema 1 translates fonctions récurrentes and series récurrentes (2) as recurrent
function and recurrent series respectively but this leads to an unusual
characterisation of Keaton's gags and doesn't, in any case, fit with the analogy that
Deleuze draws between Keaton's cinema and Rube Goldberg's cartoons.

On the other hand, series récurrentes also corresponds to the mathematical term
recursion series and it is in fact this term – recursion – that is more appropriate to
Keaton's aesthetic and, indeed, Deleuze's explanation of it. The example of recursive
language given by the OED is “This is the house that Jack built. This is the mouse
that lived in the house that Jack built. This is the cat that ate the mouse that lived in
the house that Jack built” and so forth. Deleuze says of the structure of Keaton's
films: “Each element of the series is such that it has no function, no relationship to
the goal, but acquires one in relation to another element which itself has no function
or relation” (3). The series, in other words, is not purposive but results from a
pragmatic effort to link one moment to the next. Strictly speaking, the series can go
on ad infinitum, but in Keaton's work the beginnings and ends of films stand as two
disconnected points, and within these broad points of disconnection are numerous
other disconnected points. Deleuze, by way of explanation, likens Keaton's comedy
to Rube Goldberg's machine cartoons, the causalities of which “operate through a
series of disconnections” (4). One such Goldberg cartoon, Professor Butt's Automatic
Dishwasher (c. 1928), shows a contraption constructed by Professor Butt for washing
the dishes while at the movies. The cartoon depicts a proscenium view of a room
housing a complicated arrangement of domestic appliances, connected by pulleys
and levers and energised by the family pets. The caption which goes with the image
reads:
 When spoiled cat (A) discovers he is alone, he lets out a yell which scares
mouse (B) into jumping in the basket (C), causing lever end (D) to rise and pull
string (E) which snaps automatic cigar lighter (F). Flame (G) starts fire sprinkler
(H). Water runs on dishes (I) and drips into sink (J). Turtle (K), thinking he
hears babbling brook babbling, and having no sense of direction, starts wrong
way and pulls string (L), which turns on switch (M) that starts electric glow
heater (N). Heat ray dries the dishes.

Professor Butt's Automatic Dishwasher

Another example of a recursion trajectory, perhaps the most elemental to be found

in Keaton's films, occurs in another two-reeler, The Pale Face. The Keaton
character's effort to flee the clutches of the Indians is stymied when the chase
manoeuvres him toward the edge of a ravine. Its precipices are connected by a
broken-down bridge, consisting of two parallel ropes and less than a handful of
planks, which provide a path for the distance of only one or two steps. Beyond this,
the ropes are bare, and the bridge hollows out to the abyss below. Keaton has no
means of escaping the Indians except by this forsaken bridge, so he installs himself
as a machine in it, removes a plank from behind him as he crosses it and replaces it
in front of him, thereby continuing his trajectory in a repetitive and piecemeal
fashion. The two sides of the ravine thus present the points of disconnection, and the
planks of wood, individually useless, are the elements of the series that provide
Keaton's means of transportation. The planks, in other words, are his props.

While Deleuze himself is loathe to specify the role of the comic performer or the
comedic in the discussions of cinematic comedy in either of his Cinema books (5),
this essay explores the connection between the aesthetic that he identifies as
specifically Keatonesque and the humorous quality of Keaton's narratives. Keaton's
unique formulation and utilisation of the action-image is taken as a means of
constructing cinematic narrative in accordance with Deleuze's own conception of
narrative as something not given in the cinema but “a consequence of the visible
[apparent] images themselves and their direct combinations” (6). Keaton's utilisation
of the recursion function, the current essay argues, generates non-dialectical and
inorganic teleologies. Recursion is thus the comic means by which Keaton discloses
the machine lying at the heart of narrative.

The argument presented here extends the recent theorisation of cinematic comedy
by Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik in their book Popular Film and Television Comedy
(7) and by Tom Gunning in his essay on the operational aesthetic entitled “Crazy
Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags and the Origins of American
Film Comedy” (8). It focuses upon the aesthetic implications of Neale and Krutnik's
contention that the shift in the industrial basis of cinema that saw the demand for
longer films necessitated greater emphasis upon narrative in '20s slapstick. It
considers Gunning's identification of the operational aesthetic with the causal
structure of the machine and with gag-based comedy. By explicating and interpreting
Deleuze's treatment of Keaton's singular deployment of the action-image, it gives
concrete content to Gunning's claim that this coincidence between the machine and
the gag lays bare the mechanics of narrative articulation. It thereby investigates
further Keaton's comic configurations of mise-en-scène, gags and narrative
structures in order to assess their significance for our understanding of narrative in
general.

The Two-Reelers

Keaton's two-reelers look back to Mack

Sennett's aesthetics in their slapstick and
chase sequences, in the emergence of comedy
from the interpenetration of situations which
are parallel in space and time although wildly
disparate in content, and in their
experimentation with dream logic, particularly
the imbrication of comic logic and dream logic.
But the two-reelers also look forward to his
features in their emphasis on props and in
their construction of both stories and gags
around the deployment of props. Indeed, the
finest of the features are stories built around a
The Cameraman
single prop – the train in The General, the
ocean liner in The Navigator, the steamboat in Steamboat Bill, Jr., the cinema in
Sherlock, Jr., and the movie camera in The Cameraman – or a motif, which is in any
case a concept that has a prop-like status – athletics in College and marriage in
Seven Chances.

By Keaton's own admission, his short films were often not much more than a
compilation of improvised gags, sometimes with less than the barest bones of
narrative structure. But such extemporising, he observed, could not sustain a 100-
minute film (9). And although he shares the credits with other directors in his shorts
as well as his features, Keaton himself has quite tellingly suggested that in his
feature films other directors were largely brought in to assist with the development
of a storyline (10).

The question that concerns me here is how the need for a story-line, for narrative,
forced Keaton, beyond seeking assistance from other directors, to relearn his comic
repertoire between making short and feature-length films. To put it another way: to
what extent did Keaton in fact subordinate the comic to narrative, or vice versa?

The subordination of the comic to narrative, or of the possibility of the comic

replacing logical causality with surprise, fate, chance, luck, etc., or of slapstick
existing as a non-narrative kind of cinematic attraction are the most vehemently
debated questions by theorists of cinematic comedy. David Bordwell, Steve Neale,
Frank Krutnik, Donald Crafton, Tom Gunning, and Henry Jenkins (11) have all
attempted in one way or another to account for the relationship between the comic
and narrative. In approaching this issue here, I will argue that what comes to
distinguish Keaton's transition from the two-reeler to the feature-length film is that
his gags are not so much recast within the dramatic form of narrative as mobilised in
such a way as to create a distinctive form of comedy (12) .

In order to show how Keaton's gags provide him with a structuring logic for his
extended narratives, let me first very briefly provide details of the kinds of narrative
that are found in his two-reelers. The preponderance of adventures and situations
furnishes the “structure” of Keaton's short films with a more or less rudimentary
narrative form. The films tend to chronicle the Keaton character's life rather than
present fully formulated narratives. The narratives vary, however, in the degree to
which they are linear and in the extent to which they are digressive or resolved, and
in the way events are organised according to the rules of psychological and causal
motivation. For the most part they are largely produced through building up
humorous incidents or episodes; they are not properly structured interpretations of
events, but formations that emerge as a result of nothing more than the continuity
of time and space. Four kinds of narrative can be identified in the two-reelers,
although it is not necessarily the case that they are mutually exclusive. A
consideration of the articulation of these narratives will in turn enable us to
understand how, in addition to the external pressures associated with the demand
for longer films that were brought to bear on his filmmaking, Keaton eventually
arrived at a distinctive form of cinematic narrative.

