[Buster Keaton / Seven Chances, the rockslide sequence]

"A man may keep away from everybody, but he can't get away from himself." Legend has it this is explanation Buster Keaton offered to describe the general theme of Film, the 1965 film written by Samuel Beckett in which he starred. Like many former silent screen icons, Keaton's fame had long faded by the 1960s. His most notable role in the last twenty years had been a self-deprecating cameo in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which he and a fellow has-beens H. B. Warner, Anna Q. Nilsson and Norma Desmond formed a motley crew of bridge playing "waxworks". While the quote that introduces this paragraph refers to a universal existential plight, it also speaks to the relationship between the camera and the central performer in silent comedy.

On casual examination of Keaton's early and self-directed work, it is clear that the camera is (more or less) locked on his person while everything around him is in a state of constant flux. There is dialogue and character development in silent comedy but only insofar as is required to justify extended physical gags and elaborate setpieces—conversation does little more than move the plot along. This notion of a central body, fixed within an unstable world that seems to hurtle by was accentuated by Keaton's trademark stoicism. The stunts he performed were so complicated, and required such acrobatic prowess that his abilities as a physical performer are still firmly ingrained in Hollywood lore. In shooting Sherlock Jr. (1924), Keaton broke his neck, continued filming and the injury remained undetected for years. This injury is perhaps the ultimate testament to his virtuosity as a "body artist" and it stands in stark contrast to the current milieu of stunt doubles, body doubles and digital compositing.

Seven Chances (1925) is a "six-reeler" directed by Keaton in which he plays a troubled financial broker who stands to inherit a tidy fortune provided he can get married by the end of the day. Keaton botches proposing to his sweetheart and then flounders in soliciting another dozen or so would-be-brides and a peer places an announcement in the newspaper stating: "WANTED A BRIDE - James Shannon, prominent young broker falls heir to $7,000,000 if he is married today." The notice promises that any woman who shows up at a local church that evening and is willing to get married can become Keaton's new, very rich wife. Five hundred veiled opportunists descend on the church, Keaton flees in terror and one of the most ambitious chase sequences in early cinema ensues.

Clocking in at 14 minutes (a quarter of the film), the Seven Chances chase sees Keaton frantically traverse construction sites, rush hour traffic, a train yard, a cornfield, an apiary, a duck hunt, a river and a craggy landscape. The horde of pursuit brides only yields when Keaton triggers a massive rocklside and ends up sprinting down a steep slope while dodging tumbling debris. As is expected, Keaton's interaction with each of these locations is based on a clever site gag and our comic frantically runs, ducks, climbs and jumps his way to the altar to meet the women he had originally intended to be his bride.

The Seven Chances chase sequence serves as source material in Keaton Mario Scroll (embedded above), a video created by media scholar Manuel Garin to compare the aforementioned "actions" of Keaton to gameplay from the Super Mario Bros. franchise. Careful editing foregrounds the similarity between Keaton's single-axis sprint and the platformer genre within gaming and the video effectively illustrates how distinct mediums from different eras employ the same visual language. Keaton embarks on a speedrun through gamespace, Mario nails a complex run-jump-slide manoeuvre on the first take - if only for a moment, the line between celluloid and pixel begins to blur. Garin was invited to contextualize Keaton Mario Scroll this past summer and he described the relationship between slapstick and side-scroller as follows:

Among the masters of slapstick, from Chaplin and Lloyd to Semon and Chase, Buster Keaton was probably the one who brought his obsession with motion, interfaces and Goldberg machines to a higher degree of visual lucidity. Sight gags, based on the creation, repetition and variation of a kinetic pattern (as in a three time musical structure), unveiled a world of infinite gameplay. As in the Super Mario games, the trace of the character's action -jump, chase, pie in the face- and its physical developments -platform, rotor, slide, cliff, pendulum, pulley, seesaw, zip-line, lever...- define a screen trajectory while opening the question of gameplay laughter. Maybe, as Gilles Deleuze instinctively prophesized, Buster was secretly developing the first video game (avant-garde) machine: "...the dream of Keaton, to take the biggest machine in the world and make it work with tiny little elements, transforming it into something that anyone can use, to make from it a thing for everyone".

The biggest machine in the world - a choice metaphor for a precision engineered environment where every object is charged with potential energy and every interaction is seamless. A gamer playing Super Mario Bros. would have to be near perfect to match Keaton's (apparent) dumb luck, but this level of expertise is not unheard of. Each of these references employs a toolkit of simple actions, obstacles and terrain to construct engaging studies of momentum and horizontality. Like Mario, Keaton is also a low resolution protagonist with an unflinching gaze, culturally resonant body language and his princess is also always in another castle.

Keaton Mario Scroll is not the only side-by-side comparison developed by Garin - the scholar has conducted a whole suite of studies as part of a larger project entitled GamePlayGag, which explores linkages between silent film and new media. This work is rich visually but what seems most promising here is the implied "future history" of gaming. Butting game scenes up against 80 year old films underscores the fact that computer gaming is still a relatively new development - we've only had video game consoles and personal computers in our homes for about two and a half decades. Perhaps we are only just now emerging from an era that might eventually be described as "early computer gaming" and what we consider state of the art could just as easily be read as completely archaic. An acknowledgment of obsolescence, a search for persistent forms and ideas and an attempt to zoom out and consider technology within a broader timeframe - these are all noble goals to strive for when thinking about media.

A hat tip to Rob MacDougall whose post introduced me to GamePlayGag. Beyond my usual interests, I could not resist writing about the Buster Keaton-8-bit connection. I've had a minor obsession with Keaton for about three years now and I've got a project on the boards that is a database-powered consideration of his work, hopefully I'll be able to share some preliminary views into this venture by mid next year. I guess If I am referring to decades as a unit of measure within media scholarship, I need not rush the idea.