Horizon Watch

You'd think that collaborative general-interest blog of history, literature, culture, and stuff would mention this Mark Steyn column. But noooooo, the blinkered self-styled "cultural elites" can't be bothered, can they? Here's real culture, you pomo pansies:

But here’s a fact: in Fatty Arbuckle’s The Butcher Boy (1917), his first screen appearance, Buster Keaton threw a custard pie. Thereafter, in none of his own films did a single pie fly. Instead, as one of the few self-contained film-makers — star, writer, director, producer, stuntman — he tapped the true energy in comedy. Not the phony energy when everyone’s running round in circles, but the energy that can come from just standing still. No single scene distills the spirit of Keaton better than that sublime moment in The General (1926) when he climbs up to the roof of the train, stands on the engine and leans into the horizon, ramrod straight but tilted forward, the wind whipping his hair as the landscape rushes by. It’s all in the angle — like the famous photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, for which, in its grace and poetry, this scene is Keaton’s comedic equivalent.

# posted by Old Belt @ 7:30 AM