WEBVTT 00:00:03.310 --> 00:00:06.230 Hi my name is Tony and this is Every Frame a Painting. 00:00:08.450 --> 00:00:10.229 There are some filmmakers who are so influential 00:00:10.460 --> 00:00:13.540 that no matter where you look, you see traces of them everywhere. 00:00:16.619 --> 00:00:19.560 I see this filmmaker's framing in the works of Wes Anderson. 00:00:23.460 --> 00:00:25.760 His acrobatics and stunts in Jackie Chan. 00:00:28.460 --> 00:00:30.760 And his deadpan posture in Bill Murray. 00:00:34.760 --> 00:00:38.430 He, of course, is Buster Keaton, one of the three great silent comedians 00:00:38.649 --> 00:00:42.490 "He was, as we’re now beginning to realize... 00:00:42.890 --> 00:00:47.449 ...the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema." 00:00:47.900 --> 00:00:49.300 And nearly a hundred years later 00:00:49.400 --> 00:00:52.120 I think he still has plenty to teach us about visual comedy. 00:00:52.990 --> 00:00:56.320 So today, let’s take a look at how the master builds a gag. 00:00:56.890 --> 00:00:57.440 Ready? 00:01:00.230 --> 00:01:00.739 Let's go. 00:01:07.900 --> 00:01:10.700 The first thing you need to know about visual comedy 00:01:10.200 --> 00:01:12.370 is that you have to tell your story through action. 00:01:12.570 --> 00:01:15.350 Keaton was a visual storyteller and he never liked it 00:01:15.350 --> 00:01:18.460 when other directors told their story through the title cards. 00:01:18.660 --> 00:01:21.780 -"The average picture used 240 titles... 00:01:21.800 --> 00:01:23.380 "...that was about the average." 00:01:23.700 --> 00:01:27.310 -"240 was the average?" -"Yes. And the most I ever used was 56" 00:01:28.100 --> 00:01:31.190 He avoided title cards by focusing on gesture and pantomime. 00:01:31.300 --> 00:01:34.550 In this shot, you never find out what these two are talking about. 00:01:34.850 --> 00:01:38.419 Everything you need to know is conveyed through the table & their body language 00:01:38.720 --> 00:01:40.900 "But what you had to say... 00:01:40.190 --> 00:01:43.490 "You had to communicate to the audience in only one way..." 00:01:46.000 --> 00:01:48.219 -"Through action" -"Right. We eliminated subtitles..." 00:01:48.219 --> 00:01:51.610 "...just as fast as we could if we could possibly tell it in action" 00:01:52.100 --> 00:01:54.420 Keaton believed that each gesture you did should be unique. 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:56.300 Never do the same thing twice. 00:02:00.420 --> 00:02:01.700 Every single fall... 00:02:02.820 --> 00:02:04.100 is an opportunity… 00:02:05.660 --> 00:02:06.800 for creativity. 00:02:08.199 --> 00:02:10.590 But once you know the action we come to the second problem: 00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:12.550 Where do you put the camera? 00:02:18.290 --> 00:02:21.549 Visual gags generally work best from one particular angle. 00:02:22.500 --> 00:02:23.350 And if you change the angle... 00:02:24.150 --> 00:02:26.769 then you’re changing the gag and it might not work as well. 00:02:27.769 --> 00:02:29.750 Finding the right angle is a matter of trial and error. 00:02:30.000 --> 00:02:33.380 So let’s take a look at two possible camera placements for the same joke. 00:02:33.500 --> 00:02:35.000 Here’s the first one. 00:02:42.880 --> 00:02:44.000 And here’s the second. 00:02:52.240 --> 00:02:54.730 You’ll notice in first angle, the car takes up most of the frame 00:02:54.830 --> 00:02:57.240 and we don’t get a clear look at Buster until he turns around. 