Buster keaton

Born in Pickway, Kansas, in 1895, Joseph Francis Keaton was the son of a couple of traveling actors. At the age of three he and his parents formed a trio known as “The three Keatons”. In 1912 Mack Sennett founded the legendary production company Keystone, which created its own style based on crazy chases and cake wars. The golden age of slapstick begins, a genre based on visual jokes that fascinate viewers. Popular figures such as Harold Lloyd , Fatty Arbuckle and, above all, Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin , took their first steps in this company .

In 1917 Keaton met one of the Keystone comedians, Arbuckle, and was hired as a supporting role in his shorts, in which he was nicknamed ‘the stick-faced man’ because he never laughed. His character never fluttered, never even moved an eyebrow, even though everything was collapsing around him, to hilarious effect. It is even said that Keaton had a contractual agreement never to laugh in public. In addition, the escapist Houdini nicknamed him ‘buster’ (something like destroyer), when he saw him fall down a ladder without hurting himself. With Fatty Arbuckle he made shorts like ‘Fatty in the kitchen’ or ‘Fatty Postman’, where he attracted so much attention that he was immediately offered to star in his own films. Signed by Paramount, he becomes a writer, director and protagonist.

Known in Spain as Pamplinas, Buster starred in ‘Pamplinas y los fantasmas’, ‘El guardaespalda’, etc. He soon developed his own style, close to surrealism. In his films, Keaton showed signs of enormous acrobatic capacity, coming to perform gags of great technical capacity. One of today’s movie stars, Jackie Chan , claims to have been inspired by Keaton for his complex choreography.

He gets a big hit with a wacky humor. Among his shorts, La barca (1921) stands out, in which his character builds a boat so big that it cannot fit through the door, and La casa eléctrica (1922), where he builds a house with technological wonders that unleash chaos. His first feature film is The Three Ages (1923), in which he describes the same love story in three different eras. They are followed by The Modern Sherlock Holmes (1924) and The Cameraman (1928). His masterpiece is The General’s Engineer (1926), loosely based on the theft of a locomotive during the American Civil War.

His career fell apart when MGM bought out his contract, forcing him to submit to strict rules that limited his creative freedom. This coincided with the divorce of his wife, who forbade her to visit his children. Keaton took refuge in alcoholism and ended up being fired from MGM. He survives with small appearances on by-products and television shows. In 1959, he took part in The Twilight of the Gods , a tribute to the decadent silent film stars. And the following year he published his autobiography, and he appeared alongside Chaplin in Footlights . He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1959, seven years before his death.