The two-reelers of the first group are conventional in the sense of being goal-
oriented, psychologically motivated, structured through the logic of causality and
resolved at the end. These quest narratives detail the Keaton character's attempt to
achieve a goal (whether it is marriage (Neighbors; Day Dreams; Cops [1922] or the
completion (successful or unsuccessful) of any kind of task (One Week [1920]; The
Electric House [1922]). While these narratives are quite conventional, they are also
farcical in as much as the narrative is rudimentary while the plot is as voluminous as
its events are inconsequential. Those of the second group are less structured by
narrative flow than built around situations, much like the situation comedies that we
see on television. Keaton retains this kind of structure from the time he worked with
Arbuckle. It is evident in such films as Coney Island (1917), The Butcher Boy (1917)
and The Garage (1919) (all made with Arbuckle) and continues to predominate in
The Playhouse (1921), The Blacksmith (1922), The Scarecrow (1920), The Haunted
House (1921) and My Wife's Relations. The third group – The Boat (1921), The
Balloonatic (1923), The High Sign (1921), Hard Luck (1921), The Goat (1921), The
Pale Face (1921) – are adventure narratives with digressive trajectories brought
about by comic processes. The Keaton character's narrative agency in these films is
minimised – meaning that he does not so much set out on an adventure (in the way
he does later in the feature film Go West [1925] for example), as embody the
attributes of a nearly will-less man caught up in the flotsam and jetsam of the world
at large, but doing his best to adapt to the ordeals that it presents to him. This
characteristic provides for the digressive structure of such films and allows the comic
free reign. The films of the fourth group, structured according to the “logic” of
displacement, are without a rational basis for connecting events. In The Frozen North
(1922), The Love Nest (1923) and Convict 13 (1920), even the most tenuous
narrative logic of coincidence and accident is abandoned and replaced by dream
logic. Causality is more dramatically forsaken in Convict 13 and The Frozen North
than in The Love Nest.

It was in the features, however, that the problem of the tension between narrative
and the comic presented itself most emphatically to Keaton. There is evidence to
suggest that because the demand for a story was at odds with the methods he had
previously developed for making audiences laugh, Keaton's shift to making feature-
length comedies led him to reconsider the comic possibilities at his disposal. In his
biography he outlines how the need for a stronger storyline meant that between his
two-reelers and features he had to relinquish implausible narrative structures and
impossible gags. He had to curb his use of slapstick and work on developing
believable characters. He also had to avoid gags that were discontinuous with the
basic plot structure (13).

Narrative linearity presented one of the biggest difficulties. Keaton learned through
experience that in feature-length films audiences would not tolerate having their
attention diverted from the hero's efforts to resolve the problems presented by the
narrative. To illustrate the point, he cites one of his favorite sight-gags, devised for
The Navigator (1924). It was to take place in the scene where Keaton, having
donned a diving suit, plunges down to the bottom of the ocean to mend a leak in the
ship on which he and the girl have been set adrift. At his disposal he has a number of
gags relating to the incongruity of situation and behaviour (while underwater he puts
up a barricade bearing the sign “Men at Work” and washes his hands in a bucket of
water) and also to the transformation of objects (he uses a lobster as a pair of pliers
and a swordfish as a weapon to joust with another swordfish). All of these gags,
according to Keaton, were readily accepted by the audience. The one they rejected
(and which was cut from the film) involved the Keaton character playing the part of
traffic cop. Pinning a starfish to his diver's suit, he held up his hand to halt a passing
school of fish so that a big fish waiting patiently for clear passage could go along its
way. When the gag was shown in the trailer, the audience's response was suitably
mirthful, indicating that the gag itself was not lacking in comicality. But a subsequent
test-screening of the whole film revealed that its placement in the narrative vitiated
its comic potential. Keaton concluded that his “feature comedies would succeed best
when the audience took the plot seriously enough to root for [him]” as he
“indomitably worked [his]...way out of mounting perils” (14). The challenge then was
to devise a way of making gags while retaining a narrative structure that would
guarantee the maintenance of audience attention.

While Keaton's feature films were more conventional in narrative structure than his
two-reelers – not only more teleological but also more organised around the Keaton
character as agent of narrative development – an examination of his first forays into
feature filmmaking indicates that it wasn't a straightforward transition. His first
feature, The Three Ages, a parody of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), is in fact
three short films intercut with each other, each exploring the same theme but in
different epochs – love in prehistoric, Roman, and modern times. The feature-length
narrative of his next film, Our Hospitality, was achieved largely by subordinating
comedy to melodrama. The beginning of the film is firmly organised by the
melodramatic mode; the narrative hinging upon a feud between two families which
provides the situation for a duel between the Keaton character and the brothers of
his love interest. Comedy is injected into the duel structure; it breaks with
conventional melodramatic realism, but its effects are comparatively insignificant in
terms of narrative development, leading David Bordwell et al to cite it for its
exemplary narrative structure in spite of its genre (15). The third feature, Sherlock,
Jr., confirms that Keaton was even at that stage still uncomfortable with the full-
length narrative. This time he deals with the problem by inserting a dream within a
film within the film, which allows him to retain the impossible gags and divergent
logical structures of some of his earlier films. It is only with his fourth feature, The
Navigator, that Keaton makes the transition to full feature-length comedic narrative.
It is noteworthy that in this film he interweaves the narrative structure with a prop in
a manner that he had not done so resolutely since One Week.

Both The Navigator and The General attest to

a comparatively greater ease with narrative
structure on Keaton's part and the story is
implicated in nearly all of the incidents
related. In The Navigator, Keaton plays a
card-carrying member of the idle rich, Rollo
Treadway. The plot of the film at its broadest
level involves Rollo attempting to get the girl
he loves to marry him. While she initially
rejects him, complication and coincidence,
which sees them both set adrift on an ocean
liner called “the Navigator”, conspire to give
The Navigator them a second chance. Un-navigated, as it
were, they are subjected to the will and whim of the elements. In the course of their
adventure, Rollo and the girl must adapt to the scale of the ship, hazard fierce
storms and vast seas and fend off a tribe of hungry cannibals. A series of individual
tests brings them closer together until the final shot where their embrace affirms
their love for each other.

Conventional narrative causality also appears to organise the unfolding of events in

The General. The film presents the story of the heroic deeds of a Southern patriot in
the American Civil War. Keaton plays an esteemed train driver called Johnnie who
has but two loves, his engine, eponymously named The General, and a girl called
Annabelle. When Civil War engulfs the South, Annabelle's brother and father do the
honourable thing and enlist. Annabelle expects Johnnie to do the same, but when he
tries his application is refused because he is regarded as more valuable as a train
driver. Annabelle dismisses Johnnie's excuses and vows to have nothing to do with
him until he is in uniform. From this point on, the narrative concerns Johnnie's
redemption.

Even though in both films all the events in some way pertain either to developing the
character for the audience or to the films' narrative unfolding, there is nevertheless a
sense in which these feature-length narratives differ from their non-comedic
counterparts. Chance, fate, luck, and coincidence are more significant factors in the
orchestration of these films' narratives. For example, just when it becomes clear that
the test of “navigation” in The Navigator has overwhelmed the protagonists and
death by drowning is inevitable, a submarine – the deus ex machina – comes to the
rescue. And in The General, coincidence is the only reason that Annabelle journeys
on Johnnie's train to visit her wounded father in a nearby town and it is bad fortune
that she remains on board when it is stolen by the Northerners. When Johnnie makes
it his mission to retrieve his beloved train, it is unknown to him that Annabelle has
been taken hostage and it is pure luck that he is privy to Northerners' battle plans.
Coincidence, not heroism, nor any dialectical capability on Johnnie's part, enables
him to rescue both Annabelle and his train and warn the Confederates of the pending
Yankee offensive. Coincidence and chance undermine the functions that causality
and character agency have in narrative. In particular, such factors erase the way
that conventional rational causality produces narrative meaning and, indeed,
legitimates narrative's claim to meaning. On the other hand, this is not to suggest
that coincidence and chance necessarily make the films non-narrative or anti-
narrative.

The Operational Aesthetic

One of the most interesting arguments that can be brought to bear on the
relationship between comedy and narrative structure in early cinema comes from
Tom Gunning's theorisation of an operational aesthetic based on demonstrating the
function of the machine. Whereas theorists like David Bordwell and Steve Neale and
Frank Krutnik generally concur that in the relationship between narrative and the
comic the abandonment of causal motivation is more or less a generic convention
(16), Gunning, by contrast, actually makes mechanical causality the crux of the
relationship between cinematic comedy and the operational aesthetic (17).

