Keaton's Silent Shorts: Beyond the Laughter

Chapter 10:The Playhouse

(UpfertO ThePlayhouse (January 1922) Courlesy or lite Academy of MOlion i'iclUrc .... ClI anti Scknccs H amlet once mused, "TIle play's the thing." Entcr Keaton punctually on the cue "perchance to dream" with a quick run and pratfall, to conjure a daydream of extraordinary visions. In The Playhouse , aUthe world isindeed astage-yetfor all thestage, still a ~Im. Keaton rolls llis memories of vaudeville straight through the proscenium and frame forsorne ofthe mostvivid illusions in silentcinema. 125 Theplayhouse The darkness of the screen lifts like a stage curtain, in a curious wipe form, to present Buster reading aposter, OPERA HOUSE TO-NIGHT TWENTY FIVE OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST MINSTREl. STARS. Instantly, we enter the world ofthe theater by the opening, strictlyfilmic, optical"curtain. " Buster plays a dual role: ticket-buying Audience Member and Actor (since he is in fact "behind the curtain"). This illusion is reinforced as Buster pays with money from a tiny wallet that unfolds to the floor like a long accordion. We have been duly warned: what seems one will be another, yet they are the same. Buster enters the playhouse. An irised medium shot tunnels our vision to dispel any doubt on what we are about to see. It is also like a filmic "spotlight" on the Conductor who now steps into the orchestra pit; he bears an uncanny "resemblance" to Buster. Unfamiliar with this strange new world, we momentarily wonder how the Conductor can look exactly like the Audience Member. Is it Keaton's logical-illogic that the Conductor of the show has to pay to get in? Or has Buster come to see his musician twin brother? Conductor readies us for a greater shock when he taps his baton, blasts into a downbeat , and cues us to the "Strings" by looking offscreen. In long shot, Bass, Cello, and Violin perform vivace; they are all Busters. In medium shot, Conductor cues us to the other side: Clarinet, Trombone, and Drums are all played by Buster. In medium shot, the Conductor scratches his back a tempo with the baton, almost like a wry comment. Once we are introduced to the orchestral participants in this illusion and become accustomed to the multiplicity, we realize this is not a trick of double exposure or superimposing one Keaton over another. Each musician plays his instrument in his own "cubicle" of the frame through multiple exposure. The piece de resistance ofthis technique is yet to occur in The Playhouse, but to whet our appetite, Keaton introduces it early in the film. Keaton and his cameraman Elgin Lessley divided the picture frame into separate parts, or cubicles, for each Buster in the shot by masking off fractions of the lens, blocking those cubicles that should not be exposed. Once a role was performed, the film was rewound, the shutter reset, and the lens remasked for the next performance in the adjacent cubicle. Up to three musicians are accommodated in one shot so that the trio appears to perform simultaneously. "Keaton didn't originate [multiple exposure]. It had been used for years to show an actor in two roles at once. But it was a difficult technique. It was hard to join the halves of the picture without a tell-tale line down the middle. It was also hard to get the separate actions to synchronize-like looking up at the 12ti Theplayhouse exact moment that your alter ego, in the earlier exposure, said something to you. ,,1 Unlike multiple exposure, double exposure results from filming over another image within a full frame so that two images (say, of the same person) can literally occupy the same place at the same time. As a result, double exposure creates the kind of dreamy transparency vital to Keaton's feature SherlockJr. in which Buster the projectionist rises from his sleeping body to enter his own dream. The ghostly offspring represents a self "dissolved" into an ethereal form. Metamorphosis into a ghost or dream alter ego is generally introduced by a transparent self rising from a solid body and sometimes returns to that forth when the story ends. More often, the transparent image quickly "solidifies" and does not retain its ghostly appearance once the character begins its adventures. Besides the technical difficulty of maintaining a transparent entity for the film's duration , superimposition can also be a disservice to actor and audience. The superimposed actor is not seen in a natural...