A Camera in a Film, with Its Character - Text 3
In the late 1920s, when silent cinema was heading to its inexorable end with the arrival of the earliest sound film systems, Buster Keaton, with Edward Sedgwick, made a film whose protagonists were moving picture camera operators. Today The Cameraman (1928) is an indispensable document for understanding the art and technique of camera operators in the latter half of the decade. During this period, camera operators’ skills began to emerge and become more visible with documentary images (newsreels, reportages, etc.) which had evolved thanks to the Akeley camera, precisely. In this film, starring Keaton, this same camera becomes, in its storyline, a full-fledged character in the film. After The Playhouse (1921) and Sherlock Jr. (1924), The Cameraman was the third film in Keaton’s autobiographical trilogy on the cinema, and the film shows and analyses the possibilities offered by the Akeley camera.[7] Unlike Chaplin and other comics of the day, Keaton blended art and technology by adopting a material viewpoint, beginning with Sherlock Jr., which abounds in shots inquiring into the very nature of cinema.[8] Like Stroheim and Sternberg, Keaton always sought to try out various image techniques throughout his career. Recall for example the use he made of slow motion in the falling-with-an-umbrella scene in College (1927), a scene which appears to have come right out of a contemporary film in the French avant-garde. For its part, The Cameraman contains shots which also evoke the avant-garde, both French and Russian, for example the sequence showing Keaton’s failed audition for the cameraman role.
