Keaton's Silent Shorts: Beyond the Laughter

Rating:
Summary: Overdone and Dry.
Review: A long, over-written unfunny book about some very funny films. See Keaton's movies instead.

Rating:
Summary: Film analysis at its best.
Review: Between 1920 and 1923 Buster Keaton wrote, directed, and starred in nineteen independent short films which are some of the funniest ever made.
In this scholarly yet readable analysis, Oldham, an unabashed fan of the "great stone face", devotes a chapter to each of these classic shorts, closely describing each scene with attention to visual composition, symmetry, repetition, and other cinematic techniques, as well as the critical element of the extraordinary funnyman himself.
We can be thankful that Oldham not only avoids killing the subject in the process of dissection, an all-too- common fault in film criticism, but actually adds a richness of understanding to the Keaton legacy. In her words, "Beyond the comedy is film, lovingly and dexterously crafted in its comic visions. Within these visions are starkly familiar themes and paradoxes. We begin to realize that Buster - exaggerated or simple, funny or serious - resembles each one of us..."

(The "score" rating is an unfortunately ineradicable feature of this page. This reviewer does not "score" books.)