Keaton's Silent Shorts: Beyond the Laughter Paperback - 1996

From the publisher

Hardly a neglected artist, Buster Keaton attracts biographers and film scholars capable of incisive comment on his work. He continues to draw the serious attention of both popular writers and scholars because as a comic genius and major comedy filmmaker during the silent age he rivals Charlie Chaplin. Yet writers have focused on the full-length films from 1923 to 1928, when Keaton joined MGM, lost his creative freedom, and began a glide toward oblivion that lasted until his rediscovery in the late 1950s. Filling a major gap in the critical canon, Gabriella Oldham s study of Keaton s nineteen silent short films shot between 1920 and 1923 chronicles the rapid growth in the filmmaker s understanding of what makes both comedy and film successful.

Oldham reconstructs each of these rarely seen films in such a way as to enable the reader to "watch" Keaton s performance, devoting a separate chapter to each. She analyzes each film s strengths, weaknesses, and prevalent themes and threads. She also enables readers to plumb the depths of what seems to be surface comedy through philosophical, biographical, historical, and critical commentary, thus linking the shorts together into a cohesive study of Buster Keaton s growth through his three-year independent venture as a filmmaker. Beyond the laughter and beyond the great stone face, Oldham presents a treasure of cinema comedy and a unique philosophy of life as captured by the mature eye of a great filmmaker."

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