There were two loves in his life: watching 400 movies he's never seen before, and... [cut to photograph of his blog]
The General
1926
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman
Okay, alright, I got it this time. Last time—I will consider Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans to be the "last time," since I'm not referring to all Film Club movies, but instead Film Club movies that were released almost 100 years ago—I had a tough time understanding why this silent film was important. What I learned in the aftermath of viewing that film, and was lucky enough to discuss with my peers on Zoom, was that the movie was important because the making of that movie was IMPRESSIVE. A century later, I tend to take the act of making a movie for granted. I see it as a given, but I should be seeing it as the miracle that it is. And when we view extremely old but nevertheless well-made movies, its age and limitations should only serve to underline the filmmaking process, and the joy it is to see these filmmakers achieve something tangible, something grand.
So I watch The General with all this in mind, and I got it. To be fair, this film made it extremely easy to remember that the act of filmmaking is a challenge to be overcome, based on the insane stunts. But let that fact even out with the fact that this is now officially the oldest feature film I've ever seen, and will officially put to rest any notion that the older a film is, the worse it is. This was a great film! I loved watching it! However, to be in a space where I was able to appreciate the insane guts it must have taken to film this thing, that's what I'm really thankful for.
More than the stunts—which I will touch on in the very next paragraph, have patience—I remain impressed with the idea of a film being shot like this. I remember from Sunrise a point made about the camera in the 1920s not being the most nimble, effortlessly movable thing. And yet here we are, a film whose majority of time is spent on a moving train, and somehow, the camera keeps up with it. Parallel train tracks? For one of the most expensive movies of all time, I'm assuming so. But isn't it interesting, that such a feat would pass right by you if you didn't bother to think about it (as has been my flaw in the past)? I take for granted that I am the audience of the film and so my eyes will be able to follow the action. Putting myself in the filmmaker's shoes, and I see how difficult a process it must have been, to allow that camera to follow the action as it's been captured. Goddamn.
And the stunts are impressive because of the time period too. I know these thoughts are pretty obvious, but I'm going to type them out anyway. Consider which would be more dangerous to a human being in real life: jumping on a moving train from one train car to another, or driving a car through the top window of a skyscraper and crash landing through a window of another skyscraper. It's the second one, right? Obviously. But then consider this: when they did that in one of the Fast and Furious movies (I don't know which one, and I might have even made it up, I don't know), they had generous help from computers. Vin Diesel didn't actually jump a car between two skyscrapers. Buster Keaton really did fuck around this much on a moving train. There was no trickery! The train was moving! He was defying death! That's why The General is more awe-inspiring. More dangerous, sure. More stupid, even, because we wouldn't even be here if something went slightly askew and Keaton ended up with a railroad spike through his skull. But fuck, man, this is movie magic.
There are, in many of these older films that we're moving through in Film Club, certain scenes that I've seen clips of before, enough times (say maybe more than three) that I can recognize them as clips that I've seen around. Not from anywhere specific, just probably in certain clip packages of "history of movies," like at the Oscars or in random commercials or whatever. Hopefully you know what I'm talking about. Anyways, the scene in this film that I've obviously seen before, even though I have absolutely no knowledge of where specifically I might have seen it before, was the infamous trainwreck scene.
Think about it. They had no special effects in 1926 that would satisfactorily show a train collapsing through a bridge into a river. So they literally just had to collapse a bridge and film a train crashing into a river. Absolute insanity. Fucking commitment to the art. I've seen plenty of trains collapse through tracks throughout my life, sometimes through bridges, sometimes into rivers, so many crashes. But most of those are practical effects or animation or CGI fuckery. Buster Keaton dropped a real fucking train into a real fucking river. (And left it there! It became a tourist attraction!) The film called for such a climax, and there it was, no cost spared, movie magic intact.
I've seen very few silent films in my life, so it's worth noting Firsts, even though they are obvious. But this is the first film I've ever seen Buster Keaton in! I guess I'm familiar with this face? His nickname was "The Great Stone Face," which is pretty fascinating. Based on what I saw here, it fits. I think if a modern actor had this disposition, like if they were stone-faced while acting in a movie, then we might be quick to say that they are a bad actor. Having an "expressive face" is a compliment, and having the opposite feels like a criticism. But I've seen the acting style described as "stoicism while surrounded by lunacy," and I guess it makes more sense.
It's like what we talked about with The Naked Gun, and "Joke on a Joke." Leslie Nielsen wouldn't have been nearly as funny if he wasn't so serious. The same can probably be said for Buster Keaton. This movie was funnier because he played it seriously. And I'll note here that I might even confess to being confused about The General's designation as a "comedy." It felt like a thriller to me. There were some comedic bits, but they almost felt out of place (like the bit where Annabelle Lee is throwing progressively smaller pieces of wood in the fire). I'm chalking it up to this being a sign of the times, like with A Night at the Opera's serious operatic singing—movies were so new in the '20s and '30s, and maybe audiences expected a little of everything.
There's just so much to learn. When I say "I get it," that absolutely does not mean that I instantly understand everything. For some aspects to this film (and film in general), I will say that I am only at the beginning of the journey. For example, there was a camera shot in this film that I noted as interesting—when Johnnie Gray is hiding under the table, he looks through a cigar burn in the table toward Annabelle, who is being held captive, and we see Johnnie's eye. But then the camera's POV switches, and we're looking through that eye, and through the hole in the table cloth, and Annabelle is framed in a large white circle.
The circle was the tablecloth. But now I'm reading it, and it seems that the shot was also based on an iris shot, which is something we're familiar with, the closing of the lens slowly so that there's a circle focusing on one particular aspect of the scene. This wasn't the lens, this was the tablecloth, but it was a reference to the iris shot. And maybe if I knew a little more, I would've been able to pick that out right away. I'm not there yet, but I get it more than I did yesterday, and I'm being patient.
GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5
NEXT TIME: We're going to watch Trading Places. Man, can you imagine Eddie Murphy in a silent film? I don't even know how that would work.
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