Buster Keaton: Visual Comedy Research

I thought it was essential for me to research into Buster Keaton for my essay, as his work relies solely on his performance. Keaton didn't like when other directors told their stories through title cards, so he would try to minimise the use of them in his own films. Instead, he would tell the audience everything they needed to know though action, and though body language. In order to make a lot of his gags believable, he would strive to capture them in one take. He thought this was the best way to convince his audience what they were seeing was real, so often if a gag wasn't captured in one take, it would be scraped.

As the worlds he acted in were 'flat' (he would only move left, right, up, down, away from the camera or towards it), this meant his gags relied heavily on staging too. Where the camera was placed for each scene had to be carefully considered, otherwise the gag might not have worked as well.

Buster Keaton - The Art of The Gag

Quotes:

Tony Zhou - Every Frame a Painting

"Visual gags generally work best from one particular angle, and if you change the angle you're changing the gag, and it might not work as well."
"Never fake a gag"
"For Keaton there was only one way to convince an audience that what they were seeing was real. He had to actually do it without cutting."
"Either we get this in one shot or we throw out the gag."
"Each gesture should be unique."

Buster Keaton (Interview with Buster Keaton)

"The average picture used 240 titles, that was about the average... and the most I ever used was 56."
"We eliminated subtitles just as fast as we could if we could possibly tell it in action."
"I remember you once told me something about ten years ago about you and Charlie Chaplin having friendly contests, who could do the feature film with the least amount of subtitles?" "I think Chaplin won that. He got down to... One of his pictures is something like 21 titles and I had 23" "And this is for an hour and a half film" "Yeah. Seven reel picture"
"We didn't repeat gags, and we didn't steal from each other."
"This is a shock to anybody who is in the motion picture business today... Neither Chaplin, Harold Lloyd or myself, ever had a script." "We never even thought about writing a script. We didn't need to."
"When we get the start and the finish we've got it, because the middle we can always take care of, that's easy."  "We can always go into any story, and pad and fill in the middle."
"We didn't rehearse a scene to perfection. We didn't want that, because it was mechanical then." "We only sat down and talked about it." "We didn't want anything to look mechanical."
"A poison thing to us was a misplaced gag."
"I always wanted an audience to outguess me, and then I'd double cross them sometimes"