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of this pantomime business and in terms of the proscenium-like, long-take
medium-shot through which this pantomime is mounted, Langdon differs
from Keaton. Keaton characters, by the end of the films at least, are phys-
ically masterful. In some films, like The Navigator, they are initially lazy,
but they are not physically immature. Johnnie Gray is sometimes inept,
but not infantile. The whole point of Keaton s humor would be lost if
Johnnie Gray did not have the capacity for agency. Keaton s composition is
also at odds with the highly theatrical medium-shot Langdon employs. This
shot in Langdon is purely functional. It is the easiest means for representing
Langdon s intricate, slow-paced pantomime. Unlike Chaplin and Keaton,
apart from the use of frontality and centrality, there are almost no other
compositional structures in evidence in the medium-shots in Long Pants.
Thus, neither the stylistic nor thematic analyses we offered of The General
can be exported to Langdon.
Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon 151
Summary
In this chapter I have attempted to show that my previous analysis of
The General was specific to that film. It is at least specific to the extent that
it does not explicate The General in terms of generic themes and styles that
apply to all silent comedy. I have attempted to exhibit this specificity by con-
sidering films by Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon, Keaton s major competitors
in feature film production of comedies in the twenties. I have analyzed
the work of Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon to show that these works have
their own special emphases, emphases that often diverge sharply from what
we find in The General. Given these divergences, it would be folly to attempt
to map our analysis of The General onto Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon. Each
of the kings of silent comedy had his own domain, as I hope I have suggested
in this chapter. Film criticism should respect the boundaries between these
different domains.
notes
1 For an example of this line of criticism, see Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in
Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1972).
2 For an example of this type of criticism, see Stuart Kaminski, American Film Genres
(n.p.: Pflaum Publishing, 1974).
3 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957), p. 39.
4 Ibid., pp. 43 4.
5 Roman Jakobson, Studies on Child Language and Aphasia (The Hague: Mouton,
1971), p. 70.
6 Andr Bazin, What Is Cinema?, tr. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1967), vol. I, pp. 145 6.
7 It may be felt that, even if The Gold Rush is dissimilar to The General, Modern
Times is not. In Modern Times Chaplin deals with the subject matter of machinery.
However, it seems to me that the similarities between Modern Times and The
General end here. In Modern Times, Chaplin seems to be committed to depicting
modern machinery as unintelligible. For instance, the function and structure
of the machine Chaplin works on are absolutely opaque. It is a pile of gears
and cogs with no apparent purpose. Its fantastic aspect is further emphasized
by the gag in which Chaplin gets caught in its mechanism, and passes through
its network of gears. Here, Chaplin represents the machine as absurd. Chaplin
also represents work on the assembly line as unintelligible, i.e., as incalcul-
able in terms of an overarching process. Chaplin in Modern Times pursues his
152 Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon
quasi-Marxist derived notions of work and machinery by means of extreme
caricature. His approach, unlike Keaton s in The General, is to represent the work-
processes and machine-processes of the film as quite unintelligible.
8 For example see Donald W. McCaffrey, 4 Great Comedians (New York: A. S. Barnes
and Co., 1968), p. 72.
9 For instance on p. 76 McCaffrey gives an example of Lloyd s use of the full
force of the medium, which boils down to an intensive use of editing.
10 C. W. Mills, White Collar (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,
1951), p. 182.
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