2
Style in The General
In this chapter, I will examine key elements of cinematic style in The General.
This will include discussions of the composition and editing of the ﬁlm as
well as of the interrelations of the composition with the editing. My major
concern is with the more Keatonesque elements of style in The General, as
distinguished from the style that predominates in the work of most other
comic ﬁlmmakers. In particular, I am interested in these elements of style as
they function in The General. Here, three different issues will be canvassed:
how the elements of style modify one’s perception and experience of the ﬁlm;
how these modiﬁcations facilitate the gags in the ﬁlm; and how the gags
and their cinematic structure serve as expressions of the deeper themes of
The General.
Throughout I shall speak of Keaton as the person responsible for the look
of The General in terms of composition and editing. This is not adopted merely
as a convention of exposition. Nor is it based simply on the fact that Keaton
exercised executive control, the ﬁnal say, over the ﬁlm. It seems that Keaton
had practical control as well. He stated, “Now this was my own story, my
own continuity, I directed it, I cut it and I titled it. So actually this was my
pet.”1
No one has contradicted this claim despite the fact that Keaton’s long
years of decline would have provided a wide-open ﬁeld for any counterclaims.
Instead, we have the following testimonial from Clyde Bruckman, the man
listed as the co-director of The General.
You seldom saw [Keaton’s] name in the story credits. But I can tell you – and
so could Jean Havez if he were alive – that those wonderful stories were ninety
percent Buster’s. I was often ashamed to take the money, much less the credit.
I would say so. Bus would say, “Stick [Bruckman] I need a left ﬁelder,” but
76 Style in The General
he never left you in left ﬁeld. We were all overpaid from the strict creative
point of view. Most of the direction was [Keaton’s] as Eddie Cline will tell you.
Keaton could have graduated into a top director – of any kind of picture, short
or long, high or low, sad or funny or both – if Hollywood hadn’t pushed him
down and then said “Look how Keaton has slipped!” Comedian, gagman, writer,
director – then add technical innovator. Camera work. Look at his pictures to
see beautiful shots, wide pans, unexpected close-ups and angles that were all
new when he thought them up.2
Bruckman’s statement of Keaton’s contribution is quite emphatic. We have
no reason to distrust Bruckman here. Bruckman’s own career was quite tragic.
He ended committing suicide in the bathroom of a restaurant, leaving a note
saying that he couldn’t afford a funeral. If anything, one would think that
someone in Bruckman’s straits might be tempted to claim more of the glory
that surrounds the Keaton ﬁlms that he worked on. His lavish praise in such
circumstances provides a degree of conﬁrmation to his report. That such
testimony is not called into question by other testimony is further evidence.
The Long-Shot
I begin my discussion of the style in The General by considering its composition.
Isolation of the particularly Keatonesque format of composition need
not be a completely de novo undertaking. I shall pick up on the observations
of other critics, hopefully corroborating these leads via argumentation, and
also reﬁning those leads into more speciﬁc hypotheses. In this regard, there
does seem to be a consensus among recent commentators that the long-shot
is the characteristically Keatonesque format.3
Indeed, Penelope Houston
has speculated that the rise of Keaton’s critical stock in the ﬁfties and sixties
can be accounted for by his use of long-shots, a practice which corresponds
to favored strategies in the contemporary ﬁlms of the period,4
including those
of neorealism, the new wave, and cinéma-vérité.
To say that the long-shot is characteristic of Keaton, and especially characteristic
in The General, is to claim that he uses this device more than other
comics. “More” here is ambiguous. It does not simply mean that Keaton’s
use of this device is statistically greater, but also that the device is of greater
importance in Keaton. Every comic director uses long-shots, if only as
establishing shots. What people are suggesting when they focus on Keaton’s
long-shots is not the statistical tabulation that there are more shots that meet
the dimensional standards of long-shots. Rather they mean that there are many
Style in The General 77
long-shots that perform services in the narration that go beyond simple establishment
of action. Claiming the long-shot as characteristic of Keaton is to
claim that it is central to the ultimate project of the work.
In my analysis of gags in The General, I noted on many occasions that the
gag under consideration was represented via a long-shot as in the shot of the
bemused and dismayed Johnnie Gray sitting on the driverod of a locomotive
after Annabelle Lee spurns him. In this shot, we see an engineer in the cab
of the locomotive, in the upper screen-left corner of the shot, start the engine
while Johnnie sits listlessly in the center of the shot. Johnnie glances screenright.
Suddenly the train begins to move. The camera pans screen-right to
follow the movement. Just before the train enters a tunnel, Johnnie realizes
his predicament. Why is the long-shot used here?
The Authenticity Hypothesis
This kind of shot might be explained in terms of Keaton’s commitment to
a kind of authenticity. We have already remarked on the extreme danger
the shot involved. Keaton is sitting on the driverod of an ancient piece of
machinery.
The engine was a museum piece; in his search for authenticity, Keaton had
found a working locomotive of almost the right Civil War vintage, and had
it further modiﬁed to resemble the actual “General” in every respect. There
was one trouble with such an old piece of machinery, the engineer told
[Keaton]: it had a tendency, if the steam was not fed to it just right, to spin
its wheels at the start. This would probably kill him outright or at least very
seriously injure him. Keaton often talked about the care they took to make
sure the gag didn’t backﬁre: they tried a smooth start several times without
him on the crossbar, and when the engineer was quite sure he had the knack,
Buster actually sat down and they did it again for the camera.5
The danger described above is authenticated by the long-shot. This shooting
format reveals that the stunt is not faked. Keaton is not tightly framed,
sitting on a moving metal rod. Shot that way, it would be possible to disconnect
the rod from the train and manipulate it by some directly controllable
method. Shot from afar, however, we see there is no chicanery. The rod
is unquestionably attached to the wheels of an awesome locomotive. The
long-shot conﬁrms our sense of the real risk that the image involves. We say
“real” in the same sense as Bazin when he expresses his thrill when Chaplin
truly enters the lion’s cage in The Circus.6
Long-shots in such cases putatively
vivify the action by establishing that the ﬁctional action being portrayed encompasses
many of the same risks to life and limb that the represented act entails
offscreen.
