Review: The Cameraman

In its own low-down deportment, The Cameraman is really a raucous, more accessible iteration of Man with a Movie Camera.

The Cameraman
Photo: MGM

Despite the fact that he broke his neck while filming a stunt for Sherlock, Jr., Buster Keaton was always one of the most schematic and precise artists of cinema’s early years. His control was physically evident: Witness his confidence—or, perhaps, his insanity—during the hurricane sequence that closes Steamboat Bill, Jr., most notably the bit where the side of a house literally comes down around him. But it was also emotionally evident: The nickname “the great stone face” has less to do with his alleged facial inexpressiveness and more with his naturalistically muted response to exaggerated situations.

When Keaton sacrificed that independence and control by signing a contract with MGM, where production schedules were tighter and less open to the sort of gag-improvisations that he was used to indulging, many observed it as the beginning of his career decline. Which makes it all the more poignant that his first MGM feature, 1928’s The Cameraman, directed by Edward Sedgwick, who up to that point in his career was more or less a director-for-hire, is right up there with Sherlock, Jr. as one of Keaton’s most impressively self-reflective films and an ode to the unexpected and elusive lightening-in-a-bottle nature of filmmaking.

One of the film’s great early gags defines its preoccupation with lack of control. Keaton plays a street-corner tintype photographer who falls in love with the receptionist, Sally (Marceline Day), at a newsreel production office. In a bid for her attention, he applies for a job shooting on-the-spot news with the only camera he can afford: an outmoded, hand-cranked shoebox model. After splurging on shooting “audition” footage, Buster has his reels screened for the office management only to discover that his lack of experience with his ancient equipment has resulted in a mess of poetic double exposures (a battleship appears to lope down a busy Manhattan thoroughfare) and kaleidoscopic, pre-Man with a Movie Camera street bustle.

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In its own low-down deportment, The Cameraman is really a raucous, more accessible iteration of Dziga Vertov’s meta-cinematic masterpiece from 1929, at least to the extent that both thrive on postmodern self-referentiality. Throughout Sedgwick’s film, Buster’s camera repeatedly causes chaos, photographically as well as physically, acting as an extended, pseudo-vestigial limb that frequently shatters glass panes as readily as Keaton’s own body works its way into myriad bizarre pratfalls and situations at a local saltwater pool.

Buster appears in front of his own camera twice during the film, once in each half. The first occurrence is during his cinematographic gestalt period, when he consciously places himself in the role of his film’s subject: a one-man baseball team, enacting impossible feats of slugging (an infield run) and defense (a miraculously nonchalant triple play). And the second time occurs when he jumps into the water to save Sally when a romantic rival has left her to drown after a failed daredevil stunt. Redemption has already entered into Buster’s life: When he accidentally knocks down and supposedly kills an organ-grinder’s dancing monkey, he’s pressured to buy the tiny corpse, which seems to come back from the dead in an eerie and hysterical slow-motion shot (the monkey removing his white shroud like a resurrected saint).

It’s that same monkey that’s revealed to be rolling film on Buster’s heroism and, thereby, the artist behind the scenes engineering a comedic resolution. If the film’s first half posits that amateurism is the jumping-off point for accidental expressionism, then its second appears to argue for unregulated primitivism. Specifically, The Cameraman’s most tangible moral is that, if you want to achieve unfussy filmed drama, you’d do best to take your lessons from an organ-grinder’s monkey. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a message for the ages.

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Score: 
 Cast: Buster Keaton, Marceline Day, Harold Goodwin, Sidney Bracey, Harry Gribbon  Director: Edward Sedgwick  Screenwriter: Clyde Bruckman, Joseph Farnham, Lew Lipton, Richard Schayer  Distributor: MGM  Running Time: 67 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1928  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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