I DECIDED THAT a Buster Keaton film marathon might help alleviate my gloomy condition. Perhaps existential comedy could trump existential angst. Perhaps Keaton’s ghost had appeared precisely to lead me back to his great work. It was worth a try. I decided to start with the shorts and proceed to the classic features of the mid-1920s. But I wouldn’t keep going to the talkies. As James Agee so beautifully expressed it, Keaton’s “dark, dead voice, though it was in keeping with the visual character, tore his intensely silent style to bits and destroyed the illusion within which he worked.”
Ideally, this marathon filmfest would take place on a grassy slope under the stars. There’d be a faint scent of salmon and river mud and wet springer spaniel on the air, and my father would still be alive. B
