Very Cool!!!

Let's be realistic.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

The Cameraman (1928) is Buster Keaton's last great film, before drink and MGM's misguided stifling of his creativity effectively ended his career as a director-star. It is about an aspiring newsreel man who seeks the love of a secretary at MGM studios (a little self-promotion never hurt Leo the Lion, it seems). He looks for any kind of action to capture on the streets, contends with a slimy rival for his lady love's affections, and befriends a monkey. Like Keaton's best films, we have his sly and dry humor, action scenes, and lots of imagination.Of course, the movie differs from Keaton's pre-MGM work in key ways: it is incredibly romantic in a way Keaton avoided being in his earlier work. The love stories in some of Keaton's earlier films are fraught with misery and seem to promise little lasting happiness for both partners. Other ones are more grounded though pleasant, such as in The Navigator and The General, where Keaton's heroes end up with feisty girls who are more like comic partners than passive love objects who wait impatiently for Buster to man up and win their respect. In TC, Marceline Day is a different sort of love interest for Keaton: she is sweet, an ideal, a light in the young cameraman's seemingly dreary and lonely existence. In The General or Sherlock Jr., the young hero is lovelorn but also independent. He can live with or without love, though he's willing to fight for love at all costs. Here Buster's character lacks that kind of toughness and seems more vulnerable. This vulnerability allows Keaton to show a little more tragedy in his acting than what we normally get to see and it is fascinating. No one who has ever seen this film can forget the "descent into the sand" scene, where Buster thinks he has lost the girl of his dreams forever. The heartbreak and longing in Keaton's eyes, hands, his posture are so potent that it shocks me that viewers still call him stone-faced and cold.But don't let us forget this is a romantic comedy and there are lots of laughs to be had. It's Keaton last great silent film, a sort of walk into the sunset for his golden age.

In New York, Buster (Keaton) is a public photographer. You can get your picture taken for ten cents. While he is taking a picture, a big parade takes place: many people gather and among them, Sally (Marceline Day) a young woman who works for the News department at the MGM. The crowd is so big that he is pressed against her, smelling her perfume... After the crowd disappears, he offers to take her picture. She agrees but has to go leaving him with her photograph. When he visits her at work, he decides to be a cameraman... Then he will be able to see her anytime! But you do not become a cameraman just like that: you have to learn how to do it. First, it is an expensive job: he has to buy a camera. Even if he gets the cheapest one, he has not got any money left. Then you have to move the handle the right way: this gives a sequence where you can images moving forwards and backwards, an overprinted ship in a street, and a sequence where the picture is multiplied. A very surrealistic movie which does not please the MGM News director. But Sally still encourages him to go on. She even accepts a date with him. But things do not work as expected. Still, she gives him a last chance : go and film the Chinese New Year. You can guess how it will end... This film is Keaton's penultimate movie. The talkies are coming: The Jazz Singer was released by the Warner Bros Company. This is Keaton's swan song. There is much melancholy, and even sadness in this story. Everything falls apart. Anything he tries is a failure. Even when he wants to end it all and go back to tintypes (he sends his last film to the studio) : instead of being mocked, he is hired! Nevertheless, this film contains great scenes: the stairs, the swimming-pool, the Tong war... Moreover, Keaton teaches us a great reporting lesson: he show us how things work behind the scene. He even rearranges the fights during the Tong war (nobody does that...), but still close to the fighters, risking his own life! As I said earlier, it is his swan song. Kea ton will be less and less important in the film industry. And the last sequence has something prophetic in it: the film ends where it started, with a big parade which he thinks has been organized for him! But this was the day Lindbergh was celebrated after he crossed the Atlantic Ocean. His next movie will be Spite Marriage. Sadness and melancholy will be stronger. Meanwhile, let us enjoy this movie as it is: a very fine comedy, one of Keaton's best. So, enjoy!

There's so much creativity in this film. It's amazing to remember that this was made before maybe 99.9% of everything else (movies and TV) I've ever seen. There are stunts I've never seen before and lots of innovative shots and sequences.There's a powerful truth and subtlety to Buster Keaton's performances. It's not fake or forced or exaggerated, he doesn't even seem to be trying for laughs. His character isn't stupid but is often oblivious - he accidentally bumps things, misses details, gets things mixed up. Perhaps he's clumsy because he's so indifferent. He isn't careful because not many things matter much to him and he doesn't get hurt easily. But when he's set on achieving something, he does crazy, impressive, imaginative things and is seems almost unstoppable.Buster executes his stunts and physical comedy perfectly and yet it still all looks natural and accidental as if his character didn't mean it at all. That takes a huge amount of skill. He stays in character the whole time. And then his reaction afterwards is almost always mild. It doesn't need to be more, it's the concept that is hilarious. In spite of his efforts to learn from mistakes and avoid trouble, things always seem to go wrong. We've all had experiences like this so it's funny to see his confusion and frustration as he tries to figure out what's going on.His comedy isn't so much about anticipation as execution. We're not sure what's going to happen in a situation and often it's simpler and more primitive that what we might've guessed. But when it happens, it's always timed so well and looks incredibly graceful and comical. We're amazed and surprised while Buster just shrugs and moves on.The monkey is really cool, he must have been trained pretty well. The way he interacts with Buster is cute and awesome.The Cameraman is also fairly romantic. Buster falls in love and you see it in his eyes and posture. He goes into a daze. It's a simple and innocent thing that happens. The girl becomes all that matters to him and he does many things for her without asking anything in return. He sees her walking away with another man at one point and humbly accepts his fate. He may be the great stone face but he uses his body like few others so his emotional expression is not really limited at all. And of course his eyes express a lot. It's about mastery - he chooses to restrain his facial expressions and gestures but he has great control over what he *does* do, which is what matters.With modern comedies you hope for decent writing and acting and maybe a few big laughs. In a really good comedy, you might even get one or two pretty original moments. With Buster, you get a movie full of original ideas performed by a hard-working perfectionist. Buster's like a gymnast, a veritable comedy ninja.

