"You must always grind forward, never backward."

Often regarded as Buster Keaton's last great film, The Cameraman was the first of nine films Keaton made for MGM in what would soon become a troubled relationship. Keaton had spent the prior decade in an independent production partnership with Joseph Schenck and thus enjoyed uncurbed creative control. Under this arrangement Keaton made nearly all of the material on which his legendary reputation rests, but it came to an abrupt halt when Schenck joined United Artists following the commercial failure of Keaton's masterful Steamboat Bill, Jr. At the advice of Schenck, Keaton reluctantly signed with MGM at a lucrative rate and with provisional artistic independence. Following creative differences with honcho Irving Thalberg on…

“Keaton was beyond all praise... a very great artist, and one of the most brilliant men I ever saw on the screen. He was also a superb director. In the last analysis, nobody came near him. Keaton, one of the giants!”  
— Orson Welles

As always, I’m in awe with this miracle of a human being. Criterion’s recent 4K restoration of The Cameraman or Buster with a Movie Camera is truly something to behold, ninety year-old, crisp images flowing flawlessly with its accompanying remastered score. Romance pulses from this one, and like all essential Keaton films it’s flat-out hilarious, the physical timing making it totally universal. Any language, any age, if you’ve never seen a Buster Keaton film now would…

This will make entry number four in a month-long NYC film fest with my boyfriend to combat our collective depression at not being able to enjoy our much-anticipated annual September trip to the Big Apple.

Buster Keaton endearingly attempts to impress the object of his amorous desires by way of indefatigable professional development in this rousing romantic comedy. Keaton trades in his “cocktail shaker” tintype camera and invests his entire worth in a functional if not antique motion picture camera to win the favor of an encouraging but highly-courted newsreel secretary, Sally (Marceline Day). 

His crude technical and artistic skills rapidly bloom like earnest weeds, though his potential employer and fellow camera operators ridicule his avante-garde, kaleidoscopic representations of New…

If you’re looking for perfection in comedic narrative, look no farther than a monkey machine-gunning down gangsters to save Buster Keaton’s clueless li’l butt. 

“The Cameraman” - Keaton’s first (and I’m sure he would have preferred, last) film with MGM - is an apex of the visual language that he had come to create. It’s a language with reams spoken just through the hapless and unchanging look in Keaton’s own eyes, as the world falls apart around him. 

And Keaton’s world was collapsing. Pressured by studio executives and changing trends, “Cameraman” is considered as the last film over which Keaton had creative control. The movie, about a street busker turned news photographer, has a tight cohesiveness fitting for a later work…

THE CAMERAMAN is often cited as the film in which Buster Keaton no longer had story control.  For inspired filmmakers, this could prove disastrous.  Witness Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their films made for 20th Century Fox as a case in point.  While this also didn’t bode well for Buster Keaton in general, I find THE CAMERAMAN to be one of my favorites.
   
The movie is not the typical Keaton movie with amazing stunts and a never-ending cycle of sight gags.  While these could create classics such as THE GENERAL, they also could generate characters whose sole reason for existence was to support the gag.  In THE CAMERAMAN, Keaton may have found his greatest “love interest” in…

Watched as part of the Criterion Challenge 2021
Week 10. 1920s

Buster Keaton is his usual stony-faced self in this funny but somewhat muted (by his normal standards) film.

In his first film for MGM, a move he later recalled as the worst decision of his career, he still retained creative control, but the output here is less inspired but still a nice story with some really funny scenes. The film follows Keaton as a photographer who falls in love with a secretary who works for MGM Newsreels. Desperate to be around her he empties his bank account and buys a film camera so he can get a job with them as a cameraman.

I think the premise had tons…