Filling a major gap in the critical canon, Keaton’s Classic Shorts: Beyond the Laughter chronicles the rapid growth in the filmmaker’s understanding of what makes both comedy and film successful. Keaton developed his major themes in these nineteen silent short films shot between 1920 and 1923, creating his persona “Buster” with his trademark stone face. These short films clearly indicate Keaton’s love of the camera and his concern for composition, symmetry, and images that delight the eye and startle the mind.
Oldham reconstructs each of these rarely seen films to enable the reader to “watch” Keaton’s performance, devoting a separate chapter to each. She analyzes each film’s strengths, weaknesses, and prevalent themes and threads. She also enables readers to plumb the depths of what seems to be surface comedy through philosophical, biographical, historical, and critical commentary, thus linking the shorts together into a cohesive study of Buster Keaton’s growth through his three-year independent venture as a filmmaker. Beyond the laughter and beyond the great stone face, Oldham presents a treasure of cinema comedy and a unique philosophy of life as captured by a great filmmaker.
Film analysis at its best. Between 1920 and 1923 Buster Keaton wrote, directed, and starred in nineteen independent short films which are some of the funniest ever made. In this scholarly yet readable analysis, Oldham, an unabashed fan of the “great stone face”, devotes a chapter to each of these classic shorts, closely describing each scene with attention to visual composition, symmetry, repetition, and other cinematic techniques, as well as the critical element of the extraordinary funnyman himself. We can be thankful that Oldham not only avoids killing the subject in the process of dissection, an all-too- common fault in film criticism, but actually adds a richness of understanding to the Keaton legacy. In her words, “Beyond the comedy is film, lovingly and dexterously crafted in its comic visions. Within these visions are starkly familiar themes and paradoxes. We begin to realize that Buster – exaggerated or simple, funny or serious – resembles each one of us…”