I'll get to The Cameraman in a sec, just bear with me. Did you watch Lost? I hope, for your sake, that the answer is no. I mean, c'mon – J.J. Abrams, I'm going to kick your ass in a dark alley if I ever get the chance, just for wasting my time. But I digress. I merely mention this to point out the character of Desmond Hume, who wags around the one Dickens novel, Our Mutual Friend, that he's saving. 'Cause see, I do that too. As a matter of fact, I'm sitting on Martin Chuzzlewit by Dickens, Pic by Jack Kerouac, and one lone piece from Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel. Please don't tell me how tragic and regrettable this will be if I get hit by a bus… I know, I know.All of this is to say that recently, I went to a screening of The Cameraman (1928) starring the one and only Buster Keaton. And this was the one and only Buster Keaton film I've never seen. So before you gasp and clutch your chest and say, "But Pretty Clever Film Gal, how could you neglect to see a Buster Keaton movie!?!" I refer you to my opening salvo above. Buster Keaton movies are rare and precious commodities. It's not like we're getting any new ones, unless somebody decides to use his powers for good not evil (I'm looking at you, James Cameron.) However, when you have the opportunity to see a Buster Keaton movie in a theater with music accompaniment from William O'Meara, well preciousness has to be put aside.The Cameraman-poster-Buster KeatonEric Veillette, impresario of Silent Sundays at the Revue Cinema and Silent Toronto perpetrator, introduced The Cameraman as Keaton's last great film, which is a fair assessment. Careful readers may have noticed that I did not refer to the movie as "Buster Keaton's The Cameraman," but merely stated that it starred Keaton. Though Keaton was an auteur before there was such a thing, writing, directing, editing, I suspect even catering all of his features up 'til this point, The Cameraman was directed by Edward Sedgwick. Notably, this movie was Keaton's first under his brand spankin' new contract with MGM. Things would go from bad to worse for Keaton and MGM, and in a little less than a year, creative control of his films would be wrested out of his hands. Keaton later called the move to MGM "The worst mistake of my career." Considering what followed, he's exactly right.But that's later. In 1928, The Cameraman has Keaton's fingerprints all over it. Sedgwick may have held the title of director, but no body puts Buster in the corner apparently, or at least not yet. As a filmmaker, Keaton is all about control – having it, losing it, regaining it. His films are precise, always demonstrating that's there's nothing coincidental about a good gag. Comedy is a presentation, dependent on timing and control and Keaton's work reflects this, always. So despite being stripped of the titular role of director, it's impossible to assert with a straight face that The Cameraman, perhaps one of his most self-reflexive works, was not firmly in Keaton's control.The Cameraman-Buster KeatonThe movie abounds with gags the define Keaton's preoccupation with control, or lack thereof. When he pawns his tintype machine to buy an outdated, hand cranked movie camera, all in the service of getting closer to Sally, the newsreel production office receptionist, things spin out of Buster's control pretty damn fast. His initial salvo in newsreel shooting results in a tragic mess of double exposed images – a battleship sailing down a Manhattan street, most notably. Forget the mechanics even – Buster struggles with the physicality of the machine itself, breaking the glass in the office door multiple times. In the end, the star cameraman of The Cameraman is a monkey, for pete's sake. Which might be a metaphor for Keaton's entire career: an aimless amateurism produces iffy experimental results, and an unrestrained primitivism produces a heroic quality results (not to mention funny results). Take that, MGM studio stooges! I think there's another point worth making about Buster Keaton and The Cameraman. Turns out, Buster is a fine actor. His previous, auteur-like body of work demonstrates beyond a doubt that Buster is fantastic performer, honed from basically being born on a vaudeville stage. He always had the timing, the exploitation and confounding of expectation to provoke a reaction, but did Buster ever act, did he build a character and flesh out a role? Perhaps freed from the rigors of being the writer-director-caterer, Buster is free to be our hapless little cameraman, so complete that when Sally rejects him, it will bring a tear to your eye. That's not the typical response to your typical slapstick and reflects the elevation of Buster's small-man-in-a-big-world character beyond mere comedy prop.With hindsight being 20/20, it's difficult to not find a tinge of the bittersweet in The Cameraman, solely because it is Buster Keaton's last great film. It is, sadly, mostly downhill for Buster from there. But, for all that, The Cameraman is not to be missed.