Editorial Review of The Art of Buster Keaton, courtesy of Amazon.com

 Buster Keaton was arguably the cinema’s first modernist, an old-fashioned romantic with a 20th-century mind behind a deadpan visage. His films brim with some of the most breathtaking stunts and ingenious gags ever put on film, all perfectly engineered to look effortless. And, as Kino’s magnificent 11-disc boxed set The Art of Buster Keaton conclusively shows, they are among the funniest ever made. Keaton warped gags until they left the plane of reality in such shorts as The Playhouse (1921) and The Frozen North(1922), and takes a logic-defying leap into the very nature of cinema itself in his hilarious Sherlock Jr. (1924).

He takes on the mechanical world with Rube Golberg ingenuity in The Navigator(1924) and perfects his match between man and massive machine in Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), which features the funniest hurricane scene ever put to film, and The General (1927), one of the greatest comedies of all time.

Editorial Review of The Buster Keaton Collection, courtesy of Amazon.com

 The Buster Keaton Collection presents three of the first films (one, The Cameraman, a near masterpiece) Keaton made for MGM beginning in 1928, an arrangement that gradually ushered the great comic actor and director into the sound era but ultimately deprived him of creative control. The Cameraman, considered by many to be Keaton’s last important silent work, is an unusual story about a tintype portrait photographer (Keaton) who becomes a newsreel cameraman in order to win the heart of a secretary (Marceline Day). After flubbing an assignment by double-exposing some action footage, the hapless hero tries to prove himself in several memorable sequences of Keatonesque knockabout comedy (including a Chinatown street battle). There are also a couple of grace notes, such as a scene set in Yankee Stadium in which a solo Keaton exquisitely mimes the moves and attitudes of a pitcher. But The Cameraman’s strange, almost subconscious power is in its variation on an old Keaton refrain: The hero’s conflict over different kinds of authenticity, represented here on either side of a motion picture lens–the difference between capturing something real and living it.