Keaton Project post #34: The Accidental Surrealist submitted by All Adders are Puffs. This exceptionally well written essay (penned by a graduate student, so that helps) examines Keaton’s art and its relationship to the Surrealist art. It really is an insightful piece, so please do take the time and give it a good, thorough read:
I have chosen to look at director and actor Buster Keaton and his attachment, or you could say his adoption, to the Surrealists. “Keaton’s surrealism was achieved without effort or intention; his films exemplify what the surrealists refer to as ‘involuntary surrealism’” (Knopf 1999, 112) Surrealist artists, such as Salvador Dali, admired Keaton for his lack of sentimentality and, as Dali states, his “gratuitous and imaginative use of objects and bodies.” (Knopf 1999, 112) Knopf goes on to state, “J. H. Matthews asserts that the surrealists valued comedy for its ability to break the bonds of logic and social decorum: ‘The comic film impresses [the surrealist] as much more than an amusing movie when it liberates impulses capable of changing life’s pattern, nullifying controls exercised in the everyday world by reasonable conjecture.’” (Knopf 1999, 112)
Some have also seen Keaton’s work as a precursor to surrealism since his main body of work happened slightly before the movement really took off. Keaton’s work most closely connects with Andre Breton’s second manifesto of Surrealism which was issued in 1930: “There is a certain point for the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease being perceived as contradictions. Keaton plays with these perceptions in some of his films, most notably the play between reality and dreams. This is seen through his short film The Playhouse (1921) and Sherlock Jr. (1924) while some aspects of his other films deal more with reality itself. I feel it is worthwhile to look at Keaton’s film through the lens of surrealism because he is so different from his contemporaries, Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.
In order to fully understand how Keaton works, you must know where he came from and how filmmakers worked in the 1920s. Keaton was born in 1895 to parents who were employed in a traveling medicine show, and shortly after, vaudeville. The legend continues that he first entered the family act at 9 months, and then formally became part of the act at age 5. (Vance 2001, 13) “The Three Keatons was among the most violent and raucous vaudeville acts in the history of the American theater. Like any other prop, Buster was routinely thrown a about the stage, and occasionally into the audience, by his irascible father, Joe Keaton.” (Vance 2001, 13) Buster learned everything about comedy, and how to take an amazing fall, from being a vaudevillian for 17 years; he then entered film under the wing of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. With Arbuckle, he learned everything about film. Keaton talks about early filmmaking in an interview: “[There was] no script. We simply talked over what we were goin’ to do and we got our ideas, and went to work. Arbuckle was his own director and I’d only been with him probably about three pictures when I was his assistant director. In other words, I was sittin’ alongside the camera when he was doin’ the scene. And he taught me the cutting room also because he was his own cutter…” (Pratt 1974, 20) Filmmaking in the early days was mostly based on the spur of the moment or chance, which is one of the ways of making art that the surrealists valued. They would go out to location, or on a set, with a general idea and just start filming. They could come up with gags on the spot while filming, so one of the rules the cameraman had while filming was to keep cranking until the director said to stop. Everything was internally done, so the director had complete artistic control over his film. This is why I can easily consider Keaton to be an artist in his own right.
Keaton two films that directly deal with the dream world are The Playhouse and Sherlock Jr. These films also draw heavily from his vaudeville years. Keaton always felt that a good film must be based in reality, so anything fantastic could only happen in a dream. This is what happens in the two aforementioned films. The Playhouse is basically a story about a boy who works in a vaudeville playhouse and falls in love with a girl who is performing an act with her twin sister. The story in general is unremarkable, but the first 7 minutes of the film has some Keaton’s best surrealist imagery.
