Buster Keaton's "The General"



Watched a Buster Keaton film for the first time last night, and thoroughly enjoyed his style of physical comedy. The General was a Civil War comedy in which Keaton's Confederate character single-handedly, with his beloved locomotive, won the war against the Union army. The gags were ingenious, poetic in their repetition, variation and pacing. The famous deadpan face was surprisingly capable of expressing an enormous range of emotion. Every scene and gesture was precisely calculated; and the calculation rendered speech superfluous. Now I understand what LW meant when she compared Beckett's Fragments to Buster Keaton.

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