00:02:58.740 --> 00:03:01.480 But in the second angle, the car’s placed in the background 00:03:01.480 --> 00:03:03.560 and we always have a clear view of his face. 00:03:04.180 --> 00:03:07.600 This split second, where he doesn’t know what’s happening but we do... 00:03:07.360 --> 00:03:09.550 ...that’s much better from over here. 00:03:10.750 --> 00:03:12.800 And in the first angle, the framing splits our attention. 00:03:13.200 --> 00:03:16.510 Our eyes want to look at his face and the sign at the same time. 00:03:17.100 --> 00:03:18.700 But after reframing the scene... 00:03:19.100 --> 00:03:20.489 Our eyes naturally look at him... 00:03:21.290 --> 00:03:22.500 then the sign 00:03:22.890 --> 00:03:25.529 then back to him. Much better. 00:03:28.690 --> 00:03:30.130 Now we come to the third question... 00:03:31.490 --> 00:03:33.730 What are the rules of this particular world? 00:03:35.130 --> 00:03:38.190 Buster’s world is flat and governed by one law. 00:03:43.320 --> 00:03:46.000 If the camera can’t see it, then the characters can’t see it either. 00:03:47.000 --> 00:03:49.500 In Buster’s world, the characters are limited by the sides of the frame 00:03:49.600 --> 00:03:52.000 and by what’s visible to us, the audience. 00:03:53.990 --> 00:03:56.200 And this allows him to do jokes that make sense visually 00:03:58.230 --> 00:03:59.230 but not logically. 00:04:00.200 --> 00:04:02.620 A lot of his gags are about human movement in the flat world. 00:04:03.620 --> 00:04:04.600 He can go to the right... 00:04:05.520 --> 00:04:06.500 to the left... 00:04:07.400 --> 00:04:08.400 up... 00:04:09.200 --> 00:04:10.200 down... 00:04:11.300 --> 00:04:12.200 away from the lens... 00:04:13.640 --> 00:04:14.500 or towards it. 00:04:15.400 --> 00:04:16.000 Look familiar? 00:04:16.339 --> 00:04:20.000 -"She’s been murdered. And you think I did it." 00:04:21.360 --> 00:04:22.100 -"Hey!" 00:04:24.360 --> 00:04:27.210 Like Wes Anderson, Buster Keaton found humor in geometry. 00:04:31.260 --> 00:04:34.510 He often placed the camera further back so you could see the shape of a joke. 00:04:34.810 --> 00:04:35.960 There are circles... 00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:38.000 triangles... 00:04:39.100 --> 00:04:40.260 parallel lines... 00:04:40.710 --> 00:04:43.560 and of course, the shape of the frame itself: the rectangle. 00:04:45.760 --> 00:04:49.159 I think staging like this is great because it encourages the audience 00:04:49.160 --> 00:04:52.700 to look around the frame and see the humor for themselves. 00:04:53.000 --> 00:04:54.500 In this shot, think about where your eyes are looking. 00:04:59.120 --> 00:05:00.320 Now where’s he? 00:05:02.520 --> 00:05:04.229 Some of these gags have their roots in vaudeville 00:05:04.520 --> 00:05:06.639 and are designed to play like magic tricks. 00:05:11.839 --> 00:05:13.100 And like all great magic tricks 00:05:13.439 --> 00:05:15.800 part of the fun is trying to guess how it was done. 00:05:19.450 --> 00:05:23.250 Keaton had a name for gags like these. He called them “impossible gags.” 00:05:26.500 --> 00:05:28.350 They're some of his most inventive and surreal jokes. 00:05:30.650 --> 00:05:32.669 But as a storyteller, he found them tricky 00:05:32.669 --> 00:05:34.200 because they broke the rules of his world. 00:05:34.669 --> 00:05:39.109 -"We had to stop doing impossible gags, what we call cartoon gags." 00:05:40.210 --> 00:05:42.599 -"We lost all of that when we started making feature pictures." 