Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens

 The more you immerse yourself in the 1920's, a period of enormous creative dynamism but also of teeth-rattling instability, the more a single insight seems to animate nearly all the art and popular culture of that age:  that the world is a dangerous and unpredictable place, and in it each of us is alone.    -- Dana Stevens, Camera Man (Atria Books, 2022)

There seems to be a continuing interest in the films of Buster Keaton recently, starting with Peter Bogdanovich's documentary The Great Buster in 2018 and leading to the current schedule of Keaton films at New York's Film Forum and the recent books by Stevens and James Curtis.  I think there are at least two reasons for this:  one is the depressing state of contemporary movies and another is Keaton's modern existentialism and cinematic brilliance.  I vividly remember when Keaton's films were revived at the Elgin theatre in the 70's, the first chance for most of us to see this incredibly beautiful and intelligent work of Keaton's from the 1920's, lovely films that seem more modern than ever today.

Stevens does not go into analyzing the individual films to any significant extent -- many other books have done that -- instead she give us a detailed biography of Keaton's life and influences.  Keaton never had the detailed business sense of Chaplin and when sound came in Chaplin warned Keaton against signing with MGM, predicting accurately that Keaton would completely lose any independence. Stevens examines Keaton's MGM films, which started out well with The Cameraman in 1928 and then went quickly downhill until Keaton was fired in 1933 for drinking and unreliability.  Keaton eventually stopped drinking (with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, of which Stevens gives us a history) and then worked behind the scenes as a gagman, moving eventually to a circus and a successful stint in television. 

Stevens includes detailed portraits of Keaton's wives, F. Scott Fitzgerald's unhappy times at MGM, writer Robert Sherwood's positive reviews of Keaton's films in Life magazine, and Bert Williams, an influential Black comic and actor who influenced Keaton's work, as well as the members of Keaton's crew who worked with him on his independent production in the 20's. My one quibble about this fascinating book is that there is no index, though there are extensive source notes.