The operational aesthetic, similarly bound up with the nineteenth century context of
cinema, extends Gunning's previous theorisation of the cinema of attractions (18).
Gunning uses the latter concept to account for cinema's emergence from the specific
cultural and technological conditions of the nineteenth century, noting in particular
the vast array of optical toys and visual attractions that both culminated in the
invention of cinema and established its audience as sophisticated urban pleasure
seekers. The imperative of early cinema or the cinema of attractions was not, he
argues, to tell stories so much as to arouse and to intensify the curiosity of its
audience, to astonish and shock them.

The earliest evidence of the operational aesthetic is found in the audience's

attraction to the cinematograph itself; the films screened by the cinematograph are
deemed by Gunning to be “simply a demonstration of the machine's process and
functioning” (19). This cinematographic machine similarly captured the process and
functioning of other machines as we see in the Lumière brothers' 1896 actualité,
Arrival of the Train. The fascination with the machine went hand in hand with
cinema's illusory capacity. Gunning cites, for example, early cinema's appropriation
of the music hall's sausage machine routine where a pig is herded into one end of a
box and comes out the other side as meat cuts and sausages (20). The operational
aesthetic also revelled in the reversibility of nature, as is illustrated by the brothers'
film of the brick wall that is erected and dismantled by manipulating the forward and
reverse wind mechanism of the projector.

While many of the cinematic examples of the fascination with operationality have a
comic element to them, it was in the plethora of mischief films produced over the
years 1896–1905 that cinematic comedy really got underway. It is in them that
narrative, gag and mechanism became three distinctive means of ordering the
temporal process in a way that was distinctively cinematic. Gunning identifies these
three components of the operational aesthetic in his analysis of L'Arroseur arrosé
(1895), a film often cited as the first piece of cinematic comedy. A basic narrative
structure is formed by the construction of the gag, a gag that is itself constructed on
the basis of the deployment and redeployment of an apparatus. A man attempting to
water his garden is prevented from doing so by a boy stepping on the hose. When
the man examines the nozzle to see what is wrong with it, the boy steps off the hose
so that water suddenly spurts in the man's face. The man reprimands the boy and
finally chases him out of frame with the hose. The narrative emerges from the
apparatus mediating between the two characters and inscribing action with temporal
development in the operation of the device (21). The gag, Gunning quite rightly
suggests, emerges from the deployment of an apparatus which creates a detour of
character action through an inanimate object, and of course from the man, initially
oblivious to the boy's intervention, being caught unawares.

Gunning describes the anti-productivist ethos of mischief films like this. Their
primary aim was the derailment or interruption of intentional action. Indeed, this
quality of interruption or derailment and the fact that it was “structured around a
quick payoff” constituted its gag-like structure and prevented the “flow...into a
longer temporal progression” (22). As films increased in length, directors for a time
strung pieces of mischief together in a kind of additive or parataxical structure, but
ultimately this method proved unsustainable and the mischief film all but
disappeared. Gunning argues, however, that the operational aesthetic continued to
prevail into the 20s in Chaplin's assembly lines and Keaton's locomotives: “This
fascination with the way things come together, visualising cause and effect through
the image of the machine, bridges the end of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth, shaping many aspects of popular culture” (23).

The Keaton films in which the operational aesthetic most clearly comes to the fore
can be called task films (although there is a task dimension in all of Keaton's films)
(24). The operational aesthetic is evident in the articulated gags in One Week
orchestrated in relation to the construction and transportation of the house, the
gallows with an elasticised noose and the machinic performances of the rioting
prisoner and the Keaton character in Convict 13, the collapsible mast designed to
allow the vessel to squeeze under the low bridges in The Boat, the trafficator made
from a boxing glove and pantograph (extension scissors) in Cops, the constructive
and destructive transformations of the house in Electric House, the demolition of the
car and the invention of the sprung saddle in The Blacksmith, the hybrid balloon/boat
in The Balloonatic and finally Buster's lifeboat and his means of lowering it into the
water in The Love Nest.

The most memorable exploration of the

operational aesthetic occurs in Keaton's two-
reeler The Scarecrow. The adaptation of
objects and construction of apparatuses that
structure so many of Keaton's ventures are
here used to add a masculine touch to
domesticity. The film opens with two men
(Keaton and Joe Roberts) at home, one with
a toothache, the other with an idea of how to
remove the offending tooth. After
misconstructing an apparatus, but

The Scarecrow
nevertheless succeeding in removing the tooth, the two men prepare for dinner. The
house they share is completely, though somewhat unconventionally, mechanised. It
is filled with transformable objects and apparatuses constructed to economise and
masculinise domesticity. A phonograph is also a cooker, a table-top doubles as a wall
plaque, a sink converts into a lounge, a bed into a piano. Strings and pulleys connect
the bottles of condiments set on the dinner table so that they can be efficiently
exchanged and conveniently removed. While the plates are attached permanently to
the table, the table itself is detachable so that food can be emptied from it and fed to
the pets outside through a trap door before being hosed down.

Gunning's identification of an operational aesthetic in early cinematic comedy

unquestionably provides a means of understanding the deployment of apparatuses in
both Keaton's short and feature-length films. More importantly though, it can be
used to explain how these apparatuses relate to Keaton's gags and Keaton's
narrative structures. For the operation of apparatuses oft-times provides the
substance of both the story and the comedy. Consider, for example, the two-reeler
The Electric House. As a tale of retribution, narrative events are linked through
misidentification and revenge. The Keaton character has just graduated as a doctor
of botany but is mistaken for an electrical engineer and contracted to electrify a
house. The film is organised around the undertaking of a single task. Both the story
and the film's comic dimension emerge from the demonstration of the uses of
electricity. And both, literally and figuratively, are concerned with crossed wires. This
film recalls the house of gadgets in The Scarecrow and one can imagine that the
diverse uses of electricity that the film explores would have dazzled contemporary
audiences more than today's. (It is the poetic, often surreal, quality of the images
that emerge from this enterprise that remains impressive.) Stairs become
escalators; the bath travels to the bed to pick up its client; dinner is distributed by
train; the plates are cleaned in the dishwasher and returned to their cupboards by
conveyor belt; the pool table is electrified to set up the game; the library to
distribute books; and outside, the water-level of the swimming pool can be altered
by shifting a lever. The film's gags involve both the operationality and malfunctioning
of these newly invented machines. As one would expect in a Keaton comedy, a few
slapstick glitches temper the demonstration of such modern marvels. The real
engineer gets his own back by unleashing the destructive underside of
electricification. The circuit room is like a computer, which he reprograms to turn the
house against its inhabitants. Keaton's attempt to carry his suitcase up the stairs
turns into a Sisyphean nightmare. With the trunk heavy on his back, he is unable to
see that his interminable movement up the stairs is thwarted by their downward
mechanisation. And as the owner argues with one of his guests in the library, the
automated book selector slaps the latter on the back with such perfect timing as to
lead the man to believe his host is the perpetrator of the violent deed. Lights flash
off and on of their own accord and the dining room furniture starts to pulsate. The
rollaway bath seems to take offence at Keaton and the girl being alone together in
the room and intervenes in the situation by sucking him in and ferrying him away
while knocking her onto the bed, which in turn folds up and imprisons her in the wall
cavity. The house that had been animated by electricity appears to those within it as
suddenly animistic and, in this respect, it behaves in a manner not unlike the
malevolent house in One Week.

Undoubtedly the contraptions and apparatuses in Keaton's films are the basis for his
gags. Even if the operation of such machines does not always correspond with the
Keaton character's intention (for he is capable of unleashing in them an unstoppable
destructive capacity), they are his primary means of adapting to the world in which
he lives and they justify his continuing existence in the film.

