What Buster Keaton Can Teach Writers in the Age of Covid-19
Thoughts On the Life and Art of The Great Stone Face
I was raised on movies — and not just what was playing in the nostalgia-soaked cinemas and on the five television channels of my formative years in the 1970s and 80s (“OK Boomer” trigger warning.) I was raised on old movies, that is the silent films of the 1920s. This morning I realized how that put a hook in me, attached to a divine cable that is lifting me out of the heavy concerns of a global pandemic — and why that might be important to you. It has to do with how the best culture takes us out of time and pain, and gives us consolation and perspective. That will take a bit of writing to set up, so I hope you soldier on through this. I’ll do my best to make it interesting.
It starts with family history, as so much of our perspective on matters existential does.
My maternal grandfather, Andrej Ruszkowski, born in 1910 in Poland, was, among other things, a Film and Communications professor and a true cinephile. After a circuitous route that took him from Poland to France after World WII, and then to Lima, Peru in the 1950s and 60s, he arrived in Canada in 1969. At 59, he helped found one of Canada’s first post-secondary Communications departments, at the University of Ottawa. He was a frequent attendee of international film festivals (particularly Venice,) and his work brought him into contact with some prominent names in the industry. On the wall opposite the desk where I write this, hang framed photos: a signed black and white of Frank Capra made out to my grandfather by the master of morally-restorative cinema, and a picture of my Dziadzio with Gregory Peck (my grandfather was a tall man, but he is dwarfed by Peck, who was huge.) He also co-authored a book called The Cinema of Sidney Poitier: The Black Man’s Changing Role on The American Screen.
When I was single-digits young, my grandfather took me and my brothers to see a re-release of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, and, if memory serves me correctly, The Gold Rush. You could see silent film comedy on television all the time in those days: Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy were fairly ubiquitous. Chaplin had been, arguably, the most famous man in the world during the silent era, and his famous walk, cane, bowler hat and pre-Hitler toothbrush mustache still permeated the culture. OK Boomer that I nearly am, I even remember watching old Charlie Chaplin meekly receive his Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars in 1972. (I say “nearly” because I was born in 1964 and by generational measures, circumstance and mindset, I more properly identify with Generation X — another essay for another time. Stay with me, folks.)
But actually going out to a cinema to see those films — that was pretty niche. Even more niche still was to be taken to a Buster Keaton movie. At some point in those early years, my grandfather brought us to a series of Buster Keaton films that were, oddly, subtitled in Swedish. That was my introduction to a silent film great.
A quick note for your study hours: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd were considered the most influential performers and filmmakers of the silent movie era. If you don’t know them, you should. Everyone you respect in the film and comedy worlds has been influenced by their work either directly or indirectly.
Keaton, whose great work had been forgotten for a while, was the subject of a new wave of interest and restoration by the 1970s. He had died in 1966 without receiving his own old man Chaplin moment, just as his work was gaining renewed attention. And he was the one who really caught my imagination. My grandfather told me he was known as the Stone Face because he never smiled, and that was the lure that plunged a hook into me as deep as Harpo Marx’s hilarious selective mutism. Did this man never truly smile, 1972 Tony wondered? Was such a thing possible?
And now, another miracle of cultural circumstance! In those days before YouTube (read with the voice of Grandpa Abe Simpson,) the local library stocked a ton of silent films on Super 8 reels released by a company called Blackhawk Films. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Blackhawk Films of Davenport, Iowa, made a good buck re-releasing classic silent era motion pictures on 8, Super 8 and 16 mm film. Our library was well-stocked with one and two reelers (short comedies) and longer, larger four-reelers (feature films.)
I am that film nerd who regularly, with the freedom eight and nine year olds of today sadly can’t imagine, walked or rode his bike to the library, took out the old movies, loaded up the Super 8 projector, and watched for hours and hours. I wish you who were born in the digital age had had the pleasure of manipulating actual film, and looking down at picture after picture in a long line, accompanied on their long, slow march by square, perforated holes. That was real, physical magic.
Buster Keaton, with his incredible physical prowess, amazing stunts, and ahead-of-his-time film sense, was my favourite, and I have lost count of how many times I watched Cops and The General. Don’t take my word about how good they are. We’ve all got more time on our hands than we’d like. Go watch them for yourselves.
Thanks for your patience. The set up ends here. Tony was raised on Buster Keaton and other silent films from the 1920s, and he still likes them today. Why should I care?
You should care because, on this third Saturday of our local Covid-19 lockdown, I sat down in front of my television and starting watching Battling Butler. I had PVR’d it off of Turner Classic Movies, which shows fantastic old films non-stop, and for which I am grateful beyond these 905 words and counting during our time of plague.
