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IN 1927, A YOUNG FILM CRITIC NAMED LUIS BUÑUEL, living in Paris at the time, wrote a review of Buster Keaton's latest film. College. In his review. Buñuel praised the virtues of the "American school" of filmmaking, epitomized for Buñuel by Keaton, over the European. American cinema is defined by its "vitality, photogeny, no culture and new tradition," while European cinema is defined by its traits of "sentimentalism, prejudices of art, literature, tradition." The Europeans produce "superfilms" that repeatedly display their technique, while the Americans hide their technique in order to "give lessons to reality itself" (65). However, Buñuel is not merely rejecting the European school of filmmaking technique (particularly in its then-fashionable German Expressionist and French Impressionist forms); he is also rejecting a certain European style of film performance. He cites, as an epitome of this European approach, Emil Jannings, whose performances are dominated by explicitness in facial expression and body language; in Jannings, "sorrow is a hundred-faced prism." By contrast, Keaton's facial expressions are "as modest as that of a bottle," even while the face itself has its viewpoint "in infinity" (64-65). Through his "monochord expression," Keaton embodies a kind of essence, an idea about humanity that causes the viewer to smile "the smile of health and olympian force" (64). For Buñuel, much of Keaton's greatness as a comic artist has to do with his "direct harmony with objects, situations and the other means of his work" (64-65). This sense of "direct harmony" has little to do with the character Keaton plays in College, since the comedy here is often predicated upon that character's "failing" to master an object. Rather, the sense of achieved harmony occurs through Keaton's skill as an actor in controlling these objects, a control that paradoxically is applied toward failure of mastery within the film's diegesis. Such a mastery in handling the object is not, for Buñuel, utterly unique to Keaton (however gifted Keaton may have been) but rather symptomatic of America in general, suggesting a strong link between this kind of performance style and American culture.
American actors often possessed healthy, streamlined bodies, highly mobile if not acrobatic, and were able to thoroughly dominate a space: Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix, Pearl White. But they were also able to...