Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
The General
A locomotive chase across the Civil War, played entirely straight.
Keaton's masterpiece was a commercial failure that ended his independence — audiences in 1926 wanted a comedy, and he had built something stranger: an epic in which every gag is also a feat of engineering. The train wreck at the Rock River was the most expensive single shot of the silent era, done once, real, and left in the river for scrap hunters. The precision is the point: comedy at the exact tolerance where it becomes grace.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Buster Keaton · Clyde Bruckman
- Photographed by
- Devereux Jennings
- With
- Buster Keaton · Al St. John · Boris Karloff · Marion Mack · Charles Henry Smith · Joe Keaton
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
The machine as co-star, 1926 and 1927: Keaton loves his locomotive like a person; Lang fears his Machine like a god. Between those two feelings sits the whole century's argument with technology.