Stumm und Laut: Silent Film Festival in Vienna

Buster Keaton in a still from The General

Last weekend, I attended the Stumm und Laut silent film festival in Colombusplatz in Vienna.


An aficionado of the silent era, in particular Buster Keaton, I was thrilled to discover such an opportunity in Vienna - and for free! Not only that, two different programs for Friday and Saturday, which meant that I had to go both nights. I did, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.


A note on Buster Keaton: I love Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, all those guys.  But Keaton, a child actor from Vaudeville days, is a particular inspiration to me. He once said, "Most men put their pants on one leg at a time, but I'm not most men. I put my pants on two legs at a time," by which he meant that he purposely bought over-sized trousers. One of his gags involved going to a thrift store or other clothing shop, and,  to avoid a certain person, such as in Cops where he tries to evade the police, he pulls a pair of very large pants off the rack and jumps into them. Disguised in his new duds, he walks away from the unsuspecting policeman.


This prompted me, when I was still a freshman at Lawrence, to go down to the local Goodwill store and buy a pair of my own over-sized trousers, affectionately called my "man-pants" because, of course, to get the right effect, I needed to buy men's pants. They were brown, rather ugly, and intended for a short and stout man (inseam 30", waist 38") and wouldn't stay on without a belt. But I bought them and wore them around campus, and practiced jumping into them when my roommate, opposed to any and all "odd" behavior, was out of the room. I still wear them quite often, since they're so comfortable, and no longer terribly odd-looking, what with the "menswear" fad going on now. I didn't pack them for Austria because I didn't really have room...though in missing them, I did wander around the sales racks of the men's department at Peek & Cloppenburg the other day (an Austrian department store, sort of like a high-end T.J. Maxx).


Getting back to the film festival: they played a Lumière film, L’arrivée d’un train en gare de la ciotat, one of the very first moving picutres; two Méliès films: Panorama pris d'un train en marche and Le tunnel sous la manche. These were all accompanied by an a capella singer - amazing to listen to her make train sounds! - and the last film was a feature, Buster Keaton's The General about a train engineer in the south during the Civil War who saves his beloved and town from an advancing Union army. Sometimes, in our modern times, The General is panned because the hero is a Confederate, and I don't know why that is, but I maintain it's still great movie. Very cute and typically Buster Keaton, with plenty of physical humor, but not slapstick. To call Keaton's on-screen acrobatics "slapstick" is to undermine the beauty and art of The Buster Keaton. 


Reference, if you will, some of Charlie Chaplin's work for slapstick. The Rink, for example (show on Saturday along with Méliès' Le Voyage dans la lune and Le raid Paris -Carlo en deux heures, and two Keatons: Cops and Nieghbors  with accompaniment by a Viennese techno-pop group) is one pie-throwing, tumble-down after another, with everyone in the scene bruised and battered but Chaplin. Keaton, on the other hand, like Harold Lloyd, took the pit falls and rat traps and pies in the face himself. Sure, Chaplin had the Little Tramp, and he became richer and more famous around the world than either Lloyd or Keaton, with a longer career that lasted through the silent era and into talkies. But Keaton and Lloyd had the integrity to do their own stunts, the first two fingers of  Lloyd's right hand infamously being blown off during filming of Safety Last (he wore a prosthetic from then on). The thing that did Keaton in, unfortunately, was alcoholism, which he attributed to his first wife leaving him and not allowing him to see his sons.

An interesting article on Keaton and Surrealism by Gordon C. Waite can be found here, if you desire to read up on the artistic nature of what might otherwise be simply called "comedy."