Related simply to tasks and the malfunctioning of apparatuses, the operational

aesthetic appears to break out at isolated moments. The machines that Keaton
constructs in his short films are mostly small gestures of intentionally directed
behaviour that accumulate to form the plot. Occasionally the aesthetic is pursued
quite rigorously, as in One Week or The Boat; but more often than not, its somewhat
piecemeal form is closer to that of the turn of the century extended mischief films.

The Comedy of the Dialectic

In Keaton's early work, the operational aesthetic coincides with the films' status as
farce comedies and its mode of functioning is no doubt a new means of accounting
for the structure of farce. What is interesting is the way Keaton eventually manages
to extend the form into some of his features as well. The operational aesthetic
permitted Keaton to respond to the demand for longer films (and for greater
adherence to the conventions of realism, characterisation and story) without
abandoning what was essential to the comedy of his short films.

Gunning, for his part, hesitates over aligning this aesthetic with narrative structure.
While arguing for the coincidence of comedy and a fascination with operationality he
nevertheless initially refuses to concede that the gag could be “an elementary
building block of narrative” (25). Instead he holds to the gag's predominantly
disruptive role and anti-productivist basis – a role consonant with those gags I have
just elaborated in The Electric House. But he nevertheless ends up considering the
narrative component in such gags (26), coming to the conclusion that “in their
contact with narrative, gags do not simply lose their independence, but precisely
subvert the narrative itself” (27). This is achieved “not through their non-narrative
excess, their detouring of narrative concerns into pure attraction [such as slapstick],
but precisely through their integration with narrative, their adoption of narrative's
form of logical anticipation and their subversion of it” (28).

While Gunning utilises the concept of the operational aesthetic to demonstrate that
causality and mechanism coincide in the gag, and that this ordering produces
something like narrative, his emphasis is ultimately on crazy machines, absurdist
mechanics and hence the gag's subversion of narrative's anticipatory logic. The gag,
in other words, relies on a cause-effect structure but follows recognisable causes
with unexpected effects. The gag's subversion of narrative remains part and parcel of
an anti-productivist ethos. In addition, Gunning's interest lies not in the story or
what the event means but in how the operational aesthetic focuses upon the
functions and processes of the machine. But while he identifies the coincidence of
causality, mechanism and gag, he fails to reflect upon their configuration in
functional (as opposed to absurd anti-productive) causality – precisely that kind of
coincidence that we saw at the beginning of this essay in the series of gags that
established the narrative of My Wife's Relations. Such coincidences produce a
mechanistic kind of narrative in which meaning is indeed secondary to operationality.

One of Keaton's commentators, Jean-Patrick Lebel, goes a step further than

Gunning. His observation that Keaton's gags often function as mechanisms for
narrative resolution has led him to label Keaton a dialectician. The gag registers a
“dialectical” form of adjustment on Keaton's part in the course of which the synthesis
resolves the contradiction, through Keaton's masterful success... The gag structure is
not circular but dialectical” (29). Consider his account of a gag from The General:

In pursuit of the Northerners, Keaton prepares to use against them the curious
bombarder-mortar-cannon he has had the foresight to hitch on to the back of his
train. He loads the weapon with elegant pinches of cannon powder (first variation:
cannon charge assimilated into salt-cellar). Keaton lights the weapon's fuse. The
cannon fodder pops out and, after describing a most graceful curve, drops a few feet
away (second variation: simple turnabout, Keaton's fiasco. The cannon belches its
projectile in a niggardly fashion).

But Keaton isn't one to let himself be bested. This time he stuffs the cannon full to
the brim. Now we'll see what we'll see. He lights the fuse and, while it burns, returns
to his driver's seat.
But on his way back to the tender he unfortunately uncouples the mortar truck,
detaching it from the rest of the train. The liberated connecting hook drags along the
track, jerking the weapon and causing the cannon to lower dangerously, until it's
aiming directly at Keaton who tries to save himself. But in his panic he's ensnared
his foot in the hook of the tender, and remains a captive directly in the cannon's line
of fire. In a fit of panic he impotently throws a piece of wood at the cannon (a
supreme detail this, adding to the gag's perfection). This solution proving ineffective,
he faces the cannon, helpless.

It is now that Keaton the director, compensating for his energy, makes the track
curve. The positions are thus the following: Keaton's locomotive takes the curve and
is no longer in the cannon's line of fire; the Northerners' locomotive, on the other
end of the curve, is. And just before the cannon itself takes the curve, the shot goes
off! (30)

Lebel reduces this “double-trigger” gag to

the three moments of the dialectic. The
first stage comprises Keaton overloading
the cannon; the second stage (or
antithesis) occurs when the cannon turns
on him; and the third stage or synthesis
comes about because the cannon
nevertheless hits its initially intended
target. Lebel thus delineates the gag in
dialectical terms, identifying Keaton's
behaviour with dialectical sublation (the The General
Aufhebung). The sublative process is exemplified in his statement that both “Keaton
and the cannon surpass themselves, the former by his magnified action, the latter,
its function enriched by its added inventiveness and precision; Keaton makes the
cannon do things it could never do otherwise” (31).

Lebel's interpretation is salutary in so far as it demands further examination of the

relation between the machine, the comic and the dialectic. Unlike many other
theorists of cinematic comedy, Lebel argues (in this respect like Gunning) that the
gag is not necessarily an interpolation – an autonomous insertion into the narrative –
which bears no necessary relation to the narrative chain but rather a necessary link
in the narrative, a means of propelling the narrative forward. The frequency and the
facility with which Keaton deploys this kind of comedy demands a consideration of
the closeness of Keaton's comedy to the operation of the dialectic and more
specifically an examination of the means by which narrative is constructed in
Keaton's comedy. At the very least it begs the question of what kind of synthesis it is
that resolves the contradiction.

But how are we to account for the different positions of Lebel, who argues that
Keaton is a dialectician, and Gunning, whose work implies that there is a tendency
toward mechanism and mechanical causality in Keaton's work? Let us turn to the
concept of the dialectic itself and the distinction Hegel makes between internal
dialectic and sophistry.

For Hegel, an internal dialectic is the form of becoming of objective things and the
“proper” form of becoming of concepts and categories. According to Hegel's
commentator Michael Inwood, the internal dialectic of objective things is internal to
them in the sense that they “grow and perish” by virtue of their own contradictions.
The internal dialectic of concepts is undertaken by the philosopher's radical
development of flaws within them, thus making them pass over into other concepts
(32).

Inwood claims that by virtue of the dialectic's internal nature, the “dialectic is not a
method, in the sense of a procedure that the thinker applies to his subject-matter,
but the intrinsic structure and development of the subject-matter itself” (33).
Dialectic purporting to be a method would be mere sophistry or an external
application of the dialectic to concepts, “finding flaws in them that they do not really
contain” (34). Comedies of misunderstanding, such as we see in Shakespeare, are
doubtless sophistical in this sense.

In theorising the relationship between the dialectic and comedic narrative, the
concept of teleology can be used to distinguish between the dialectical or organic
form of dramatic narrative and the possibility of a non-dialectical comedic form.
Teleology doubtless has a relation to the dialectic in so far as both are modes of
becoming, but teleology is not necessarily concerned with the resolution of immanent
contradictions nor with sublation as the preservation of that which is negated on a
higher level. Teleology for Hegel pertains to mechanism and chemism (35) and in
contradistinction to the dialectic can properly be either internal or external. Internal
teleology is exemplified in living organisms and has a stronger correspondence to the
dialectic in so far as the realisation of purpose is immanent to the object (36). In
external teleology, the purpose or goal is introduced from an outside agent rather
than immanent. The agent thus presupposes the object and intervenes in it by
attending to the mechanical or chemical principles according to which it operates.
The purpose that the object serves is not its own but that of the agent and often also
that of another entity such as God.

Lebel's characterisation of Keaton as a dialectian could thus be challenged on the

grounds he confuses the dialectic with teleology. Keaton's surpassing of himself (as
Lebel puts it) is not after all the result of the development of internal contradictions,
but the outcome of nature conforming to narrative necessity through divine
intervention (a curve in the track positions Keaton outside the cannon's line of fire),
which in this instance means the intervention of Keaton the director, the metteur-en-
scène who usurps the power of God. In Lebel's example of Keaton's “dialectical” gag
structure, the character's action and its consequences would be more appropriately
understood as the enactment of an external teleology rather than the operation of
the dialectic. While there is an undeniably teleological aspect to the gag, it is not
strictly speaking internally dialectical.

