The Cameraman: directed by Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton

(Robert) Masseo Davis
The Cameraman

The Cameraman: directed by Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton

Rating: 4/5

“The main point about comedy… is that it provides the site for an allowable disruption of the fictional ‘rules’, allowable because the particularity of the disruption forms a crucial part of the audience’s expectations of the comedy- film and because the ‘comic effect’ itself relies not upon disruption alone but upon the interrelationship between disruption and (re) ordering.”


The Cameraman, directed by Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton is a classic example of slapstick comedy. The film illustrates the ironic nature of comedy through sets of disrupted normality. The film The Cameraman takes the natural and utilizes it in uncanny fashions exposing an ironic function. The film is a successful comedy because it not only illustrates ironic scenarios, but also after each punch line the film brings the viewer back to its filmic reality. This film interprets literally the notion that people love nothing more than to see their hero fall.
The film The Cameraman, Sedgwick utilizes objects, people, and even space to depict obscure realities. The reason the comedy is successful is because the narrative seesaws between the disrupted functions of the natural and, reality as depicted in the film. The disruption would not be as funny if the natural order of the film was not restored. The film then would become a whimsical fantasy where anything could happen.
The Cameraman is a film about a man (Keaton) who becomes infatuated with a woman named Sally, played by Marceline Day, who works at MGM newsreels. The narrative of the film follows Keaton, who through a series of uncanny events attempts to win her heart. He trades his “tin types” camera for a “motion picture” camera, and continually tries to get a job at MGM so to be closer to Sally. In his attempts to get a job at MGM Keaton breaks the newsroom door window with his tripod on multiple occasions. The action of Keaton breaking the glass window is the filmic punch line to the larger joke involving the disruption of order. The use of the tripod as a device to break windows with, or at least this particular window, demonstrates a secondary function of the tripod that was not initially considered by the viewers. The film takes objects that the audience perceives as having a particular function, and illustrates a secular function, which disrupts the filmic order.
The film also uses Keaton and its other actors as devices that disrupt the natural order of things, and illustrates actions as comedic punch lines. Keaton and Sedgwick know that their audience has a certain understanding of the worlds ‘rules’ and in breaking them they expresses a punch line, because it goes against the natural/ normal.
In slapstick comedy where the narrative is expressed primarily through body language the directors would be forced to use their actors to depict alternative scenarios, which disrupt the filmic reality of things while maintaining narrative progression. The film depicts sequences where the actors are the primary source of comedic disarray, with Keaton alone playing imaginary baseball to crowds of people, thus interrupting the narrative progression.
Crowds are a very prominent in the film. There are occasions where crowds of people break up situations and disturb Keaton’s narrative flow. There are also scenarios where Keaton disrupts the order maintained by a closed social group.
The film starts with Keaton standing alone still working with his “tin type” camera, when suddenly crowds of people rush into the scene to participate in welcoming an important figure who is never distinguished. Though the scenario is not of unusual nature: the crowds interrupt Keaton while he was trying to photograph a person with his camera. The crowds of people push him around mercilessly giving the audience reason to believe that the film shall depict many more scenarios where Keaton’s self shall be discarded like a rag doll.
The disruption of order in “The Cameraman” is not only to illustrate the comedic qualities of the film but is a narrative tool used to progress the story forward. The specific situations in the films narrative “..forms a crucial part of the audience’s expectations of the comedy- film…”. The opening crowd scene, while it does disrupts the flow of Keaton characters work, that scene introduces both the audience and Keaton;s character to the girl who works at MGM, and implies to the audience the plot of the film, which is Keaton’s pursuit of the girl’s affection.
Near the end of the film there is a scene that depicts a gang war in Chinatown.
Keaton’s character films the whole thing. The sequence includes many people in an elaborate fight scene with machine guns, bullets flying everywhere and Keaton in the middle filming the action. The war is resolved at the last minute with the police storming into the sequence to stop the carnage. This sequence demonstrates a scene that is full of ironic, unrealistic ideas. It would have been impossible for Keaton to have survived the massive gunfight just standing around filming the action. Yet it would not have been funny if the gunfight had killed him for it would have eliminated the possibility for the return to the narrative normality it never would have left actual reality, which is established when the police come and break up the fighting. Considering the idea that Keaton died in the gang fight means understand a new story ending. The fact that Keaton did not die in the fight presupposes the notion that Keatons character’s story still isn’t finished. The reality of the situation depicted in the film would require for Keaton’s character to have died in the scene, however keeping him alive illustrates to the audience a secular plot outside of the realistic.
Salvador Dali, an influential surrealist believed that the unpredictable reality of the world could potentially be organized.

“I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active process of the mind (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states), it will be possible to systemize confusion and to help discredit completely the world of reality.”
-Salvador Dali, The Rotting Ass


“The Cameraman”, being a slapstick comedy, illustrates a form of a reality where the actions appear to be of systematic degrees. Slapstick comedy as a medium is a precision art form. Timing and staging is everything. This dance like staging illustrates a filmic world with limitless possibilities. This notion is comprised from the understanding that comedy rests between both the realistic and the disrupted reality. The two filmic realities collide to create a third alternative reality where the disrupted reality isn’t necessarily a disruption but more of an expectation. The fact that Keaton’s character breaks the newsroom office window with his tripod on multiple occasions makes that action an expectation not a disruption. The narratives filmic world then becomes, not a realm of confusion, but a systematically organized series of coincidence and chances.
This would go well in explaining why Surrealists such as Salvador Dali, would admire films like The Cameraman, because through slapstick comedy they illustrate the world with “systematic confusion”.
Ultimately, Keaton and Sedgwick’s film “The Cameraman” illustrates the notion that comedy is successful when it coexists between the disruption of a narratives reality and its reorganization. The film then creates an alternate reality where through slapstick comedy a realm of staged confusion is systematically organized to create expectations that move the narrative forward.


…..Plus it’s Hysterical