As stated before, Keaton likes to play with reality and the dream world. For him, the reality is in the actual making of the film, and the surrealism comes through in the viewing of the film. The Playhouse opens with Keaton as every member of the orchestra, then goes on to show him as every member of the act on stage, and finally him as every member of the audience. “The effect is astonishing when one sees nine Busters all at once in the same frame. In these early days of motion pictures, all of the special effects were created inside the camera on once piece of film. … [Cameraman] Elgin Lessley would block out the entire frame except for the small space occupied by Buster as that one character and crank the camera at an exact speed. Lessley would then rewind the film to the precise point, and Buster would do his performance exactly the same again.” (Vance 2001, 83) As Knopf points out, “Keaton accentuated the realism in his surrealism.” (Knopf 1991, 17)
Knopf states, “The classicism of his shots is yet another realistic convention that his gags and stunts undercut through juxtaposition, creating tension between the logic of his shot composition and the illogic of his gags.” (Knopf 1991, 123) This scene is also looking inwards, to the boy’s dream. None of these fantastic things could happen if this were to be reality – only the fantastic can happen in the dream world. We are looking at the boy’s dream of becoming a vaudeville star, but since we are looking at a dream world, it is of course going to be illogical.
Keaton shows this dream abruptly ending and returning to reality by, once again, playing with our perceptions of reality. “In the next scene, [the boy] is shown sleeping in a small room, and an angry man strides in, rousts him from his bed, and demands that he vacate the premises. A moment later, the ‘bedroom’ vanishes, its walls carried away by stagehands and hoisted into the flies. Buster, it now appears, is only a theater worker being bawled out for sneaking a nap on the job. This playful shifting of identity and reality is one of the signal qualities of Keaton’s comedy.” (Parshall 1997, 70) Keaton liked to play with the “deceptiveness of appearances. … The theater itself, with its sets and props, is a visual illusion that works only when seen from a certain angle.” (Smith 2008, 115) This “trick of the eye” reminds me of
Dali’s Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) because the basis of the painting is all in perception. The Bust of Voltaire is a trick of the mind because from a distance it looks to be Voltaire, but upon closer inspection it’s actually comprised of two Dutch women. Both Keaton and Dali had a fascination with double imagery, which I intend to look at later in this essay.
Keaton, playing off the early dream sequence of The Playhouse, expands on this idea of the fantastic coming true in your dreams in Sherlock Jr. “Busters entire reason for making the film was to create the situation of a motion-picture projectionist in a theater who falls asleep and visualizes himself becoming involved with the characters on the screen. The dream sequence was the excuse for all the film’s impossible gags.” (Vance 2001, 124) Once again, the dream sequence where Keaton enters the film has some of the most stunning visual effects to date. In this sequence Keaton is jostled from scene to scene in the film when the environment changes unexpectedly around him. This is something audiences have never seen before and were amazed by.
The incredible gags from this point until the end of the dream could never happen in reality – they can only happen in a dream. Sherlock Jr. also shows how the boy’s unconscious is projected onto the screen of his dream. “[Garrett] Stewart suggests that it is appropriate for the boy to fall asleep on the movie projector, because it then projects the ‘imposition of his own unconscious fantasies upon the preternaturally receptive plot of the film actually being shown to the theater audience,’ becoming a ‘true dream machine.’” (Parshall 1997, 73) The characters of the boy’s life, replace the characters in the film being projected to the audience with the boy becoming the great Sherlock Jr., the complete opposite of the bumbling, awkward boy.
Knopf states “surrealists valued films for their ability to disorient the spectator. J. H. Matthews defines disorientation (dépaysement) as ‘the power of the cinema to take man out of his natural surroundings, be these material, mental or emotional.’” (Knopf 1999, 16-17) Most of the gags in Sherlock Jr. are not funny, but more astounding. They do disorient the audience because they are more based on chance or the fantastic. The opening of the dream sequence is again, based in reality. Smith states, “Far from seeing movies as a fantasy realm where anything can happen, Keaton felt driven to prove to the audience that what they were watching was real.” (Smith 2008, 117) “The secret of the sequence… is that after filming each segment, cameraman Elgin Lessley developed the last frame of the next segment, so that he could coax Buster into matching his own filmed outlines exactly. … No form of process shot or double exposure was used: Buster was really filmed in the ocean and the snow and the lion’s den, and the scenes were spliced together. … The rest of Sherlock Jr. inspires plenty of laughter, but of a particular kind: incredulous laughter.” (Smith 2008, 118) So, once again, Keaton use of reality creates an even more surreal image on the screen.
