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This chapter explores two of Buster Keaton’s short comedies, both examples of what has been called California slapstick: The High Sign (1922) and The Balloonatic (1923). Both films, which were shot in and around the seaside resort of Venice, California, give evidence of a peculiar moment in the social and material geography of metropolitan Los Angeles during a critical period in the histories of the city and the Los Angeles-based film industry. Apart from the stimulation of their entertaining, intensely physical hilarity, Keaton’s films give us an example of the mutual implications of the film technology and suburbia, both of which were involved in making sense of modernity’s propensity toward an experience of dislocation.

Comedy was the most established of all silent-film genres, and as it began to find new bearings in a time of sound, it frequently took on musical trappings. The Marx Bros. led the way, followed by a strange assortment of silent comedians (Buster Keaton), blackface performers (“The Two Black Crows” and radio's Amos ‘n’ Andy), and stage stars such as Charlotte Greenwood. The marriage between music and comedy was frequently uneasy, although in random moments a performer such as Beatrice Lillie, in Are You There?, could demonstrate the possibilities.

This chapter examines cinema’s engagement with ubran-based industrialization, linking its audience and their modes of mechanized production to those that made cinema possible and does so by using Chaplin and Keaton as complementary directors who engaged with mechanization. Cinema’s capacity to engage the increasingly thin line between animate and inanimate entities, between the organic and the mechanical / electric, was rendered even thinner by the technologies that altered labour and vision. The numerous connections between the machine of the factory and the vision machine of the cinema factory/industry system reveal the many roles of visual technology within the cultural politics of the first few decades of cinema, leading to a self-reflexive examination of the status of the image, and cinema’s engagement and thematising of its own power.

By a recurrent logic of inversion, screen comedy makes light of, by bringing to light, the machinations of its own medium. This takes place in a way theorized implicitly by Henri Bergson, in regard to the mechanization of body and language in comedy, and exemplified by classics like Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924), and the oddball metafilmic farce of Helzapoppin! (1940). The essential filmic comedy in each case includes photogrammic in-jokes about the progression of the image file, turned at times to a kind of metafilmic slapstick based on the misrecognized or reversed image. Classic examples are contrasted with the digital manipulations of the later comedy Click (2006) as a measure of the electronic eclipse of photochemical progression.

Much of Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy revolves around his elaborate outdoor sets and the crafty weather design that destroys them. In contrast to D. W. Griffith, who insisted on filming in naturally occurring weather, and the Hollywood norm of fabricating weather in the controlled space of the studio, Keaton opted to simulate weather on location. His elaborately choreographed gags with their storm surges and collapsing buildings required precise control of manufactured rain and wind, along with detailed knowledge of the weather conditions and climatological norms on site. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) is one of many examples of Keaton’s weather design in which characters find themselves victims of elements that are clearly produced by the off-screen director. Keaton’s weather design finds parallels in World War I strategies of creating microclimates of death (using poison gas) as theorized by Peter Sloterdijk.

This chapter shows that the war consolidated the cave man’s status as a global cultural character. Cave men have since been frequently depicted on stage, in films, in advertisements, literature, and more recently on television. Hollywood finally embraced the British conception of comic cave men in the 1920s. By then the character was so completely divorced from earlier evolutionary associations, that religious fundamentalists ignored it. The character has subsequently followed an almost unrelenting downward trajectory into b-movies, cheap comedies and cartoons, and productions that paraded hyper-sexualised women. The slide decelerated in 1960 when The Flintstones, the most influential depiction of cave men, debuted on American television. The series satirised middle-class, suburban America, in much the same spirit as E.T. Reed had once viewed Britain. The chapter concludes by briefly examining more recent depictions of cave men and prehistory in film and television to show that comedy predominates alongside healthy doses of action and attempts at scientific accuracy. Various examples are used to show that women continue to be portrayed in dismissive and overtly sexualised ways and that prehistory still denigrates and dismisses racial minorities. At the same time, the seemingly endless popularity and profitability of cave men films and television series mean that they will continue to be made for years.

Addressing location substitution in early silent comedies such as Mack Sennett’s Homemade Movies (1922) and Yukon Jake (1924) Buster Keaton’s The Frozen North (1922) and Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), along with examples of lesser known films, Mark Sandberg examines the ways in which Hollywood was able to build a simulacrum of the entire world, and the Arctic in particular, on its backlots. Sandberg delineates the claims for authenticity made by these films and the publicity machines that surrounded them, despite their artificiality. Based on extensive research at the Margaret Herrick Library, Sandberg also examines in detail para-material such scenarios, adverts, and Paramount Studios’ location map, to delineate how various world geographies were delineated across the map of California.

This section sets the background for the telling of Langdon’s story, which is divided into three phases. It also tells the story of how this biography came to be and expresses the author’s hope that after many years of development, this book reflects both the hard work of the scholars involved and the memories of wife Mabel and son Harry Jr. of this man who was a comic genius.