“Not a whisper. / Never laughter. / Buster, thank you / for disaster.” So wrote graduate student Dana Stevens, who would go on to become Slate’s resident film critic and podcaster. Her love affair with Buster Keaton – strictly platonic, as their “first sustained encounter” was decades after the actor’s passing in 1966 – began at a cinematheque in Alsace. But Stevens’ book about actor-director-gag man-stunt virtuoso Buster Keaton, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century (Simon & Schuster, 2022), is more than the story of one man. Through Keaton, Stevens tells the story of modernity, one that includes the myths and scandals of the Hollywood Dream Factory but that goes far beyond the usual contours of the celebrity biography.

In this conversation, Dana Stevens discusses the origins of this, her first full-length book project, weighs in on her favorite Keaton films, and reveals the particular challenges of working as a critic of contemporary franchise filmmaking.

Dana Stevens has been Slate's film critic since 2006. She is also a cohost of the magazine's long-running weekly culture podcast, the Slate Culture Gabfest, and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Bookforum. Stevens lives with her family in New York. You can follow her on Twitter @thehighsign.


https://newbooksnetwork.com/camera-man

Enjoyed how this book not only gave greater context to Keaton's life but was a propulsive and entertaining read. Happy to include it in “Hollywood Moment: 12 New Books on Tinseltown,” my recent round-up of movie-related reading for Zoomer magazine’s Books section.

I am a film fanatic particularly of classic Hollywood. I have always been a big fan of Buster Keaton and knew some about this life. What makes Dana Steven's book so unique is that she uses his acrobatic past as a metaphor to propel us through the story of his life. I saw an interview with her and she described how she frames the chapters to be both a close-up on Buster and then zooms out to show us context -- his personal and work life as well as the lives of others around him -- for example, some of my favorites included more detail on Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, and Bert Williams. This book is not a typical straightforward biography, but is so much more and incredibly detailed about the filming of Keaton's iconic films (including Cameraman). It is a meticulously researched book from the perspective of an admiring fan. I highly recommend this book.

Buster Keaton (1895-1966), the “Great Stone Face” of silent movies, found himself hurled, figuratively and literally, into the 20th century. And quite an impact he was to make! We often seek a way into a story through an event or a person. Buster Keaton proves to be a perfect guide in an understanding of where we’ve been, in terms of media, these last hundred years or so. Dana Stevens, film critic for Slate since 2006, gives Buster Keaton his due and even credits him with having more than a little to do with defining the last century.

It’s only in hindsight that we can see the big picture. One of the most celebrated anecdotes about the early years of cinema goes back to one of its inventors, Louis Lumiere, who is said to have declared that “the cinema is an invention with no future.” Perhaps that is more legend than true but it was kept alive by Jean-Luc Godard for his screenplay, Contempt. As Stevens points out, time and again, there was nothing certain about this new art form. It was a gamble. It was a game for risk takers. Enter Buster Keaton and his family of daredevil vaudevillians dealing in the most spine-tingling and acrobatic of stunts!

Buster Keaton set upon the stage at the tender age of five, just at the dawn of a new century. As Stevens does throughout, she connects all sorts of disparate dots to focus on a whole, while crafting a sense of the poetic, especially with her favored metaphor of Buster in mid-air. Here is an excerpt where she tightens the frame around Buster’s origins:

"By the time Buster was taking his first public falls at the turn of the century, watching talented children onstage was a cultural thrill that came with a built-in moral twinge, even when those children weren’t being flung into scenery or the rib cages of hecklers by their strapping fathers. The awareness that “the cruelty” was liable to shut down the show must have added to the audience’s frisson of mingled guilt, pleasure, and suspense–the precise mix of affects Joe and Buster’s father-son knock-about act also specialized in eliciting. This conflicted cultural, legal, and psychological space, where children were at once fragile treasures to be protected, market commodities to be exploited, and private property to be disposed of at their parents’ will, was the world into which Buster found himself thrown."

Buster Keaton, in his own way, was the ultimate Everyman of the Twentieth Century, a regular fellow thrown into a suddenly faster world. In one film after another, in countless intricately plotted near-death antics, Buster Keaton is the sad sack in over his head, just trying to get by, but forced to contend with a topsy-turvy chain of events whether it was a house frame perfectly timed to fall only inches away from him or a locomotive set to just barely miss from killing him. Stevens, with great gusto, details every step of the way of Keaton’s ongoing good citizen trapped in a new-fangled pursuit of the American Dream.

Sharing similar childhood pathos and artistic achievement in adulthood with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton is among that elite group of artists that simply transcend any one medium, elevated to the level of an icon. Look to his movies and you will find gems with a distinctive Buster Keaton artistic vision. Beyond his silent movie glory, Keaton remained relevant as a character actor at the dawn of television and in movies well into the sixties. It was Keaton’s special mix of talents and demeanor, a combination of the subversive and the melancholic, that truly spoke to a new generation and remains timeless. Dana Stevens is spot on to celebrate this singular talent and her book is a most fitting tribute.