In December of 1895, the Lumière brothers hosted the first commercial film screening in the basement of a Paris café. Two months earlier, in a small town in Kansas, Buster Keaton had been born. Keaton would spend his early years honing his physical comedy chops as part of his family’s vaudeville act; meanwhile, cinema’s pioneers were creating the language of the 20th century’s defining art form and new venues for film projection began to appear. Cinema was still in its infancy when Keaton moved to New York in 1917, but the stage was set for his entrance and viewers across the country were ready to embrace the soon-to-be iconic master of deadpan slapstick.
This fortuitous concurrence is only one of many in Keaton’s life, as Slate movie critic Dana Stevens shows in her superb book Camera Man, an unconventional biography that casts its subject as the protagonist of his time, a mirror for the rapidly changing country in which he lived. Stevens takes detours into various political, economic, and cultural developments of Keaton’s time both to put him into a broader context and to demonstrate how film art crucially influenced what the book’s subtitle calls “the invention of the Twentieth Century.”
Some of the most unexpectedly entertaining chapters deal with now-forgotten phenomena, such as the advent of kit houses (which inspired Keaton’s 1920 short One Week) and the rise and fall of the Childs Restaurant chain. The latter not only served as the backdrop for a pivotal moment in Keaton’s life (he contemplated his future while eating breakfast at the restaurant in New York) but also eerily parallels the arc of his career, having been founded at the end of the 19th century, peaked in popularity in the ’20s, and died off by the end of the ’60s.
Camera Man is a disarmingly personal book. Stevens explains her relationship to Keaton’s work in a brief preface, but her presence is felt throughout. When describing the aforementioned short One Week, she urges the reader to put the book down and go watch the film on YouTube so that the final gag isn’t spoiled. Stevens transmits her ardor for Keaton to us as we read, making even his inferior ’30s work sound like essential viewing.
We can also feel how passionately Stevens wishes that she could go back and see the Keaton family’s vaudeville routines, or, in Camera Man’s most poignant moments, her despair at knowing that even modest adjustments to the course of history might have resulted in a drastically different future for Keaton. For instance, if the suits at MGM had placed a little more faith in him when he signed with the studio near the end of the silent era, would his career have fizzled out so decisively in the age of synchronized sound? Or if Charlie Chaplin’s wounded ego hadn’t led him to sabotage Mabel Normand’s directing career, would she be as well known to us today as Chaplin’s beloved Little Tramp?
Of the book’s various miniature biographies and character sketches, the most moving is the detailing of Roscoe Arbuckle’s sad life. Stevens takes the opportunity to correct the historical record on two fronts, first by referring to Arbuckle mainly by his given name (rather than that of his screen persona, Fatty, as he’s usually referred to), and even more importantly by laying out the known facts of the Virginia Rappe case. Even though Arbuckle was exonerated after three trials of Rappe’s rape and murder, his reputation to this day hasn’t recovered. Stevens’s affection for Arbuckle, Normand, and other secondary personages—including the entertainer Bert Williams and the writer Robert Sherwood—comes through palpably.
Keaton, of course, is at the center of it all, and Camera Man enhances our understanding of his life and times while providing a welcome invitation to visit (or revisit) his work—and just in time for the centennial of his feature-length directorial debut, Three Ages. As we approach more major anniversaries of silent-era landmarks, we can only hope that future scholarship on Keaton’s peers—Chaplin, Oscar Michaux, F.W. Murnau, Mary Pickford, and more—will boast the same verve and originality as Stevens’s work. Camera Man will appeal to established Keaton fans and induct some curious newcomers into the world of “the great stone face.”
Camera Man is now available from Atria Books.
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