Camera Man Quotes

“Our lawyer beat them in court by pointing out that the law barred children only from performing on a high or low wire, a trapeze, bicycle, and the like. There was not one word that made it illegal for my father to display me on the stage as a human mop or to kick me in the face.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“(This was something of a surprise given Peg’s own physiognomy, which might be tactfully described as “plain.”)”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“The notoriously unloquacious Buster only had about three or four standard anecdotes he told over and over in interviews, and the encounter that would follow was one of them.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“The locations’ familiar white-tiled neutrality was like the blank slate of a movie screen, a backdrop against which all sorts of urban encounters might happen.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“It was in New York in late March 1917, a few months after Buster and Myra had abandoned Joe in California while he was on a bender, breaking up the Three Keatons’ act for good.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“Right into old age he insisted that all he was out for was a laugh.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“It is evident that so far-reaching and commanding an institution among the masses may work irreparable evil or boundless good.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“In such films, he laments, “people are but types, swiftly moved chessmen.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“Nearly everywhere you look in early film criticism, the medium is characterized above all by its speed.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“the flickering shapes that the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky, on first observing the Cinématographe at work, had described as “vague but sinister” dispatches from “the Kingdom of Shadows.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“Cinema’s displacement of theater as the nation’s most popular and influential form of mass entertainment took approximately a generation, a span of time that happened to coincide with Buster Keaton’s first twenty or so years of life.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“He was an atrociously terrible businessman, an indifferent celebrity, and, until late in his life, a dilatory husband and father at best.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“It wouldn’t take long for the same qualities that drew audiences to the Keatons’ act—the irreverence, the potential for danger, and the sheer improvisational lunacy of the small boy’s daredevil stunts—to attract the notice of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“It’s a relief to the twenty-first-century viewer when this mercifully short sequence comes to an end, but there is also a certain satisfaction in seeing a white man in blackface experience something unusual in the long history of the form: consequences.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

“Keaton’s modernism—brash in ambition but melancholy in tone—is that of his fellow 1890s babies F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hart Crane, who both made spectacular literary debuts in 1920. Like those writers (whom he almost certainly never read), Keaton was formally innovative, inclined to puncture social pretension, and given to making art that was, in a uniquely 1920s way, sardonic and romantic at once.”
― Dana Stevens, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century