
Buster Keaton: Anarchitect - signor_bosco
http://www.lapsuslima.com/buster-keaton-anarchitect/
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veridies
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.

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myt6fore
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.

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scott_s
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWEjxkkB8Xs)

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not2b
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/](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.

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drfuchs
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.

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kaycebasques
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.

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

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mykowebhn
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.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDyBBkC7Lk8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDyBBkC7Lk8)

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tome
> Watched this documentary during a fight

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

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MordodeMaru
Which one I dare ask?

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

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

