Next up on
Buster Mondays is a few miscellaneous shorts, pieces that don’t fit in with
Buster’s shorts with Fatty Arbuckle, his independent shorts, or the shorts he
made for Educational and Columbia. As
per IMDb, Buster actually has a small handful of projects that fit into this
category, but I’ve only been able to see a few of them – haven’t been able to
get my hands on the rest. If I find
more, I can always circle back later to include them.
Film was written by Samuel Beckett, and that pretty
much tells you everything you need to know.
Almost totally silent, the short follows Buster (literally follows,
always shooting him from behind) as he struggles to get away from prying
eyes. He covers his face on the street,
and in the privacy of his squalid little home, he’s still plagued by the fear
of being watched: he shies away from the
windows and covers the mirror, he shuffles his pets out of sight, he tears up
the picture on the wall that seems to be looking at him, and even the decorative
holes cut out of the back of his chair appear to be eyes gawking at him.
Remember
when I said The Awakening was one of
the more unique entries in Buster’s filmography? I had to say “one of” because I remembered
that this short existed and knew it definitely claimed the top slot. Even before getting into the “why Buster?”
question, it’s just odd. It’s very
still, with lots of lingering extreme close-ups and recurring moments, and it’s
absolutely quiet. Not like a silent
film, which removes the sound of the dialogue and the action and replaces it
with music. Not even like some of the
longer wordless bit in the Educational and Columbia shorts, that feel a little
static with no music to accompany Buster’s antics. This is silent,
not even background noise. If Beckett
thought, “Hey, I’m making a silent movie, I should get an old silent movie star
to be in it!”, it’s not because this short in any way captures the feeling of
watching a movie from that era.
So why
Buster? Other than the above
supposition, the only reason I can think of is that they needed someone who
could convey story convincingly through their body language alone. Never mind the silence, or even the lack of
intertitles – because “The Man” is shot almost entirely from behind, that means
the actor can’t use his face to express anything (insert Great Stone Face joke
if you wish, but even stone-faced, Buster was still quite expressive.) So, maybe they needed a physical comedian who
was very comfortable telling a story with his body in order to make the ideas
come through while just showing his back and the back of his head, arms, and
legs. As for actual Busterish-ness, the
only moment here that feels like Buster is a little bit where he’s trying to
put his dog and cat out into the hallway, and every time he opens the door to
send one out, the other scurries back in.
It doesn’t have the same feel as it would in one of Buster’s comedies,
given the overall foreboding nature of the short and the sterile atmosphere
created by the intense silence, but it is the one thing that seemed like
something Buster would do.
Buster
wasn’t shy about admitting he had no idea what the film was about, and far be
it for me to pretend I understand Beckett.
A strange little curiosity, morose, mysterious, and pretentious.
Warnings
No comments:
Post a Comment