Not all Chaplin films, but a lot of them now play more as antiquities, or as as messages from the past. And that’s why I end up talking about digital Keaton and how GIF-able he is. But he was ahead of his time in a way: his time is arriving now, or it’s always arriving, continuously in the future. He was a movie star, and before that a stage star, and people loved him and his name on the marquee got people into the theater. IndieWire: Why does Keaton endure, and last?ĭana Stevens: To us now he has this special resonance that he didn’t necessarily have at the time. So that was the seed of it, starting there.” It was another 20 years before Stevens turned her lifelong obsession into a book. And just the huge role that he had an early 20th century history. I had a feeling of wonderment or passionate curiosity where I had to understand how these these works of art came to be, there was something so otherworldly about them.”Īs she learned more about him, Stevens said, “Your eyes just pop like, wait, what? He was a child star before he ever even became a film star. Because the French love Buster Keaton, they had quite a few books on him I read a Tom Dardis biography. Like me, she was obsessed and went to see every movie, “some of them several times, and then just immediately went down this kind of pre-internet rabbit hole, where this little cinematheque also had a little basement library. So that was just really not part of my language of film at all.”īut that year in France happened to be the centenary of Keaton’s birth, and Stevens went to a Keaton festival at a cinematheque. So in suburban San Antonio, Texas, there was just not much chance that I was going to see a silent film on the big screen or on the TV or anywhere else. ![]() But if you think about the time that I was growing up, it was the pre-VCR days, much less streaming. So that had been an interest for a long time. “I wrote Roger Ebert a letter when I was in middle school asking him how I could become a film critic. “I had been a hardcore movie nut since adolescence,” she told IndieWire during a recent Zoom interview. She fell for the silent movie star too, at the age of 29, as a literature grad student in Strasbourg in 1996. It’s not exactly what everyone else would do. ![]() ![]() The ways Stevens, a co-host of Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” podcast, breaks with convention is probably why the book is capturing attention and readers: you don’t know where it’s going to go, it takes unexpected turns. Stevens writes about all this in her engaging new book “ Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century,” which takes a genre-bending approach to describing Keaton and his place in Hollywood history. And when he ditched the family business at 22 and connected with Fatty Arbuckle in Hollywood, he learned how to make movies. ‘The Great Buster: A Celebration’ Review: Peter Bogdanovich’s Tribute to Old Stone Face Could Use More of His Spirit - Veniceīuster grew into a sober adult child entertainer who carried his entire family.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |