Buster Keaton's Role In The Silent Era

Buster Keaton’s role in The General perfectly epitomizes the utilization of comedy during the Silent Film Era as the medium through which a deeper story is conveyed. The Silent Era was generally characterized by two things: the extreme dedication of its actors and a tendency towards slapstick comedy. While the first can be attributed to the passion of these early filmmakers, the latter is perhaps more of a function of necessity. With limited use of title slides and no use of sound, actors like Buster Keaton had to find a way to tell stories without words. And so they turned to a language that can be spoken by any person, understood in any country, and appreciated across the world: humor. Throughout the plot of The General, Buster Keaton’s character uses deliberate, overemphasized motions to build his story through actions. But what sets his performance apart from mere miming is the humor he employs. As the audience watches him unknowingly throw firewood over his train car for several minutes, or accidentally stick people with his stolen sword, or even balance perilously on the coupling rods of the
The America of today resembles that of the Civil War setting in The General about as much as it resembles the country of Ghana. And the people living in our time and in that one have about as much in common as people from a different country. Yet people who enjoy the film even today can still relate to the characters of The General and of the silent film genre in general because they can still relate to them, through the humor of these slapstick films. And by extension, they recognize that if humor is the same then and now, then love and loss and courage and joy and all the other emotions must be the same too. So a quirky train conductor might have more in common with a freshman Utah girl than she might think. And that is why these films are still considered to be such great classics