GO WEST + Keaton Shorts “One Week” and “The Boat”
$8.00 (member) ; $13.00 (general admission)
Ticket prices include a $2.00 online booking fee.
Aero Theatre | Introduction by author James Curtis.
Book signing of Curtis’ BUSTER KEATON: A FILMMAKER’S LIFE begins at 2:00pm. In partnership with Larry Edmunds Bookshop.
Restorations by Cohen Media, done in conjunction with Cineteca di Bologna.
This is a vaccinated-only screening.
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ABOUT THE FILMS
“One Week” (1920, 19 min. Dirs. Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton.)
In Buster Keaton’s first starring comedy, a newly married couple (Keaton and Sybil Seely) is given a kit home from the Portable House Co. to build themselves. But then the numbers on the boxes get mixed, making it impossible to assemble it correctly. The result is a house with a mind all its own.
Format: DCP
“The Boat” (1921, 23 min. Dirs. Edward F. Cline, Buster Keaton.)
The married couple from ONE WEEK (Buster Keaton and Sybil Seely) return to set sail in a boat built in the basement of their home. What follows is a panoply of comic destruction, a celebration of defective reasoning and, as the critic Gilbert Seldes would put it, “intense preoccupation.”.
Format: DCP
GO WEST, 1925, Cohen Media, 69 min, USA, Dir: Buster Keaton.
Two outcasts meet on the vast Arizona cattle ranch known as the Diamond Bar and form a bond. Friendless (Buster Keaton) is a homeless drifter working as a ranch hand. Brown Eyes is a dairy cow destined for the slaughterhouse because she’s gone dry. They become inseparable companions as Friendless conspires to save her life, a struggle that extends from the Mohave stockyards to the streets of Los Angeles. This unusual feature, Keaton’s sixth as a filmmaker, may not be as frequently revived as THE GENERAL or STEAMBOAT BILL, JR., but it casts its own distinctive spell. The great poet Carl Sandberg, moonlighting as a Chicago movie critic, said it was likely to leave “unforgettable impressions” on an audience. “This comedian comes close to the Chaplinesque in his serious comedy. Buster is one of the few comedians at whom you can laugh without feeling a bit ridiculous yourself.”
FORMAT: DCP
Film Notes by James Curtis
