2. Keaton (2007)

[@MYOB822]

I love this guy! So, so passionate about his field.

[@bhavykhatri2669]

Key Points: Shot is a basic unit of aciton. Cut: You have to cut between scenes. Show them what is important. Remove redundant information. The info which is not useful don’t show it. For e.g. if ther is a scene of person walking outside the room, you don’t have to show the steps in between. Camera Placement: Importance of camera placements were beginning to realise in earlyfilms. For e.g. if you place a camera in front of action that is coming towards you then it. Instead you place it slightly at an angle to the action so that if something happens it could see at a slight angle. Use of Process Shots(Now not used): Example suppose there is a scene of man driving a car. Now instead of actually shooting it in a real world what would they do, they will take a shot of the environment without a car and use it for the case where they will place a dummy car and play the video of the environment shot earlier.

[@exit13productions50]

The General is one of the most entertaining movies ever made. Anyone who hasnt seen it should watch it asap

[@jakmere]

I think the disclosure he made about the lofty qualities he credits Buster Keaton with was very important - when he says it's not a point of view that Keaton would necessarily have of Keaton himself or that Keaton would be able to express these things; rather Keaton had an intuition about these things. That's important to point out and this professor seems to intuit the reasons why. It helps to re-orient the student's frame of mind on studying film rather than being trained, essentially, to qualify a film or other work of art as an act of a genius according to the professor. I've experienced that myself, where a professor often exalts an author, particularly in literary courses or creative writing courses. This was especilly true in high school, but also at the college level! When I think about it now, in retrospect, I see that often my point of view about an assigned novel, for instance, would be short-changed because much of what I was being told in lectures was typically the professors point of view, demonstrating what a career in academia brings to bear on the discussion of a work of art at the professor's level. I've never heard a professor say the author would not necessarily be able to explain how their work makes an existential statement on humanity, but a professor would often deal with subjects like metaphysics during a lecture as if the author's goal was definitely to explicity examine such specific high concepts and ideals. Without a disclosure like the one in this lecture, generally a student could end up just regurgitating what a professor says without assessing a lecture for it's intellectual integity, and often mistakeningly believing that the professor's point of view about an author or an author's work is something the author intended or believed of themselves. A statement like that helps to mentally dissociate the author from the work, freeing up the headspace needed to form a coherent critique of the work. I wish I could have gone to Yale.

[@yaboobayyaboobay8191]

Soft science teachers have an incentive to overcomplicate things to justify their jobs. That guy gets paid more if that Keaton movie is not just a funny guy on a train but a reflection of the contingency in life deeper than Sartre, as he pretends.

[@TheXAsama]

​@@yaboobayyaboobay8191 I think his lectures are designed to force students to watch those boring ass movies and remember the techniques derived from them. Drawing from his own interpretations allows for his teaching to be more expressive and invoking actual learning rather than just imitating a generic syllabus built for testing recall.

[@gabrielshigueo2959]

This idea is also present in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy

[@AlexiaGreaves]

thank you tisw

[@frenandin]

As an economist, this lecture is so so so fascinating!

[@jeffsummstl]

So many students arriving late! 😄

[@Bearyful]

this is pretty lit

[@vib_di]

Anyone here noticed that Reflections from his hands causing Combfiltering, which is causing rotatory phasor effect Dut to the location of transducer near the hands. And some times not.

[@vincenzochieppa689]

A wonderful movie! But actually what realky struck me, since (as you may see by my awful english) i am not from USA, is how free is this country. I mean, southern army lost the war and here is a masterpiece of cinema that celebrates the losing army and in sone way is "kiddibg" rhe winners. It seems to me hugely surprising and a sympton of great freedom of expression but maybe for US peiple thisvdoesn't sound so unususl.

[@flewintopylon]

Beware of the details in this. Too many small inaccuracies about Keaton.

[@GOLDVIOLINbowofdeath]

Stupid film festival programmers think animation is a genre, it is not.

[@udankhatola7174]

This is a flawed way of looking at Film, teaching film. It's like fan boys discussing about their superheroes. Why is film 'treated' as a 'cultural' subject, stripping it away from its actual scientific and aesthetic processes, and focusing on the 'propaganda' part. The current styling/fashioning of classes across 24 odd lectures , to talk about main movements is such an ideological construction that it makes films more of a dead subject to be analysed by spiders in a closed museum. Keaton and Charlie are famous because the were in 'America', and the most charismatic artists the medium/form could have, but that sad, they should not be 'revered' rather should be taught as 'makers' within the growing world context. That film as a vehicle for propaganda is such a lame way to read films. Thats y filmmaking and studying should not be separate. It pains me the way so many major changes, movements and people are left out in this 'gallery view' type of lectures.

[@rbbonotto]

What an irritating lecture. Repetitive, joke-killing, and pretentious. ("Culminating text"?!) No wonder so many young folks think silent film is boring. As for Keaton's not understanding Sartre, by the time he finished doing Beckett's film, he knew exactly what it was really about.