For Fans of Buster Keaton

The 1926 'The General' cost more to produce than almost any film of its era, and Keaton repaid every dollar. The burning bridge collapse is a real locomotive on a real bridge, and the man chasing it is Keaton himself, no doubles. The comedy is built into the machinery of pursuit: the same obstacles that menace Johnnie Gray on the way to the front become his weapons on the way back. No other film has ever made logistics funny at this scale.

Fifty years before postmodern cinema became fashionable, Keaton stepped inside the movie screen and let the edit cuts happen to his body. 'Sherlock Jr.' (1924) is a film-within-a-film that treats the grammar of cinema as a physical landscape. The gag where Keaton sits on a bench that becomes a garden that becomes a cliff that becomes a rushing train track is a joke about montage that most film students still miss.

The boulder avalanche in 'Seven Chances' starts small and builds until hundreds of rocks the size of cars are chasing one man in a tuxedo down a hill. Keaton choreographed each dodge himself. The gag begins as a punchline and ends as something close to abstract cinema: pure kinetic problem-solving, no character motivation needed.