00:05:43.210 --> 00:05:47.400 -"They had to be believable or your story wouldn’t hold up." 00:05:48.210 --> 00:05:51.479 So instead, he focused on what he called the natural gag. 00:05:52.280 --> 00:05:55.650 The joke that emerges organically from the character and the situation. 00:05:56.800 --> 00:05:58.000 Consider what he does with this door. 00:06:04.170 --> 00:06:05.600 Keaton claimed that for visual comedy... 00:06:05.700 --> 00:06:08.300 you had to keep yourself open to improvisation. 00:06:08.650 --> 00:06:11.900 -"How much of it was planned and how much came out in the actual doing?" 00:06:11.900 --> 00:06:13.700 -"How much was improvised, you know?" 00:06:13.900 --> 00:06:16.200 -"Well as a rule, about 50 percent…" 00:06:18.990 --> 00:06:20.550 -"...you have in your mind before you start the picture..." 00:06:20.650 --> 00:06:23.549 -"...and the rest you develop as you’re making it." 00:06:24.990 --> 00:06:26.500 Sometimes he would find a joke he liked so much 00:06:26.150 --> 00:06:28.000 that he would do a callback to it later. 00:06:30.270 --> 00:06:33.479 But other times, jokes that he’d planned beforehand wouldn’t work on the day. 00:06:33.780 --> 00:06:35.590 So he would just get rid of them... 00:06:36.900 --> 00:06:38.270 -"...because they don’t stand up and they don’t work well." 00:06:38.800 --> 00:06:40.700 -"And then the accidental ones come." 00:06:42.240 --> 00:06:43.400 He was supposed to make this jump. 00:06:43.600 --> 00:06:44.800 But since he missed... 00:06:45.400 --> 00:06:47.300 He decided to keep the mistake and build on it. 00:06:49.240 --> 00:06:52.300 -"So you seldom got a scene like that good the second time." 00:06:52.300 --> 00:06:54.520 -"You generally got em that first one." 00:06:54.520 --> 00:06:55.870 -"Maybe that’s one of the reasons..." 00:06:55.900 --> 00:06:58.500 -"...there was so much laughter in the house the other night." 00:06:58.800 --> 00:07:00.360 -"I mean, the younger people and I had this feeling..." 00:07:00.660 --> 00:07:02.850 -"...that what we were seeing was happening now." 00:07:05.750 --> 00:07:07.000 -"That it had happened only once..." 00:07:07.100 --> 00:07:09.300 -"...It was not something that was pre-done and done and done." 00:07:09.700 --> 00:07:11.320 And that brings us to the last thing about Buster Keaton 00:07:11.500 --> 00:07:13.000 and his most famous rule. 00:07:16.510 --> 00:07:17.700 Never fake a gag. 00:07:18.300 --> 00:07:21.000 For Keaton, there was only one way to convince the audience... 00:07:21.220 --> 00:07:22.550 ...that what they were seeing was real. 00:07:23.220 --> 00:07:24.350 He had to actually do it… 00:07:28.000 --> 00:07:29.500 ...without cutting. 00:07:29.780 --> 00:07:31.780 He was so strict about this that he once said... 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:33.780 “Either we get this in one shot… 00:07:37.780 --> 00:07:39.760 ...or we throw out the gag." 00:07:40.560 --> 00:07:43.480 And it’s why he remains vital nearly 100 years later. 00:07:43.980 --> 00:07:46.290 Not just for his skill but for his integrity. 00:07:46.980 --> 00:07:48.290 That’s really him. 00:07:50.290 --> 00:07:52.700 And no advancement in technology can mimic this. 00:07:53.500 --> 00:07:56.540 Even now, we’re amazed when filmmakers actually do it for real. 00:07:57.500 --> 00:08:00.400 But I think he did it better 95 years ago. 00:08:01.350 --> 00:08:02.350 So no matter how many times... 00:08:02.550 --> 00:08:04.200 you’ve seen someone else pay homage to him… 00:08:13.689 --> 00:08:18.379 Nothing beats the real thing.