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The artist as collector of images, his métier and apparatus. On a wing and in the trenches, newsreel daredevils, Buster Keaton meanwhile peddles tintypes on a street corner, "they make fine ashtrays." The lure at the MGM office is a comely receptionist (Marceline Day), the job calls for interesting footage so he scours Manhattan for it. "Within an hour he was photographing everything from soup to nuts... mostly the nuts." Create spectacle when there isn't any, thus a pantomimed home run in the empty stadium, scramble documentary and get surrealism. (Reversed divers and prismatic crowds find Vigo and Vertov in the screening room, double exposures give the accidental poetry of a battleship sailing down main street.) Meta-gags at the ritzy studio, glassy surfaces forever smashed by the vestigial tail of Keaton's tripod. "I'll try your reflexes to see if you're goofy." Up and down the staircase in anticipation of a date, cf. Hitchcock's Blackmail, across town hanging by the window of a crowded bus. An afternoon at the bath house means a scuffle with Edward Brophy in the changing cubicle ("This is my dressing room!" "Shut up... or it'll be your coffin!"), then marauding an oblivious matron in the pool to replace missing swim trunks. Question of recording reality versus participating in it, nothing like a Tong War to put theory into practice. The hero's Chinatown scoop has him paired up with an organ grinder's resurrected capuchin monkey, with camera box and machine-gun side by side for the benefit of Godard (Vivre sa Vie). The punchline is the need to "play the sedulous ape" behind the lenses, and there's Medium Cool playing catch-up four decades later. With Harold Goodwin, Harry Gribbon, and Sidney Bracey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |