In the process I probably even missed a couple, shoddy behaviour for a professed Keaton fan. When I did get around to watching the films I did so in a largely random order, fitting them in whenever I had a half-hour or so to spare. For some reason I never got around to covering it for the site – perhaps the very idea of watching and writing about 32 films and a spattering of extra features proved too intimidating or logistically impossible at the time. That we can see them at all is a minor miracle, considering that the very concept of film preservation on a meaningful scale is a relatively recent one.īack in 2006, Eureka gave us all the chance to right this unfortunate wrong when they released Buster Keaton – The Complete Short Films 1917-1923 as a 4-disc DVD box set. Even today, after years of searching and careful restoration work, pristine prints of many of his films seem likely to remain the stuff of cineaste dreams. See how I resisted the urge to put the word 'loveable' in inverted commas there? But I also realised that my fondness for Keaton was based on only a small and possibly unrepresentative number of his films, most of which were nigh-on impossible to see back in pre-digital days. Only some years later, when I was better able to appreciate Chaplin's extraordinary talent for knockabout comedy, did I realise that my preference was driven in part by the respective screen personas of the two comedians, preferring as I did Keaton's deadpan stoicism to Chaplin's loveable tramp. I've never been a fan of this trend for picking one artist over another like it's a competition in which there can only be one winner, but I will admit that in my formative years, I always preferred Keaton to Chaplin. A few years later opinion had done a reactive about-face and Chaplin was being celebrated once again as a comedy great and those earlier naysayers were being loudly mocked.
Way back, when I was really starting to explore the sheer breadth of comedy talent that flourished in Hollywood during the silent era, the films of Charlie Chaplin were starting to fall out of favour and get unfavourably compared to the work of Buster Keaton. Slarek has spent the last week with the widest of appreciative smiles on his face. 32 films – 32 great films – charting Buster Keaton's journey from supporting player to comedy giant have been brought together and restored for Eureka's Blu-ray brilliant box set, BUSTER KEATON – THE COMPLETE SHORT FILMS 1917-1923.
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