The Cameraman (1928)

Originally posted to Facebook on 8/5/2018

The Cameraman was our sixth film from 1928, and the third feature we've seen from Buster Keaton, after 1926's The General, and 1923's Three Ages.

Keaton in this film plays a struggling photographer, selling on sidewalks. After taking the photo of a young woman, played by Marceline Day, he becomes infatuated with her, finds that she works at a newsreel organization, and attempts to join the staff. As with many of the films we've seen from the famous silent comedians, this film uses its loose plot as a device on which to hang several not-terribly-connected sequences. For instance there is a long piece where Keaton goes on a date of sorts with Day to a communal swimming pool, and shortly after that there is a long sequence where he is filming gang warfare in Chinatown. The latter sequence is obviously fraught, although it does appear that the actors engaged in the gang warfare were mostly Asian, rather than white actors made up as Asians. Additionally, just prior to the brawl, Keaton acquires a monkey sidekick, the result of him running into an organ grinder's monkey, after which the organ grinder exclaims "Now, see! You kill-a de monk!" though of course the monkey turns out not actually to be dead. When I read that title card aloud, Ben sort of laughed, and then explained, "I just thought it was funny that your voice got kind of sad when you realized how racist it was." But whatever you think of the presence of organ grinders and Chinese gang members, it did seem a little funny to me that somebody might have left a theater for five minutes while Keaton was at the pool with Day, and come back to see Keaton's character trying to film brutal gang violence while a small monkey mans a machine gun next to him -- and perhaps wondered exactly what they'd missed in those five minutes.

The movie has a few of the iconic Keaton scenes that are regularly excerpted when people are showing clips -- for instance the scene of him atop a wooden structure that collapses as he's filming. I laughed a few times during this film, and enjoyed it probably about as much as Three Ages. It wasn't as good as The General -- in part because watching The General didn't summon up the image of an exhausted room of writers grasping for ideas, with somebody eventually pitching, "Maybe a monkey joins him?"

This was one of his last silents -- and will probably be the last feature of his that we watch. There's a completionist side of me that has a desire to sit down and watch all of his films -- but I also have a strong desire to move this project out of the twenties, where it has been lodged since early 2017. We are, however, planning to watch some of his short films between the planned features from 1929 and 1930.

Next week we move on from Keaton to Chaplin, watching The Circus, our seventh film from 1928, and our fifth by Chaplin. The link, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT