SHADOWLAND
The emotional otherworlds of classic cinema. Unspooling the ribbon of dreams every Sunday afternoon.
Films in this Series
Buster Keaton
94 minutes
In Buster Keaton’s greatest early feature, OUR HOSPITALITY, a young man falls for a young woman while travelling to his ancestral home in Kentucky. Unbeknownst to him, her family has vowed to kill every member of his family. Buster’s ingenuity, acrobatics, and romanticism all flourish, culminating in what is still for our money the most amazing stunt in cinema history
And also! The show will be preceded by a screening of Keaton’s short ONE WEEK, twenty minutes of surpassing genius in which Buster and his new bride receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. But their week-long construction project goes from tough to absurdly impossible when a rejected suitor re-numbers all the packing crates.
It’s no wonder that he was among the Surrealists’ favorite moviemakers. Operating in a quintessentially modern medium, the unassuming Keaton gives us the most concise statements of the absurdity that modernity itself brings about.
And also! The show will be preceded by a screening of Keaton’s short ONE WEEK, twenty minutes of surpassing genius in which Buster and his new bride receive a build-it-yourself house as a wedding gift. But their week-long construction project goes from tough to absurdly impossible when a rejected suitor re-numbers all the packing crates.
It’s no wonder that he was among the Surrealists’ favorite moviemakers. Operating in a quintessentially modern medium, the unassuming Keaton gives us the most concise statements of the absurdity that modernity itself brings about.
Buster Keaton
Clyde Bruckman
79 minutes
Buster Keaton’s most lavish production and his warmest, bringing together a boy, a girl and a train amid the maelstrom of the US Civil War. Taking inspiration from an incident when Union soldiers hijacked a Confederate train, THE GENERAL was silent comedian Buster Keaton’s most grandly conceived project. The train driver who goes in dogged pursuit of his beloved engine is a classic Keaton character: stoical, determined and preternaturally straight-faced as chaos reigns around him. The film is a seamless blend of action and comedy, involving a dizzying number of stunts — including a legendary sequence in which a bridge bearing a railroad train collapses into a gorge while putting Tom Cruise to absolute shame.
“So crazy that people have been trying to make an action movie better than this for almost a hundred years and haven't even come close.” - Sydney Wegner
“So crazy that people have been trying to make an action movie better than this for almost a hundred years and haven't even come close.” - Sydney Wegner
Buster Keaton
Charles Reisner
70 minutes
Comic genius Buster Keaton turns in one of his most amazing performances as a college student who returns home to help his crusty old riverboat captain father (Ernest Torrence) compete with the far more successful, luxury riverboat owner J.J. King (Tom McGuire) — who also happens to be the father of Bill, Jr.’s sweetheart. To make matters worse, a cyclone blows through the area, setting the stage for some of Keaton’s finest stunts on camera and perhaps one of the most iconic scenes in all silent cinema, in which an entire house’s facade falls on the oblivious Buster. STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. may be Keaton’s most mature film, and his flat-out funniest — a fitting if too early farewell to an era of creative independence for the greatest screen comedian of all-time.
