"Buster"
Lieve Billiet
Born Joseph Francis Keaton, he owes his name as an artist to a formidable tumble (buster) at the age of six months, from the top of a staircase, from which he emerged without the slightest injury[1]. This was the inaugural scene, the meeting of a signifier and an experience of the body, fixing an experience of enjoyment by linking it to a fiction of invulnerability.
As a young man, he joined with his parents' vaudeville theatre troupe and led The Three Keatons to unprecedented success. Labelled as a "human mop", "human projectile", or "the boy who can't be hurt", he is the object of his father's manipulations. He throws him into the orchestra pit, uses him as a dust rag, a potato sack or a football[2]. And while he is having fun, according to his own words, the more he keeps his face impassive, the more the audience laughs. This earned him another name: The Great Stone Face. Mistreated by his father “for laughs”, thrown away like the bobbin of Fort-Da, it’s a “message of jouissance” that is at the forefront and not a message of love[3]. A jouissance that is not localised in the image of the body, and that is not negated by castration.
At the age of 21, he moves to New York where Roscoe Arbuckle taught him everything about film making and camera work. The style of his own films, 19 short films and 12 feature films will nevertheless be clearly different from his master's style. The profusion and narrative explosion of most of Fatty’s films is contrasted with the rigour, unity and clarity of Keaton's films, marvels of rhythm, logic and geometry[4]. He will develop "a unique style, based on the virtuosity of a body in motion, tested in long shots by a space that it struggles to dominate"[5]. Impassive and indefatigable, grappling with a world, with objects and with others, the Keatonian hero, pragmatic, adapts, and thus triumphs[6].
Refusing to be doubled by a stuntman for his extraordinary exploits, he narrowly escapes death on several occasions during filming. Not necessarily from accidents. The fracture of a cervical vertebra was only discovered years later by chance during an X-ray.
Keaton was able to elevate an escabeau that was exceptionally singular, until a new management style at MGM resulted in the loss of all independence. Deprived of his style, his character, his working method, none of his genius will be found in anything that follows.
Translation: Raphael Montague
References
[1] B. Keaton & C. Samuels, My wonderful world of slapstick, Da Capo Press, 1982, p. 20.
[2] S. Goudet, Buster Keaton, Cahiers du Cinéma, Paris, 2007, p. 12.
[3] Miller, J.A., The Image of the Body in Psychoanalysis, Transl. A. Alvarez in Lacanian Ink 40, Fall 2012, pp. 14-31.
[4] S. Goudet, op. cit. p. 19.
[5] Ibid. p. 9.
[6] J.-P. Coursodon, Buster Keaton, Paris, Atlas/Pierre Lerminier, 1986.