Off to California for Harold Lloyd at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum, but first some thoughts about Keaton's 'The General'

Me outside the Jane Pickens Theatre, which always does amazing promotional posters. 

Last Thursday night, I had the honor of doing music for 'The General' (1926) for a very appreciative audience at the Jane Pickens Theatre in Newport, R.I.

In introducing the film, I tried a new way to explain what an innovator filmmaker Keaton was.

I asked everyone to look for a short sequence early in the film when Buster jumps on and starts riding one of those old-fashioned bicycles sometimes called 'penny-farthings'—the ones with one big wheel (which has the pedals) and a tiny trailing wheel.

Buster pedals for a short while, and finally falls off and down an embankment. It takes all of 10 seconds of screen time. Buster gets laughs for the sheer futility of his efforts.

But the startling thing about the sequence is the placement of the camera. Once Buster hops aboard the bike, the view switches so that Buster is followed from above as he struggles to maintain his balance over rough ground, and then finally tips over.

It could have been shot from ground level, which is is when Buster mounts the bike. But then the film switches to a tracking shot to follow him as he pedals and finally falls.

Why take the trouble to shoot from a high angle? Buster, I think, instinctively knew that the absurdity of the scene would be greatly magnified by how he's pedaling along the edge of a steep embankment.

And in order for that to work, an audience had to see the embankment. And the only way to do that was for the camera to be elevated high above Buster and to look down. 

To modern audiences, this seems perfectly natural—something you'd hardly notice. Every time we watch a movie, we benefit from more than a century of film-making technique. 

But if you look at a lot of silent films, you realize how rare and unusual this sort of camera placement is. Deep into the 1920s, directors were still prone to keep the camera on the ground, as if it was an audience member sitting in a seat at a stage play. Old theater habits died hard.

Buster, however, seemed to instinctively know that the camera had to be in a certain (and seemingly unnatural) place for the scene to work, and the flexibility of the motion picture allowed that.

No onlooker would have seen Buster on his bike from a high angle as he passed by. But Buster and his team seemed to understand the different possibilities offered by the movies, and made use of them when the scene called for it.

Here's the sequence from YouTube:

It's the same thing in another Keaton film, 'Our Hospitality' (1923), where scenes of Buster at the edge of a high waterfall are filmed from above, over the rushing waters (that can't have been easy) in order to show Buster's predicament.  

Buster shot from above (again) in 'Our Hospitality' (1923).

How did Buster know to do this? There was no film school. (Keaton, a child star in vaudeville, attended regular school for exactly one day.) It had to be an intuition about the possibilities of this new way of story-telling, and a willingness to experiment.

Not sure if any of this helped last Thursday's audience appreciate 'The General,' but the reaction was strong throughout. Very satisfying to see Buster's great achievement still provoke cheers as it approaches its 100th birthday.

Up next: I'm heading out to the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, Calif. to accompany a program on Saturday, May 30 featuring Harold Lloyd's 'Grandma's Boy' (1922).

And then June brings a cluster of great programs, including the silent version of 'Beau Geste' (1926) in Wilton on Sunday, June 7 and a screening of a 35mm print of 'The Adventures of Prince Achmed' (1926) at the Somerville Theatre on Sunday, June 14.

See you at the movies!