For most of the gags in Sherlock Jr., Keaton chose to use long shots to show the audience exactly what they were seeing. This was to prove that these stunts 
were not camera tricks, but actually happening. One of the more notable gags is one where Sherlock jumps through the chest of his assistant, Gillette, to escape his pursuers. Again, this trick was an old vaudeville stage trick. So just as the audience in the playhouse would have seen it, the scene was shot head on without a camera cut or movement. The audience knows exactly what they’ve seen through no camera trickery. This scene lent itself to a surreal production still of Keaton sticking out of his assistant’s chest. It’s captured as a head on image in order to show the reality of it. But this picture leads to the disorientation of the spectator. It plays with the perspectives of the audience. Both man and wall are impenetrable, but the scene that they have just witnessed on the screen has turned that idea upside down.
Keaton also plays with dual imagery in Sherlock Jr., which can be reminiscent of Dali’s use of double imagery in his paintings. (Knopf 1999, 171 n. 18) An object in Keaton’s hands could easily become something else that fills his needed purposes. “His transformation gags capture the spirit of the surrealists’ desire to break free from the bonds of everyday rational thinking, as well reflecting their obsession with transforming everyday objects into marvelous ones. …Regardless of category, the goal of the surrealists’ explorations of the object was to challenge its accepted function.” (Knopf 1999, 126-7) Keaton uses a few of these transformation gags in Sherlock Jr., the most memorable one being the maze of Sherlock’s house. He appears to be looking at his appearance in a mirror, but breaks the illusion by walking through the “mirror” into an adjoining room. Next he appears to be opening a safe, but when the safe opens he walks out onto the street. The safe has been transformed into a doorway. As Knopf states, Keaton has “the ability to see things not as they are, but as they may be, must be, or are in the process of becoming.” (Knopf 1999, 127) Keaton next turns his car into a sailboat when he and the girl crash into a lake. He’s appropriated the car into a boat because at that moment, the car needs to become a boat, and so it does. There are other examples of Keaton’s usage of transformation in his other films: “he uses his clip-on tie as a mustache in order to hide from the police in Cops (1922) [and] he uses a bass drum as a boat and a violin as his paddle in The Playhouse.” (Knopf 1999, 128) In Keaton’s world, objects do as he needs them to, just as any other surrealist would use them as well.
With Dali, he seems to be more interested in the “exploration” of objects and challenging their accepted functions. You could, again, look at The Bust of Voltaire, but a better example is Mae West (1934-36). When looking at the composition as a whole, the viewer sees the face of Mae West, but when the elements are viewed as singular objects, the objects take on another form and function. The lips become a couch, the nose a fireplace, the eyes as pictures within a frame, the chin as stairs, and the hair as drapes. “Keaton’s images take on the acuity of popular pictures, the haloed precision of daguerreotypes, the hallucinatory exactitude of Dali’s double images.” (Benayoun 1982, 177)
One could even compare the double imagery of Keaton and surrealist painter Frida Kahlo. Her dual imagery is seen most clearly in The Two Fridas (1939) how she depicts her two different lives. This compares nicely with the image of Keaton as his dream is just beginning in the projection room. There is the dream Keaton along with the real Keaton. He’s symbolically leaving behind reality it join the dream world of the film on screen. With The Two Fridas, Kahlo is torn between the Western world of America and he home in Mexico. There is the surreal image of two versions of the same person in the same frame, both with Kahlo and Keaton.
