Buster Keaton: Anarchitect | Hacker News Reader

Buster Keaton: Anarchitect

lapsuslima.com

109 pointssignor_bosco18 comments

The article doesn’t make this fully explicit, but The Electric House can be described very easily in contemporary terms: a self-taught technician installs a home automation system for a client, but a hacker gains access and basically wrecks the lives of everyone living there.

If I may expand on the observation...

Spinning Jenny was a type of knitting machine (a multi spindle spinning frame) that brought multi-fold increase to operator's output. A typo f optimization if you will. It's inventor may have been altruistic (or not) in his motives but ultimately it meant: more efficiency- less workforce. Today's machines crave such leanness so programmers of today get hired to automate 'overhead' jobs away. Long term, the trend may prove either good or bad, the point is, such machines do not care. Much like in Buster's era.

The Every Frame a Painting channel on YouTube has an excellent short piece on Buster Keaton covering some similar themes, but with more of a focus on camera frames than architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWEjxkkB8Xs

If you live in the SF Bay area and this article piques your interest, you should check out the Niles Film Museum: http://nilesfilmmuseum.org/ in Fremont, on the site of Charlie Chaplin's old studio. They are dedicated to the preservation of silent film and they have regular showings of Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and other stars of early silent film, with a live pianist and a docent who usually gives a 5 minute or so talk at the beginning giving you some background.

They are showing a Buster Keaton short (along with others) on April 20.

Also in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's opening night this year will feature the newly restored The Cameraman. It's at the fabulous Castro Theater, with live accompaniment by the SF Conservatory of Music, on May 1.

Also, as it hasn't been mentioned, Keaton's The General is generally considered to be his masterpiece. If you see a picture of Keaton on a locomotive, or with a very fat, very blunt cannon, it's from this film.

If you haven’t seen Buster’s stuff, scroll through that (very long) article to get a sense of the reality-defying stunts and illusions that he weaves into his films. It’s amazing that the early film artists took the medium so far. I love Buster so much.

As an introduction to Buster I recommend Sherlock Jr.

Remember that all these movies are available for free on The Internet Archive : https://archive.org/search.php?query=buster%20keaton

Great article. And I love the site!

I love how non-intuitive everything is on the site, and I have to go looking for things, exploring. For example, the essays are listed under Archons. What are Archons? I love it! And I'm still not sure what lapsuslima.com is for, but it's really got my curiosity piqued.

I understand the motivation for good website design (inspired by "Don't Make Me Have to Think"), but unfortunately the downside is that almost every website I visit now looks, feels, and behaves almost identically. It's made the Internet so homogenous and boring.

Watched this documentary during a fight last month and it was really good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDyBBkC7Lk8

That's only the trailer. Do you know if it's available in full elsewhere?

Looks like it's only available to rent, as far as streaming is concerned: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-great-buster-a-celebr...

> Watched this documentary during a fight

That conjures up a really interesting image ... :)

Which one I dare ask?

The image of someone watching a documentary on Buster Keaton whilst having a fight!

you mean flight? :)

I also liked this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWEjxkkB8Xs

Excellent article. "One week" is my favourite silent movie of all time.

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