In order to clarify further what is at stake in this mode of narrative development that
functions in accordance with the rules of external teleology, we can examine the
ramifications of Deleuze's classification of Keaton's films in terms of the large form of
the action-image – the form which he argues is properly an organic form in as much
as it is self-generating and self-regulating. For Deleuze's situation of Keaton's work
in the context of the organic form of the action-image provides a pertinent backdrop
for a consideration of comedic narrative. Let us bear in mind too that dialectic, for
Hegel at any rate, is necessarily organic and that the difference between internal
dialectic and the external application of the dialectical method is ultimately a
distinction between the organic and the inorganic.

The action-image is the term Deleuze uses for Classical Hollywood narrative. His
emphasis falls predominantly on the active, transformative structure of such films.
Transformation occurs on the basis of two different compositions of images of actions
and images of situations which give rise to the large and the small forms. In the
large form the relation between situations and actions has the formula SAS'
(Situation, Action, new Situation). The small form, on the other hand, is expressed
by the ASA' structure. An action discloses a situation that demands a new action
(37). The large and small forms of the action-image thus articulate specific
economies of narrative.

Deleuze in fact specifies five laws of the large form of the action-image, but does so
quite separately from his discussion of Keaton. What is important to us here is the
way Keaton's comedy both deploys and modifies them. This will be demonstrated by
posing Deleuze's articulation of such laws against the narrative structure of Keaton's
feature films. In so doing, what Deleuze himself says is extended to show that
Keaton's comedy puts into question the organic quality that Deleuze attributes to the
large form.

In theorising the large form of the action-image, Deleuze specifies the sign value of
images of situations in terms of the Peircian concept of the synsign. The synsign or
the encompasser, as Deleuze also calls it, signifies a real or determinate milieu, a
place with actual qualities and powers that specify that subject's relation to the
situation (38). The qualities and powers of the milieu impinge upon a character and
make him/her respond to the situation in order to modify it. The fact that the
situation impinges on the character in a particular way, and that the character is
responsive, constitutes a second sign called the binomial. The binomial designates a
duel made up of two individuated forces which intersect. One force comes from the
synsign which can manifest itself in an antagonist, the other from the protagonist
(39).

The first law of the action-image pertains to the organic mode of the synsign, which
forms a spiral of development and includes both spatial and temporal caesuras. This
law of the organic structures the actualisation of milieux at the level of situation,
space, frame and shot and organises the passage from the first situation to the
subsequent one (S to S') (40). Not only is it self-generating and self-regulating, it
issues forth challenges that will be responded to and that will cause it to change. The
second law concerns the passage from situation to action. Here the
synsign/encompasser contracts into a binomial or a duel by means of the
convergence of parallel montage. Lines of action emanate from the encompasser and
converge in the binomial in order to “make possible the ultimate individual
confrontation, the modifying reaction” (41). The third law refers to the actual point of
confrontation. At the climax, montage, even the shot/reverse shot is forbidden.
Rather, “two terms confront each other face to face and must be seized in an
irreducible simultaneity” (42). The fourth law of the action-image is that the duel is
neither single nor local; there is “a dovetailing of duels in each other. The binomial is
polynomial” (43). The fifth and final law states that the breach between the
encompasser – Deleuze also calls it the limit-image – and the hero is huge and “can
only be bridged progressively” as the hero actualises his potential powers (44).
Implied in this progression is the psychological development of the hero: “In general
the hero must pass through moments of impotence, internal or external” (45).
Insofar as the large form of the action-image is an organic form, it is synonymous
with the Hegelian dialectic. It develops as a result of the emergence from the
situation of internal, immanent contradictions which are resolved in accordance with
their own immanent qualities. That is to say, the resolution of contradictions is
organic.

In order to see how these laws function in

Keaton's cinema we can consider the
example of Steamboat Bill, Jr. The film's
narrative is centred around Willie (played by
Keaton), a college dandy, attired in Oxford
baggies, bow tie and beret, who visits the
father he has not seen since early
childhood. Steamboat Bill (Willie's father)
(Ernest Torrence) is a parody of early
twentieth century working class masculinity.
Big, beefy and butch, he embodies the ideal
Steamboat Bill, Jr. that to be a man entails practical
competence and he is clearly repulsed by what he perceives to be his son's
effeminate qualities. The challenge presented to his son Willie (obviously so-named
to accord with his personal affectations) is to prove his worthiness to his father. This
challenge is for the most part ignored by Willie, who is more interested in pursuing
the affection of a girl he knows from college than in pleasing his father. The
challenge is only responded to when the storm hits and engages him in a duel of
hyperbolic proportion (46).

In Steamboat Bill, Jr., the synsign starts out as the idyllic quality of a town situated
on the riverside of the Mississippi – which is immediately undermined by the place
name “Muddy Waters”. Pastoral idyll has been wrenched open by the progress of
modernity, the old steamboat is obsolete in the face of its modernised counterpart
while the tradesman is superseded by the entrepreneur. The synsign thus contracts
to form the two sides of the binomial: the Keaton character's redundant father and
the town's most prominent businessman (King), come head to head on a number of
occasions. What is distinctive in Keaton's oeuvre, and this no doubt prevents his
comedy degenerating into pure parody, is that he never breaks the third law, the law
forbidding montage. The confrontation with the cyclone, like the collapsing bridge in
The General, or the waterfall in Our Hospitality, is not conveyed through montage
but is shot as continuous action. Steamboat Bill, Jr. in fact gives Keaton's most
famous example of the confrontation and the risk of death it involves. The facade of
a two-storey building descends upon Keaton in a single shot, the open upper window
becoming his escape hatch from a certain death. The fourth law is evident in the
extension of the general antipathy between King and Bill, to Bill and Willie, and to
Willie and his girlfriend's father. Minor duels escalate into slightly larger ones: Willie
is forbidden to see his girlfriend; Bill gives Willie a return ticket to Boston and sends
him on his way; a violent outburst between Bill and King sees the former
incarcerated, and so forth. In Steamboat Bill, Jr. the limit-image comes in the form
of the cyclone. But while the Keaton character enters into a duel with the manifest
dimensions of the cyclone and in so doing reinstalls harmonious relations, it is
significant that he does not meet this challenge through self-transcendence as the
fifth law demands. Admittedly, in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (and College), Keaton
accumulates greater competency than in his other features. But this is far from
convincing. Even though Willie rescues his father, and his girlfriend and her father,
he still cannot tie a basic knot.

There is thus one law of the large form of the action-image which Keaton's cinema is
not properly obedient to. In the Keaton character's bridging of the breach presented
by the synsign, he evidences little capacity for self-transcendence (47). So, we could
say that in Keaton's films the development of contradictions is organic, both the
constitution of the synsign and the development of the binomial are organic but their
resolution is inorganic. In spite of Deleuze's claim that Keaton's comedy complies
with the large from of the action-image, it by no means complies with all the laws of
that form. And in breaking the fifth law, Keaton throws into question the organic
quality of narrative that the form claims.

Minoration and Recursion

How, without self-transcendence, does Keaton meet the challenge presented to him
by the limit-image? Deleuze's emphasis on the machine and on the functions of
recursion and minoration indicate the specificity of Keaton's response.