Dali wrote a letter to Lorca, a surrealist writer, in which he comments on Keaton’s new film at that time, The Navigator (1924), “It seems that Buster Keaton has made a film in the sea-bed with his straw hat on top of a diver’s helmet.” (Knopf 1999, 114) He was referring to a production still of the film where Keaton is dressed in a diver’s suit with his trademark porkpie on the helmet. Some of Keaton’s production photos, and even stills, from his films are stand-alone examples of 
surrealist artwork. “… Because of Keaton’s fondness for the long shot and the long take, his object-gags often resemble surrealist images, especially when reproduced as still photographs.” (Knopf 1999, 128)
As seen in the production still from The Navigator, Keaton enjoys playing with proportion in his images. Just as surrealist painters play with the proportion and distortion of the body in their images, Keaton plays with the proportion of objects to his body. Such as in The Navigator still, there is the tiny hat perched upon the largely distorted body of Keaton in a diver’s suit. The illogic of it is what makes it surreal. Some other images that he creates is his surreally constructed house in One Week (1920), a production still showing him riding a miniature horse in Our Hospitality (1923), plus him using oversized utensils or perched precariously on an anchor in The Navigator.
These images, although illustrating the absurd, are also strongly rooted in reality as well. While a surrealist painting adds a piece of something recognizable in their paintings, such as the cliffs in the background in Dali’s Persistence of Memory (1931) in order to root it in some sort of reality, Keaton’s reality is in the reality of the image itself. As stated before, Keaton’s use of reality is how he creates his surrealistic images. (Knopf 1999, 17)
Keaton said in 1958, “I used to daydream an awful lot. I’ve done that so often in pictures. I could get carried away and visualize all the fairylands in the world.” (Smith 2008, 127) Smith states, “Where others might speak of surrealism or a lyricism, Buster lumped anything that was not logical or realistic under the category of daydreams. He said he got some of his best ideas wile daydreaming in the bathtub. Film was a universe over which he had total control, which perfectly suited his abilities and allowed him to express his purest identity. It let him turn his daydreams into actual projected images.” (Smith 1999, 127) I think this clearly shows that Keaton was indeed an unintentional surrealist. He didn’t set out making his pictures and images as “surrealist”, he just wanted to make good pictures.
As he’s famously quoted as saying “No man can be a genius in slap-shoes and a flat hat.” (McPherson 2005, xii) Which is interesting to compare to Arnason’s idea of surrealism “reasserting the invincibility of artistic genius.” (Arnason 2010, 318) “Surrealism shares the Romantic notion of genius as exceptional and marked by originality, but traces its source to the mind’s unconscious. Artistic genius, for Surrealism, depends on the ability to tap into the raw impulses, desires, and fears that Freud claimed were seated in the unconscious. Only by giving form to the unconscious could an artist achieve the authenticity and originality essential for a work of aesthetic genius.” (Arnason 2010, 318) It’s undoubtedly believed that Keaton was a genius, albeit a humble one. I would even venture to say that he is one of the most original of his contemporaries. Through his surreal start as a vaudeville star until he was forced to give up artistic freedom of his films, Keaton managed to show his daydreams on the “dream machine” of the projector. He allowed his audiences to escape into his daydreams. So sit back, relax, and enjoy.
Works Cited:
Arnason, H. H. and Elizabeth C. Mansfield. History of Modern Art. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2010.
Benayoun, Robert. The Look of Buster Keaton. Randall Conrad. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
Knopf, Robert. The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
McPherson, Edward. Buster Keaton: Temptest in a Flat Hat. New York: Newmarket Press, 2005.
Parshall, Peter F. “Houdini’s Protégé: Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr.” In Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. edited by Andrew Horton, 67-88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Pratt, George C.. “‘Anything Can Happen - and Generally Did’: Buster Keaton on His Silent Film Career.” Image, 1974, 19-29.
Smith, Imogen Sara. Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. Chicago: Gambit Publishing, 2008.
Vance, Jeffrey and Eleanor Keaton. Buster Keaton Remembered. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 2001.
Source:
mercenarylibrarianlady
