This year is the 100th anniversary of one of the greatest silent comedian’s first on-screen appearance—in 1917, a young Buster Keaton was featured in Fatty Arbuckle’s two-reeler The Butcher Boy, beginning his career in film. Coincidentally, this year also saw my first exposure to Keaton’s work; after watching The General, the director was transformed in my mind from a distant figure of history to a true genius of comedy. Though his greatest films are nearing a century old, I was struck with their lasting comedic power. Keaton’s films captured my interest on both a historic and cinematic level, but held my interest through something harder to describe: a kind of dual quality of familiarity and novelty. Some instinct seemed to draw me towards these films as undeniably funny, and yet, when I consider recent comedies, I saw nothing quite like Keaton’s work. I wanted to know more about how silent comedy has influenced films and what modern comedies can learn from its techniques. Delving into this topic quickly took me to the works of Jacques Tati, a filmmaker who was directly influenced by Keaton, and whose work Keaton praised repeatedly. To see where similarities and evolutions in comedy were present in the directors’ works, I decided to take a closer look at the films widely regarded to be each’s masterpiece—for Keaton, The General (1926); for Tati, Play Time (1967).
One of the most obvious similarities between these films is the relative lack of dialogue. Of course, this is partly because The General is silent, but Keaton also deliberately kept his use of title cards far below that of his competitors. In Play Time, a similar aversion to dialogue doesn't erase character speech altogether, but makes what little appears mostly nonsynchronous. This stylistic choice makes the sparse dialogue, whether it's the tittering of the tour group or ruckus of nightclub patrons, feel more like another component of the shot, rather than part of the narrative. This decision adds a particular sense of depersonalization to Play Time’s modern setting, but for both directors allowed a focus on more cinematic elements of comedy. Of course this didn’t entirely exclude sound—sound effects (or the lack thereof) are used in both films in the service of gags, and are always come hand in hand with the director’s understanding of how to play with perspective within the frame. A perfect example from The General is when protagonist Johnnie Gray (Keaton) rides his train across the front lines of battle, remaining oblivious to the war being waged right behind him simply because his back is turned. Using the lack of sound effects to his advantage, Keaton suggests that Johnnie’s perception is limited to that of the audience—what the viewer can’t hear is accepted as silent, and we’re able to both marvel at and believe in his ignorance. This interaction of sound and perspective appears throughout Tati’s films, and is used to masterful effect in Play Time. One scene early in the film follows Monsieur Hulot (Tati) as he waits in a sleek, modern office building. Tati exploits the environment—here, the clear glass walls—to repeatedly withhold the sound of Hulot’s motions. This initially postpones the audience hearing the sound of the squeaking chairs, for instance, and subverts our expectations of synchronous sound when Hulot begins slipping on the waxed tile floors. Instead of hearing the scuffles of his strained movements, our sound perspective is moved outside the building, where we hear only passing traffic. This manipulation of sound is simple but effective, as the audience is left with both the gleeful task of filling in these sonic blanks as well as the implication that Hulot is on display to the city around him.
For both directors, geometry is a crucial part of both their artful cinematography and the construction of jokes. Though the implications of each world is different, both Tati and Keaton construct highly stylized and perfectly orchestrated environments, the mechanics of which are exploited for our amusement. In one scene in Play Time, the camera rests outside a modern apartment building, where we see multiple families sit down to watch TV in a cutaway view made possible by their massive single-pane windows. Tati turns the camera degrees to the left and right, establishing each family’s positions as they sit in front of their screens. As the camera returns to the initial angle, however, the barriers of the apartment walls become invisible, and we’re suddenly able to imagine that the families are watching each other, rather than TV, combining their actions and reactions in unexpected ways. All the while, beneath the scene is Tati’s commentary on the ways in which modern technology structure lives and limit connection; though it seems that the families are interacting, the truth remains that they are each physically separate, confined by the box of their own window.
Though it has an entirely different tone from this scene of Tati’s, Keaton’s classic cannon gag in The General similarly utilizes the geometry of the film world in order to surprise us. By a series of unfortunate circumstances, train engineer Johnnie Gray (Keaton) finds himself hanging off of a moving engine, in the line of fire of a cannon being pulled along behind him. Everything about the geography of this scene is used to increase our anticipation: sharp lines and symmetric framing trap Johnnie in his situation; constant forward motion builds tension; the futility of Johnnie’s small and rapid movements contrast with the unrelenting stillness of the massive cannon. What ends the gag and saves our hero is an expected change in geometry—a curve in the railroad tracks sends the cannonball off at an angle, just missing Johnnie and nearly striking his enemies’ train instead.
This scene also works as a microcosm for the film’s take on the world, a view which The General shares with Keaton’s other works. Johnnie, though he has a different name and inhabits a different setting, is essentially the same as Keaton’s other protagonists: a plucky young man in a bewildering and hostile environment which can only be conquered with a combination of human ingenuity and sheer luck. Keaton uses the frame of the Civil War to create an underdog protagonist (meaning, unfortunately, that Johnnie wears the uniform of the Confederacy) and exploits the technology of the time in service of gags—principally through trains, but with other military equipment as well. Beyond this, however, the film’s setting is ultimately unimportant; it’s the greater greater struggle against an automated world which defines Keaton’s comedy. In contrast, Tati’s Monsieur Hulot is a constant throughout his films, down to his signature coat and pipe. This difference is vital to developing some of Tati’s themes: namely, the stark ways in which Hulot is at odds with his modern environment, constantly teetering on the brink of being utterly left behind. Whereas Johnnie is a literal engineer of his world, always able to move himself through his surroundings with determination and a little elbow grease, Hulot feels more like a tourist in his own life, moving with an uncertain rhythm between one attraction to the next. Play Time is also uniquely tied to its setting, as Tati uses Paris to draw our attention to the obliviousness of the tour group—the camera only ever glimpses the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe in the reflections on the gleaming glass doors the women pass through—and comment on the commercialization of culture—the travel agency features the same dull-looking skyscraper in its posters for France, America, and India. And unlike Keaton, Tati doesn’t try to suggest that his world is conquerable; Hulot doesn’t save the day and get the girl, after all. Instead, Tati uses the film to show us the absurdity of modern life and encourage us, if we can’t change it, to at least revel in it. If this idea wasn’t already evident in the core of the film, the final scene punctuates it perfectly. Given Tati’s artistic touch, we watch as the ritualized chaos of a endless traffic circle becomes a carousel, a symphony of pattern and sound that is all at once ridiculous, biting, and beautiful.
While Keaton and Tati certainly crafted very different worlds in these films, they nonetheless share striking similarities in their cultivation of cinematic comedy. Since the arrival of sound films, comedies have had dialogue as something to lean on for laughs. I find that too often, comedies simply feature characters delivering lines, letting us forget that we’re watching a movie rather than trying to exploit the medium to any artistic ends. Keaton’s origins in the silent era clearly pushed him towards these innovations, but Tati is the perfect example of how this legacy can persist, evolve, and flourish—if only directors are willing to look beyond dialogue and play with silence.
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