Minoration, or the conversion to the miniature, is the means by which Keaton

diminishes the scale of his environment. To fully understand its implications it is first
necessary to reflect further upon the fourth of the five laws. For the dispersal of the
binomial in the polynomial gives rise to a number of minor difficulties. In fact, we
can see here that the small form of the action-image (the ASA') manifests itself in
Keaton's feature-length films. That Deleuze's commentary on Keaton is not situated
in the chapter on the large form of the action-image but in the one on the small form
suggests that one should be wary about polarising the comedy of the small form and
of the large form (polarising for instance, Chaplin and Keaton). Deleuze himself says
in Chapter 11 “Figures, or the transformation of forms” that while “[t]he distinction
between the two forms of actions is in itself clear and simple... its applications are
more complicated” and that although directors have a preference for one form or the
other, they also at times utilise the form that is not their usual one (48). My
argument is that even though Deleuze proposes that the distinctiveness of Keaton's
comedy results from the audacity with which it tackles the large form, the small form
is not only more prevalent in Keaton's shorts but is evident in the large form in what
Deleuze calls minoration.

Let us turn for a moment then to the small form. Like the large form of the action-
image, the small form is comprised of actions and situations, but in the latter variety
the movement emanates from action to situation to new action. The small form,
Deleuze writes, moves from “a mode of behaviour, or a 'habitus'”, to a partially
disclosed situation. ... A representation like this is no longer global but local. ... It is
no longer structural but constructed around events ['événementielle']” (49). The
ASA' form is comprised of a specific kind of sign, called the index, which provides the
rationale for the images of actions and their disclosure of situations (50). The index
itself is located in the action, whether it be a mode of behaviour, a gesture, a
habitus, or a fully articulated action. There are two kinds of indexical actions: one
refers us to something about the situation that is not present, to a lack or an
absence of something; the other is equivocal or suggests two different situations at
the same time. In cinematic comedy the latter kind of index prevails. Deleuze
illustrates the index of equivocity in an example from a Chaplin film in which Charlie,
seen from behind, appears to be sobbing convulsively until a subsequent shot
discloses that he is shaking a cocktail. Certainly this is an apposite image of Chaplin's
use of equivocity to simultaneously produce pathos and comedy. My argument is
that Keaton's comedy also relies on the equivocity of the index.

The equivocity associated with the small form dominates most of Keaton's short
films. For example, as the story of The High Sign develops the Keaton character
participates in two antithetical modes of employment, while it becomes apparent that
the trajectory of the narrative necessitates the removal of this equivocity. In One
Week, lot 66 is confused with lot 99, and the further perpetration of equivocal
signification by Keaton's rival, Hank, changing the numbers on the house building kit,
is the cause of the monstrous house and the debacle that results from having to
relocate it. In many of Keaton's shorts, but in some of his features as well, the
narratives are propelled by a misinterpretation of signs, misinterpretation only made
possible because of equivocity. In Convict 13 and The Haunted House the confusion
occurs at the level of costume; in Cops, at the level of the object (the bomb which
Keaton apprehends as a cigarette lighter), and likewise in The Balloonatic (the hybrid
balloon-boat) and The Scarecrow (the contraptions/objects). The Playhouse is
concerned with the equivocity of identity – Keaton not only plays the entire
orchestra, but his girlfriend is a twin. In The Navigator, Rollo ends up on the wrong
ship because a sign has only been partially disclosed to him, and in Battling Butler,
the narrative is complicated by Keaton pretending to operate under the sign of
someone he is not.

This overwhelming evidence of the small form means it is not sufficient to look
simply at the transformations of situations to grasp the comedic aesthetic of Keaton's
cinema. We must also examine the specific relationship between the large and small
forms. For it is by grasping the nature of the interaction between these forms that
we can understand the distinctive relationship between narrative and gag in his
films. Deleuze, in fact, accounts for the transposition of the small form into the large
form in Keaton's cinema, proposing that Keaton's originality lies in the way he “filled
the large form [of the action-image] with a burlesque content”, indeed a content so
at odds with the large form that Keaton's reconciliation of the two is as implausible
as it is improbable (51).

While Deleuze himself does not say as much, the two forms intersect at the exact
point that Deleuze attempts to theorise Keaton's comedy in terms of minoration.
Even though Deleuze proposes that various instances of the synsign in Keaton's films
are notable for their immensity and grandeur, he also argues that the hero of
Keaton's films deals with this immensity, these limit-images, through a process of
minoration. The gap between synsign and character is filled by minoring actions.

The notion of minoration is derived from the functioning of the machine. Deleuze
writes of “Keaton's dream of taking the biggest machine in the world and making it
work with the tiniest elements” (52) and says of The Navigator “the machine is not
merely the great liner by itself: it is the liner apprehended in a “minoring” function,
in which each of its elements, designed for hundreds of people, comes to be adapted
to a single destitute couple” (53). Minoration results from the Keaton character's
disavowal of what is essential to the constitution of the limit-image. Rather than the
hero undergoing the self-transcendence necessary to rise up to meet the limit-
image, he succeeds by diminishing its immensity. In diminishing it, he produces
comedy.

Despite Steamboat Bill, Jr.'s indisputable presentation of the large form, it is not
possible to begin to discuss it without mentioning minoration. Not only is there the
diminution evident in the names of the three male protagonists, King, Bill and Willie,
the dovetailing of duels that Deleuze discusses in regard to the fourth law must be
understood in this film as the accumulation of minor duels. The passage from
situation to action (the second law of the large form) similarly takes place through
the accumulation of small details. In fact the antipathy between father and son is
expressed in terms of costume and habitus (both of which are indicators of the small
form). Keaton's father, disaffected with his son's appearance, takes steps to
“redress” him. Willie's whiskers are whisked away (“take that barnacle off his lip”,
Bill senior instructs the barber) and new attire is sought for him. Bill senior attempts
to alter the indices of his son's personality so that father and son may be more
harmoniously connected. The small form is also the means by which Bill hopes to
recognise Willie when he meets him at the train station. Willie writes his father that
he will be wearing a white carnation, but because it is Mother's Day every man on
the platform wears a white carnation. What should have been a sign of individuation
becomes a sign of generality and sameness. When Willie and his father at last see
eye to eye, it is notable that Willie has given up his pansy outfits for the work gear
his father wanted him to wear from the start. And when King's ship sinks at the end
of the film, the crown is the only part which remains above water, King clinging to it
with all his might. These points confirm that the small form (the minor) is present in
what Deleuze otherwise calls the large form of the action-image. Actions express
situations as much as situations give rise to specific actions.

The concept of minoration can therefore be interpreted as implying that Keaton

inserts the small form into the large form, that he uses the small form as the means
of apprehending the situation expressed by the limit-image of the large form. The
operation of minoration can in turn be understood as Keaton's means of relating
actions to situations – actions characterised by a refusal to acknowledge situations
that border on sublimity, and, importantly, actions that respond to situations bit by
bit instead.

Keaton's most overt minoration of the large form is found in The General, which
diminishes the epic through the combination of melodrama and slapstick. The
narrative of the heroic deeds undertaken by a Southern patriot in the American Civil
War combines with the story of the patriot's on-again off-again romance with his
sweetheart Annabelle and monumental history is turned into the experience of a
single couple (54).

Two shots in the film illustrate this point. Johnnie has single-handedly taken on the
group of thieves from the Northern army, chasing them by train. As his train
advances north, a long shot captures him standing aloft the tender, facing the
camera, chopping wood to fuel the boiler for his engine while the whole Southern
army and then the Northern army pass behind him. The shot is funny not simply
because Johnnie has his back to the action, not just because he is oblivious to the
situation, and engaged in completing another action, fulfilling another function, but
because of the disproportion, the disparity between the two planes of the image, the
epic grandeur of the armies in the background, and the banal and docile demeanour
of Johnnie chopping wood in the foreground. Here the two forms, the large and the
small, meet in the single frame. Interestingly too, there is no dialectical point of
confrontation, the two simply pass each other by.

The second image exemplifying minoration occurs when Johnnie, having rescued his
train and girl, returns to Marietta to warn the southern army of an impending
invasion. As the Confederate General puts on his battle garb, Johnnie and Annabelle
help him dress. Johnnie takes the General's hat and puts it on his head. He straps his
sword to his waist while Annabelle buttons his coat. The gestures of familiarity and
domesticity similarly indicate the diminishment of the large into the small.

