His silence is golden

Buster Keaton endures.

Despite hardscrabble beginnings and the ferocious hard knocks of a feast-or-famine career that lasted nearly 50 years on screen, Keaton has emerged as the silent clown best suited to modern times, the man we love to watch, as purely American a film genius as the motion pictures have produced.

Because Keaton’s comedy depended not on sentiment but on what critic Peter Hogue called “some magical and unlikely wedding of surrealism and Yankee pragmatism,” his work has an unexpected freshness even today. A master of both movement and stillness, Keaton developed a comedy style that was as intellectual as it was physical. No one has ever made people laugh quite like him. Beginning Friday, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which shares the sentiment, is putting on a welcome tribute to Keaton that allows us to sample the range of his work, including his wildly inventive two-reel shorts, classic features, a rarely seen 1934 French film and two items from the National Film Board of Canada made in 1965, a year before he died.

Perhaps UCLA’s rarest treat is Saturday’s illustrated lecture by John Bengtson called “Touring Los Angeles Through the Films of Buster Keaton.” Bengtson, the author of the one-of-a-kind “Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton,” has made it his life’s work to pinpoint exactly where in L.A. Keaton, who often shot on real locations, made each and every one of his films. The book is almost beyond description in its irresistible comprehensiveness, and the lecture promises to be the same.

Still, anyone stumbling unawares on an early Keaton two-reeler, say 1917’s “The Rough House,” directed by and starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, might wonder if all this praise was out of scale with what we see on screen. The look of these roughly 20-minute shorts is primitive in the extreme, with devices such as fake hairpieces and exaggerated gestures adding to the impression of crudeness.

Even Keaton himself, frankly, often wondered what the modern fuss over his films was all about. If he could see how much he is now revered, his late wife, Eleanor, said in a 1995 interview, “he would be in total shock. He wouldn’t believe it. In fact, he didn’t believe it when his films started coming back.”

To understand that point of view, Eleanor Keaton emphasized, you had to understand the prevailing attitude in the early 1920s, when Keaton was coming into his own. Movies were a new form, considered as ephemeral and disposable as paper napkins. Even Keaton’s father, Joe, an old vaudevillian, had contempt for the medium, often telling people: “You’re not going to put my act on a bedsheet for 10-cent admissions.” Keaton’s films were created, Eleanor Keaton emphasized, strictly to make money for the short period until the next one would be ready, “and that would be the end of them. This kind of interest, Buster couldn’t visualize it.”

But what Keaton couldn’t see because he was too close to it was that silent comedy was simultaneously the apogee of one art form and the beginning of another. He and his peers had come out of vaudeville, and they used the enormous scope of their experience -- Keaton had given an estimated 10,000 performances with his parents by the time he was 21 -- to help create effects that built beautifully on what they had done on stage. It’s as if Keaton and company were a Constitutional Convention of comedy, a rare critical mass of gifted individuals gathered to create something for the ages.

Keaton had three factors that combined to make his output so special, starting with what has been called his Great Stone Face, a visage critic James Agee (whose 1949 Life magazine essay began the Keaton revival) said “ranked almost with Lincoln’s as an early American archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful.”

What that face and its inexpressibly sad eyes did was add a level of unexpected delicacy, even sublimity, to his slapstick adventures. It didn’t matter whether Keaton appeared in his trademark outfit of flattened hat, vest and tie or the most elegant evening clothes, the face gave him an earnestness that ate at your heart.

Keaton’s vaudeville training had also given him a spectacular physicality. His balance and agility were wonders to behold, he displayed a jaguar’s fluidity when he ran, and no one took a pratfall or stepped off a cliff, came through a window or went out a door with so much sang-froid. In the celebrated “Seven Chances,” in which his character will inherit $7 million if he marries by 7 p.m., Keaton shows impeccable aplomb as he’s chased by a horde of potential brides and an avalanche of boulders.

Keaton took considerable pride in the craft aspects of his work, and in one of his most famous gags, Eleanor Keaton remembered, “he’d talk about what a delicate operation it was having the whole 6,000-pound side of a building fall on him in ‘Steamboat Bill, Jr.’ He had 2 inches of clearance on each shoulder and 4 inches’ clearance on his head for his body to get through an open window. His mark was a brass nail pounded in the dirt. If he didn’t hit it, that would be all she wrote.”

Keaton’s final advantage was the fecundity of his imagination. Though he and his collaborators dismissively considered his ideas for films merely gags, they were in fact marvels of creative thinking, worked out with the intricacy of a calculus equation.

In 1921’s “The Playhouse,” Keaton’s character goes to a minstrel show where multiple camera exposures enable him to play all six members of the orchestra, all nine minstrels, a young boy and his mother and a society swell and his wife. Not to mention a monkey.

Even more impressive is 1924’s legendary 40-minute “Sherlock, Jr.,” in which Keaton breaks the theatrical fourth wall and any other walls he can think of. It’s hard to think of another film that played so successfully with the notions of film, dream and reality than this story of a projectionist who moonlights as a private detective and imagines himself into the screen action.

Still hugely popular, Keaton made a business move in 1928 that turned out to be fatal. He signed a contract with MGM that gave away creative control to the studio, and his career never recovered. Plagued by alcoholism, he had difficulty finding work, though the 1934 French film “The King of the Champs-Elysees” shows how good he could still be.

Helped by his marriage to Eleanor and the support of critics like Agee, Keaton’s career revived near the end of his life. A 1965 Canadian short called “The Railrodder” is amusing, but better still is the documentary “Buster Keaton Rides Again,” shot during the short’s production. In it we hear Keaton being himself, in one memorable moment chastising collaborators for worrying about a stunt he was planning to do.

“I generally know what I’m doing,” he allowed in his gravelly voice. And how.

*

Buster Keaton retrospective

Where: James Bridges Theater, 1409 Melnitz Hall, UCLA campus

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday, May 21 and 27, June 1 and 3; 2 p.m. May 22; 7 p.m. May 29, June 5

Price: $7; $5 for students, seniors

Info: (310) 206-FILM; www.cinema.ucla.edu