The article doesn’t make this fully explicit, but The Electric House can be described very easily in contemporary terms: a self-taught technician installs a home automation system for a client, but a hacker gains access and basically wrecks the lives of everyone living there.
Buster Keaton: Anarchitect
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Re: Buster Keaton: Anarchitect
#12The Every Frame a Painting channel on YouTube has an excellent short piece on Buster Keaton covering some similar themes, but with more of a focus on camera frames than architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWEjxkkB8Xs
Re: Buster Keaton: Anarchitect
#13If you live in the SF Bay area and this article piques your interest, you should check out the Niles Film Museum: http://nilesfilmmuseum.org/ in Fremont, on the site of Charlie Chaplin's old studio. They are dedicated to the preservation of silent film and they have regular showings of Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and other stars of early silent film, with a live pianist and a docent who usually gives a 5 minute or so talk at the beginning giving you some background.
Re: Buster Keaton: Anarchitect
#14Re: Buster Keaton: Anarchitect
#15If you live in the SF Bay area and this article piques your interest, you should check out the Niles Film Museum: http://nilesfilmmuseum.org/ in Fremont, on the site of Charlie Chaplin's old studio. They are dedicated to the preservation of silent film and they have regular showings of Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and other stars of early silent film, with a live pianist and a docent who usually gives a 5 mi…
They are showing a Buster Keaton short (along with others) on April 20.
Re: Buster Keaton: Anarchitect
#16If you live in the SF Bay area and this article piques your interest, you should check out the Niles Film Museum: http://nilesfilmmuseum.org/ in Fremont, on the site of Charlie Chaplin's old studio. They are dedicated to the preservation of silent film and they have regular showings of Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and other stars of early silent film, with a live pianist and a docent who usually gives a 5 mi…
Also in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's opening night this year will feature the newly restored The Cameraman. It's at the fabulous Castro Theater, with live accompaniment by the SF Conservatory of Music, on May 1.
Also, as it hasn't been mentioned, Keaton's The General is generally considered to be his masterpiece. If you see a picture of Keaton on a locomotive, or with a very fat, very blunt cannon, it's from this film.
Re: Buster Keaton: Anarchitect
#17Remember that all these movies are available for free on The Internet Archive : https://archive.org/search.php?query=buster%20keaton
Re: Buster Keaton: Anarchitect
#18The article doesn’t make this fully explicit, but The Electric House can be described very easily in contemporary terms: a self-taught technician installs a home automation system for a client, but a hacker gains access and basically wrecks the lives of everyone living there.
If I may expand on the observation...
Spinning Jenny was a type of knitting machine (a multi spindle spinning frame) that brought multi-fold increase to operator's output. A typo f optimization if you will. It's inventor may have been altruistic (or not) in his motives but ultimately it meant: more efficiency- less workforce. Today's machines crave such leanness so programmers of today get hired to automate 'overhead' jobs away. Long term, the trend may prove either good or bad, the point is, such machines do not care. Much like in Buster's era.