Minoration comprises Keaton's means of

injecting the large form with components of
the small form, but it also assists in the
development of recursion series. The
disconnection and equivocity of minoration
combine with the recursion function. The
operational aesthetic, in other words extends
from the machine gag to the trajectory gag
and thence to the narrative. The machine in
The General is of course the train and the film
ceremoniously and comically explores the
spectrum of its operational capabilities. The The General
train is derailed, diverted, has its cars uncoupled, is broken into, destroyed,
conjoined, refueled, collided with, shown in forward and reverse motion. But it is also
an adaptable machine; it can be used to destroy railway tracks and pull down
telegraph wires. It is thereby transformed from a cumbersome vehicle lacking the
velocity and manoeuvrability required to make a good chase element to an extension
of Keaton's own nimble body.

The train-machine, which includes the railway, also constitutes the film's narrative
trajectory, giving the clearest and fullest expression of the trajectory gag. As Daniel
Moews says:

...the narrative line of the film is also the spatial line of the film, the distance
traveled; and both are none other than the actual railroad line itself. Its rails
become a visual embodiment of a comic fatality controlling characters and
events. Restricted to them, excluded from other directions and other
possibilities of action, the northerners and Johnnie are held in conflict (55).

While the editing of Keaton's film might appear to conform to the conventional chase
sequence, it is significant that there are no breaks in this trajectory. The first half of
the film inscribes a line that moves from right to left (geographically from south to
north and figuratively from good to evil); the second half is simply a reversal of this
trajectory. Keaton's dogged pursuit of the Yankees in the first half is matched by the
Yankee's determination to run him down in the second.

The recursion function, we have seen, emerges whenever the Keaton character
makes piecemeal attempts to further himself along a trajectory and it impacts upon
the orientation of the action of the protagonist. Johnnie, for example, divested of his
beloved train, pursues the thieves on foot. A handcart aids him and then, when it is
derailed, he happens upon a penny-farthing that appears from nowhere (the very
terrain of this shot is utterly discontinuous with the shots before and after it: a house
is suddenly inserted between shots of a railway cutting). The penny-farthing is in
turn upgraded to a train engine. While Johnnie certainly has a goal here, he is
without a plan or a schema of how to achieve it. Rather than develop psychologically,
Johnnie functions recursively. At best his actions have only tenuous relations to the
end, but usually none at all. Values and events are linked not because of their direct
relation to either the problem or its resolution but because they can be related to
other values or events.

Even in the absence of the machine, the operational aesthetic still structures the
narrative through minoration and recursion. Recursion, for example, is apparent in
the manner in which Keaton's athleticism allows him to save the girl in College, in
Willie's confrontation with the cyclone in Steamboat Bill, Jr. where he is literally
swept along from one encounter to the next, and in the montage sequence in
Sherlock, Jr. Recursion and minoration are the alternative “mechanical” means to the
logic of immanent causality of the dialectic. They are essential components of the
structure of comedic narrative that Keaton brings to cinema.

In Keaton's cinema the recursion series doesn't go on ad infinitum; but nor is it

brought to an end organically. The organic force that conventionally structures
narrative is replaced by the pure mechanical teleology of the trajectory. Through the
combination of recursion and minoration, the trajectories and machines of Keaton's
films weave contiguous pathways until a solution is at last happened upon.
Resolution is due to fortuitous circumstance and divine intervention. In this sense,
the rendering of narrative form through the insertion of the recursive function
suggests that Keaton's contribution to the large form of the action-image, which
Deleuze deems to be an expression of the American ethos, counters the very basis of
its claim to organicism, and therefore naturalness.

Deleuze attributes an ethical dimension to Keaton's deployment of “the secret finality

of the machine” suggesting that embedded in the strategy of minoration is the notion
that the grandest schemas can still be made pertinent to the single individual. The
Keaton character, like Rollo Treadway magnanimously trying to tow the ocean liner
with a row-boat , persists as the little man, struggling with the elemental forces of
the universe. Certainly, Keaton's character's stoicism illustrates an ethical
determination to live by individual ideals and the recursion function provides a
means of expressing this stoical character, but the comic formulation of this idea
impacts upon the presentation of such an ethics. Far from degrading that character,
as the comic is wont to do, the stoic ethic here takes on a sacred or beatific grace,
but one that nevertheless permits the audience to distance themselves from its
ethical dimension.

From the machines and apparatuses for which Keaton is famous to Gunning's
operational aesthetic and Deleuze's concepts of minoration and recursion, we thus
see the logic that underpins the driving force of Keaton's comedic aesthetic. In short,
Keaton formulates a single logic for the narrative, the trajectory, the machine and
the gag. The importance of Gunning's work for our understanding of Keaton's cinema
is that he draws attention, perhaps for the first time, to the significance of the
coincidence of narrative, gag and machine. In Deleuze's work we find all the
components necessary for a full and clear articulation of the operational aesthetic –
the machine, recursion, minoration and the trajectory. The mechanical imitation of
organic narrative that we see in Keaton's work can doubtless be understood in terms
of Henri Bergson's conceptualisation of the comic as the “mécanisation de la vie”
(56), but I would rather argue, along with Gunning, that the comic lays bare the
mechanics of narrative ordering. Narrative is thereby made into a subset of the
machine, simply one machine among many, and narrative meaning is reduced to
little more than an effect of basic operationality.

© Lisa Trahair, September 2004

Endnotes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: L'image-mouvement, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris,
1983.

2. Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: The Image Movement, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986.
3. Deleuze, 1983, p. 177.
4. Deleuze, 1983, p. 177.
5. Deleuze, 1983; Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta, The Athlone Press, London, 1989.
6. Deleuze, 1989, p. 26.
7. Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy,
Routledge, London, 1990.
8. Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths: Mischief Gags
and the Origins of American Film Comedy”, Kristine Brunovska Karnick and
Henry Jenkins (eds), Classical Hollywood Comedy, Routledge, New York,
1995, pp. 87–105.
9. Buster Keaton, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, Da Capo Press, New York,
1982, pp. 173–4.
10. From the time Keaton parted company with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in 1920
until he started to make features, he made 19 two-reeler films. Most of these
were co-written and co-directed with Eddie Cline. Two (The Goat and The
Blacksmith) were collaborations with Malcolm St Clair and the last, The Love
Nest, was directed solely by Keaton. In the features Keaton shares the credits
for directing with Cline, Jack Blystone, Clyde Bruckman, Donald Crisp, Charles
F. Reisner, James W. Horne and Edward Sedgwick. Critics and commentators
have generally acknowledged that the directorial responsibility for Keaton's
films was largely his (at least until he fell out with MGM), despite other
directors being listed in the credits. Even Keaton's gag writer and sometime
co-director Bruckman said that Keaton “was his own best gagman” (Rudi
Blesh, Keaton, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1966, p. 149) and that his
crew were “overpaid from the strict creative point of view. Most of the
direction was his” (Blesh, p. 150).
11. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison, The University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985; Neale and Krutnik; Donald Crafton, “Pie and Chase:
Gag, Spectacle and Narrative in Slapstick Comedy,” Karnick and Jenkins, pp.
106–119; Gunning, “Crazy Machines” and “Response to Pie and Chase”,
Karnick and Jenkins, pp. 120–122; Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?
Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, Columbia University Press,
New York, 1992.
12. On this point see also Kevin W. Sweeney, “The Dream of Disruption:
Melodrama and Gag Structure in Keaton's Sherlock Jr.”, Wide Angle, vol. 13,
no. 1, January 1991, pp. 104–120.
13. Keaton, pp. 173–4.
14. Keaton, p. 176.
15. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, Routledge, London,
1985.
16. David Bordwell, “Happily Ever After, Part Two”, The Velvet Light Trap, no. 19,
(1982), p. 2; Neale and Krutnik, p. 30.
17. Gunning derives this concept from Neil Harris' study of P.T Barnum's
entrepreneurial success, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum, Little, Brown and
Company, Boston, 1973. Barnum (1810–1891) was an entertainment
entrepreneur, a wily pragmatist who would do almost anything to make a
buck, including dramatising the reality effects of his shows, manipulating the
truth and flagrantly deceiving his audiences. He achieved fame and fortune by
blurring the distinction between the circus and museum, orchestrating such
one-act attractions as the 161-year-old slave Joice Heth whom he advertised
as having nursed George Washington. Harris develops the idea of an
 operational aesthetic to account for the attraction of the American public to
such hoaxes. Barnum's special contribution to Jacksonian America was to
present conundrums and illusions to the American public who responded with
a requisite amount of skeptical fascination. Barnum's peculiar aesthetic
sought to focus his audience's attention on the “structures and operations” of
his exhibits and hoaxes alike, all of which were “empirically testable, and
enabled – or at least invited – audiences and participants to learn how they
worked” (p. 57). The operational aesthetic then was “an approach to
experience that equated beauty with information and technique, accepting
guile because it was more complicated than candor” (p. 57). Significantly,
Harris conceives this aesthetic more broadly than is suggested by Gunning's
application of the concept to the cinema, where it is taken as simply part of
an endemic fascination with the machine and its illusory capabilities.
18. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and
the Avant-Garde”, Wide Angle, vol. 8, nos 3–4, 1986, pp. 63–70.
19. Gunning, “Crazy Machines”, p. 88.
20. Gunning, “Crazy Machines”, p. 98. The Lumière brothers' film Charcuterie
mécanique (the mechanical butcher) can be understood as an allegory for the
cinematic process itself, a point taken up many years later by Jean Eustache
in his 1970 film Le Cochon (co-directed with Jean-Michel Barjol).
21. Gunning, “Crazy Machines”, p. 90.
22. Gunning, “Crazy Machines”, p. 96.
23. Gunning, “Crazy Machines”, p. 100.
24. See Noel Carroll, An In-Depth Analysis of Buster Keaton's The General, Ph. D.
New York University, Xerox University Microfilms, 1976.
25. Gunning, “Crazy Machines”, p. 95.
26. He is of the view that cinema could only really produce dramatic narratives
through the development of character psychology and the exploration of
character motivation. For him, comedic narratives emerged only at that point
that gags could be “intricately worked into comic personas”. p. 97.
27. Gunning, “Response”, p. 121.
28. Gunning, “Response”, p. 121.
29. Jean-Patrick Lebel, Buster Keaton, trans. P.D. Stovin, A. Zwemmer Limited,
London, 1967, pp. 124–7.
30. Lebel, pp. 122–3.
31. Lebel, p. 124.
32. Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1992, p.
82.
33. Inwood, p. 83.
34. Inwood, p. 82.
35. Mechanism is a device, means, machine or instrument. Inwood proposes that
Hegel understands it in terms of an “arrangement and interaction of objects
on mechanical principles” (Inwood, p. 181). Mechanism for Hegel is neither
organic nor behavioural to the extent that “[t]he category of mechanism
applies primarily to inorganic nature. But mechanism essentially consists not
in the relations of physical or material bodies, but in external relations of
persistent, independent objects”. (p. 181.) Chemismus or chemism refers to
the arrangement and interaction of things in accordance with chemical
principles. Inwood notes Hegel's differentiation between chemism and
mechanism: “[a]n object in a mechanistic system might in principle exist, ...
even if it were detached from the system and thus unrelated to other objects.
But chemical substances or stuffs are intrinsically related by their opposition
to and affinity for each other” (p. 182).
36. Inwood, pp. 182–3.
37. Deleuze, 1983, p. 144.
38. Deleuze, 1983, pp. 141, 218.
39. Deleuze, 1983, p. 142.
40. Deleuze, 1983, p. 151.
41. Deleuze, 1983, p. 152.
42. Deleuze, 1983, p. 153.
43. Deleuze, 1983, p. 153.
44. Deleuze, 1983, p. 154.
45. Deleuze, 1983, p. 154.
46. Indeed, in so far as cinematic melodrama has been theorised as exploring the
problematic constitution of masculinity, the intrusion of the epic form (which
conversely deploys an unproblematic representation of masculinity) explicitly
addresses the representation of masculinity in melodrama. By creating an
oxymoron – epic masculinity versus melodramatic masculinity – Keaton's
films make fun of both constructions. See Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli
and Melodrama”, Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies
in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, British Film Institute, London, 1987, pp.
70–74.
47. In addition to Lebel, many theorists of Keaton's comedy make the mistake of
presuming that the Keaton character surpasses himself because of the
challenges he confronts. (See, for example, Noel Carroll and Daniel Moews,
Keaton: The Silent Features Close Up, California University Press, Berkeley,
1977.) The issue of self-transcendence is a complicated one in the genre of
comedian comedy because the narratives of such films are organised around
the virtuoso performance abilities of already established live entertainment
comedians, whether they be from vaudeville, the music hall, the night club or
the television variety show. The central performer has an existing extra-
diegetic persona that is grafted on to the identity of the character. Whether
this persona is to be regarded as transcending the limitations of character
identity is not altogether clear, but it is undoubtedly the case that the extra-
diegetic persona gives the character license to behave in a manner that is
inconsistent with the conventions of fictional realism. Theorists like Steve
Seidman (Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film, University of
Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1981) and Peter Kramer (“Derailing the
Honeymoon Express: Comicality and Narrative Closure in Buster Keaton's The
Blacksmith”, The Velvet Light Trap, no. 23, spring 1989, pp. 101–116) have
argued that the narratives of comedian comedies develop in such a way as to
create an opposition between the performative license of the comedian and
the normative society of the diegesis. More precisely, they argue that the
performative license is bound up with non-conformity, with aberrant and anti-
social behaviour and that the purpose of narrative development in such films
is to ensure the subordination of such excess. I have demonstrated elsewhere
(“Fool's Gold: Metamorphosis in Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr.”, Lesley Stern
and George Kouvaros [eds], Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and
Performance, Power Publications, Sydney, 1999, pp. 209–244) that not all of
the narratives in comedian comedy function in this way and I have argued
that the tension between the extra-diegetic persona and the diegetic
character puts the notion of identity and the possibility of transcendence into
question.
48. Deleuze, 1983, p. 178.
49. Deleuze, 1983, p. 160.
50. Deleuze, 1983, pp. 160–163.
51. “L'originalité profonde de Buster Keaton, c'est d'avoir rempli la grande forme
d'un contenu burlesque qu'elle semblait récuser, d'avoir réconcilié contre tout
vraisemblance le burlesque et la grande forme” (Cinéma 1: L”image-
mouvement, p. 237). Unfortunately in the wording of the English translation
Deleuze's reference to what is specifically comic is lost. The English
translators, for instance, write that Keaton merely “gives” the large form a
burlesque content and the multiple senses of the term tout vraisemblance are
not evident in the English “against all odds”. The idiom is usually translated as
“in all likelihood” or “in all probability” but the term vraisemblance also carries
with it the meanings verisimilitude, likelihood, plausibility and probability. The
latter two words are especially significant since their opposites, implausibility
and improbability are often used to specify the nature of comedy. See for
instance Jerry Palmer (The Logic of the Absurd: On Film and Television
Comedy, British Film Institute, London, 1987) and Neale and Krutnik. The
 connotation of verisimilitude is also important given that Deleuze claims that
the action-image constitutes the cinema of realism and that while the large
form of the action-image is usually reserved for the great realist genres of the
epic, the documentary and the Western, it is the small form of the action-
image that is properly comedic. He proposes at the same time that it doesn't
necessarily give rise to comedy and can be used for dramatic effects as much
as comic effects.
52. Deleuze, 1983, p. 176.
53. Deleuze, 1983, p. 176.
54. George Wead has noted that the narrative is adapted from a real story in the
American Civil War. In 1862 a union spy stole a passenger train at Big Shanty
in Georgia. His plan was to travel to Chattanooga and destroy along the way
the telegraph wires and track. The plan failed because the spy was pursued
by the train's engineer and a road-shop foreman. The spy and his accomplices
were captured and hanged. George Wead, “The Great Locomotive Chase”,
American Film, vol. 2, no. 9, July–August 1977.
55. Moews, pp. 221–2.
56. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [1911],
trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Green Integer, Copenhagen,
1999.