Battling Butler is, by consensus, among the weakest of Keaton’s feature films. It’s actually kind of slow and plodding and way too plot-heavy. There is little of Keaton’s trademark stunt work and physical grace. Plus, we’re meant to believe that he is a pampered weakling, but one look at his spring-like physique, and you just can’t buy the gag. But it’s still Keaton, and it has moments of brilliance, particularly inside the boxing ring.
So it’s not the best introduction to the work of the Great Stone Face. The Navigator, coming up later on the TCM schedule, has more of his graceful and beautiful physical humour. But this morning, it was instructive to me. Why?
The performing, silent film elephant in an essay like this is: how can you write about an obscure silent movie clown from 100 years ago when people all over the world are getting gravely ill, and dying? Don’t you have better things to do?
I ask myself that all the time. Writing is the ultimate luxury. However, it could also be an absolute necessity. Even I needed some convincing of that.
Some years ago, I was talking with some good friends of mine who are health care workers in seniors’ residences. One of these friends performs saintly work. She provides massage therapy to bedridden seniors. What she does, many days of the week, is to touch people who, at the end of their lives, are bereft of the simple miracle of human touch.
I once told my friend: “what I do is so shallow and meaningless compared to your work.” And she, very gracefully, said: “that’s not true. When you talk to people who are sick and dying, you know what they really want to do to make themselves feel better? They want to sing with you.”
That is, of course, what people have resorted to in the first few weeks of this global social crisis. We have all seen videos of people singing on their balconies. Every amateur musician and songwriter has taken to social media to sing. I know what you’re doing out there. “To sing is to pray twice,” said Saint Augustine.
It’s not just music. People are turning to stories everywhere for consolation. I’m writing this because I see that even the oldest films, even not very good old films, do the same thing. And someone had the voluptuous luxury of writing that stuff.
They are the collective dreams that remind us that now is not everything. Now will pass into memory. There is a life beyond the one we are currently living.
When I was screening Battling Butler, made in the 1920s, I was watching actors who had been born just after the American Civil War, and who had lived through the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic. Battling Butler has survived The Great Depression, World War II, and ongoing revolutions and counter-revolutions of all kinds since then. If anything, with advances in technology, Battling Butler’s survival is assured more than ever. Sure, it may only be seen by a super-niche of viewers, but we’re still here. As we all hunker down for weeks and months, we’ll be sustaining our own niches, and sharing them. Surely that’s a silver lining. There’s always a silver lining.
Keaton’s own story is, ultimately, a tale of tremendous loss and a kind of late-life triumph. He was raised by itinerant vaudeville performers whose shtick, I have now come to realize, was to play drunken Irish immigrants from town to town. (Buster’s father, Joe, played a stock “Irishman,” and part of his act was to comically beat up his son on stage. Life in America 100 years ago was very cruel, and comedy’s come a long way.) Buster Keaton’s career was derailed by a fierce and debilitating alcoholism that robbed him of his timing, looks and opportunity. Nevertheless, by the time I was born, the world had started to celebrate his best work. By then, he had recovered from his disease, and, as a man old before his time, he became a fixture of 1960s television and movies.
One of those films, The Railrodder, was produced by the National Filmboard of Canada, and featured Keaton riding across our country on the Canadian National Railway. A still from the film was shot at the mouth of the Mount Royal tunnel a few blocks away from the library I borrowed the Blackhawk Super 8 films from. A copy of that still hangs, framed in our upstairs hallway.
Songs, films and stories remind us that, after crisis, life goes on and everything comes around. Which brings me to my grandfather, whose story I opened up this long spiel.
My grandparents and parents survived the calamity of losing everything in World War II. When I was a child, I can only remember my grandfather telling one story from those years. That story was about never losing hope. Indulge me, please, while I close out this reflection with it.
When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, the Polish government mobilized all men out of Warsaw. They didn’t foresee the barbaric cruelty of the Nazis and the Soviets. Some men who followed those orders knew that things might take a very dark turn. My grandfather was billeted in Romania in a room with another man who despaired that his wife and child would never make it out of Poland, and that his life was over. They went to sleep in the room they shared. My grandfather was woken by the sound of a gunshot. The poor man had shot himself in the head.
In a tragic twist, the anguished suicide’s wife and child arrived safely in that town’s train station the next day.
My grandfather’s message was clear: “Never give up hope.”
To me, his post-war life in film and communications is of a single, continuous edifying piece with that advice. Arts and culture — including second-rate work by first-rate geniuses, and single-shot balcony and kitchen warbling by OK Boomer songsters — form a solid rope that carry us out of the every day uncertain and remind us that this suffering, right now, is not the final answer.
