Buster Keaton’s cartoony effects

While Buster Keaton is remem­bered for his spec­tac­u­lar phys­i­cal skill, he aug­mented his films with some equally remark­able cam­era effects.  He often told the story of when he first started doing short films with Roscoe Arbuckle, he dis­as­sem­bled and reassem­ble a motion pic­ture cam­era to under­stand how it worked.

While watch­ing THE THREE AGES, one of Buster Keaton’s ear­li­est fea­ture films, some­thing odd caught my eye.  In the scene, Buster has sat down in a restau­rant and ran­domly pointed to some­thing in the menu with­out look­ing. The waiter returns with a giant crab on a plate, and sets it down in front of Buster.  Buster is star­tled, and this is how he reacts:

Buster goes from sit­ting still, to rock­et­ing straight up.  He must have used some method to cut out the prepara­tory antic­i­pa­tion for the jump.  If you look at the empty chair you can see a tiny jump, and the wait­ers hand changes posi­tion. I have found five exam­ples of a sud­den change in speed in Keaton films, and made these gifs to con­sider how it may been achieved.

Some read­ers may be unfa­mil­iar with the tech­nique of under crank­ing.   Silent film era cam­eras were pow­ered by a hand crank.  By turn­ing the crank slower, the result­ing film would project with that high speed look so com­mon to silent film com­edy.  But I think Buster went a step fur­ther to achieve the car­toony speed he wanted.  We are so used to worn out prints with unsta­ble frames and jumpy motion, we may not rec­og­nize that the film maker inten­tion­ally did some­thing that would cause it.

This one, from THE BATTLING BUTLER, is obvi­ously a cam­era trick. The boxer throws his upper­cut and freezes, while the acro­bat pre­pares his flip.

The boxer’s very sud­den stop makes me think this was achieved by cut­ting out the unwanted frames through edit­ing, (post-production)

This one from SHERLOCK JUNIOR is also clearly an effect. It is pos­si­ble that this was achieved with severe under crank­ing of the camera.

Here is a very sub­tle one from GO WEST. Buster’s jump through the win­dow almost appears nor­mal. But look at the coy­ote in the lower right side. He shoots out of frame, and the cow also has a sud­den jump to the right.  I would guess they removed a cou­ple of frames for this one.

I like this last one, from STEAMBOAT BILL JR. To give the punch more accel­er­a­tion, I think he cut out two frames.  You will note the entire image has a tiny clock­wise jump in it, sug­gest­ing the film edit wasn’t joined per­fectly straight.

The film jumps, then returns and lines back up.   That means there is an edit, one frame out of align­ment, then another edit going back to where it was.  So he cut out at least two frames that were not sequen­tial, replac­ing one in between.  This what ani­ma­tors do when they remove “in between” frames to speed up an action.  I admire Keaton’s effort to pro­duce the most effec­tive action he could.