(Der Kameramann [de])
USA 1928
d: Edward Sedgwick, Buster Keaton
ARD TV (Region 0 de)
sc: Clyde Bruckman, Joseph Farnham
c: Reggie Lanning, Elgin Lessley (b/w)
e: Hugh Wynn, Basil Wrangell
m: Music Score
p: Buster Keaton (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM))
w: Buster Keaton, Marceline Day, Harold Goodwin, Sidney Bracey, Harry Gribbon
pr: 22 Sep 1928
rt: 69:36 min
dvd-rl: 04 Okt 2005
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Music Score MPEG-1 2.0 Mono
st: German intertitles
supp: --
Keaton's first feature after moving to MGM. That this meant the eventual sacrifice of his career can be seen in the story - Keaton becomes an MGM newsreel camera-man in order to get the girl, who works in the MGM office - and the first half of the film, a series of gags (collapsing bed, reflex-testing, mixed-up bathing suits) second-hand enough to have come out of "Nickelodeon". But the final sequences make up for this disappointment: Keaton gets involved in a Tong war and (inadvertently) with an organ-grinder's monkey. He shoots exclusive footage, but the monkey steals the film. Keaton returns with an empty camera and is kicked out. Gloomily he goes to the beach. His girl is in a boating accident. Forsaking his camera, he rescues her. The monkey keeps the camera rolling. Keaton gets the girl, and back at MGM, it's the greatest news film they've ever seen...shot by the monkey. A delightful piece of film-making within-a-film which is both an insight into Keaton's own logic, and also, alas, a sort of epitaph.
— AN, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
A newsreel by Buster Keaton of a newsreel by Buster Keaton. With "Sherlock, Jr.", "The Cameraman" is his most self-reflexive film. Trying to "make it" in the Hearst Newsreel Company, Citizen Keaton finally photographs a Tong War in Chinatown and a boating accident, and astonishingly forecasts the issues of contemporary documentary theory. Along the way we are treated to sublime Buster Bits: a one-man baseball game, acrobatic competitions with mass transportation, and a change into a bathing suit in, to say the least, straitened circumstances.
— William Nestrick, PFA