The authenticity hypothesis can be used to deal with many shots in Keaton
ﬁlms. One recalls the shot in Sherlock Jr. in which Sherlock falls from a moving
train onto the spout of a water tower, which drenches him and then sends him
tumbling to the track. The shot literally fractured Keaton’s neck.7
Watching
the ordeal, one does not doubt the danger of the scene for a second.
The use of the long-shot in such scenes also serves to authenticate
Keaton’s prowess as an acrobat. His backward catch of the Canﬁeld girl, a
dummy, as she shoots over the falls in Our Hospitality is quite a testament
to Keaton’s precision, as is the shot where he uses a railroad gate to lower
himself from the top of a building into a moving convertible in Sherlock Jr.
We may initially suggest that the function of the long-shots in Keaton and
in The General can be explained by an analysis in terms of authenticity which
purports that the long-shot is used to demonstrate that the represented
actions are authentic rather than synthetically contrived through editing. The
motivation for this authenticity can be explained in several ways, including:
(1) Keaton’s pride in displaying his own ability; (2) audience appreciation of
Keaton’s acrobatic skill; (3) the titillation of the audience by actual danger
to Keaton. Keaton keeps
as much of the action as possible within a shot. It started, presumably, with
a natural pride in letting the audience see that those leaps and falls and glissades
of movement were all his own work. There could be no cutting because
to cut into the action would suggest a cheated effect. . . . He was prepared to
risk his neck for an effect which might last twenty seconds on the screen. The
camera had to get far enough back to take it all in . . .8
Further motivation for Keaton’s commitment to authenticity can be
found in what might be called Keaton’s naive commitment to realism. Here,
realism is actually a cluster of different attitudes which fall under the same
rubric, though the different components of the cluster vary in kind. Keaton
was excited by ﬁlm, in contrast to theater. He wrote:
In the theater you had to create the illusion of being on a ship, a railroad or
an airplane. The camera allowed you to show your audience the real thing;
real trains, horses and wagons, snowstorms, ﬂoods. Nothing you could stand
on, feel or see was beyond the range of the camera.9
78 Style in The General
Style in The General 79
Today some may bridle at the above implication that cinema is not an illusion.
Yet, the passage does show Keaton’s obsession with the real, as found
in theorists like Kracauer and Bazin. Keaton’s obsession is literally implemented
– he tackles all those real things that he excitedly enumerates. In comic style
as well, Keaton’s commitment to the real causes him eventually to drop certain
gags from his repertoire. He wrote: “We also discontinued what we called
impossible gags.”10
In terms of cinematic style, Clyde Bruckman claims that
Keaton was the ﬁrst comic director to abandon the use of undercranking
because he, Keaton, believed that it rendered movement unbelievable.11
In
terms of imagery, Keaton also had a passion for historical detail, taking
the ﬁlming of The General to Oregon because of his desire to use historically
accurate, narrow-gauge railroad trains. Admittedly, the historical realism of
detail, the physical realism of material possibility, and the realism of the long
take/long-shot are different matters. A director could employ one of these
practices without being committed to the other two. However, it is also
the case that, within the history of twentieth-century culture, these different
kinds of authenticity have often been equivocally yoked together in a composite,
cluster notion of realism. Keaton has a commitment to authenticity
on many different levels of representation. In this light, his use of the longshot
becomes a further instance of his obsession with realism.
The authenticity view of Keaton’s use of the long-shot certainly has
strengths. It correlates with Keaton’s avowed, multidimensional commitment
to realism. It also points to experientially felt grounds for an explanation
of why audiences relish Keaton, given the way the long-shot enhances the
thrills and acrobatic effects of his stunts. The authenticity approach also places
Keaton within a comprehensible, historical ﬁlm framework as a precursor
of the deep-focus style of ﬁlmmaking. However, all these strengths must be
balanced against an unfortunate defect: long-shots occur in Keaton, and
especially in The General, where no stunts are involved. Even if every stunt
in Keaton were represented via a long-shot, the authenticity hypothesis
would still be questionable because not every long-shot contains a stunt.
Admittedly, the authenticity approach may provide a good analysis of the
subset of long-shots that involve stunts, but the authenticity theory cannot
provide a comprehensive analysis of Keaton’s use of the long-shot in The General.
How would it accommodate the shot of Johnnie chopping wood as he
enters enemy territory, or the shot of the Union-driven General dropping lumber
on The Texas from the high bridge? What risky or acrobatic stunts are
involved here? What inauthenticity would be perpetrated by representing these
events in a tightly composed montage?
80 Style in The General
Appreciating the narrow focus of the authenticity theory of Keaton’s use
of the long-shot, E. Rubinstein comments that “the central importance in
Keaton’s directorial technique of those long-shots of all kinds . . . [is to],
by their very nature, communicate in a single image the sense of man in relation
to his world.”11
Rubinstein upholds what we earlier called a conﬂict theory of the relation
of man to the environment in Keaton. The theory that the long-shot constantly
describes man in relation to the environment connects conveniently
with the adversarial picture of Keaton versus the environment. There are a
mass of images that relate man to the environment. The narrative, so a conﬂict
theorist might explain, speciﬁes the nature of that relationship as a hostile
one. Here, the long-shot is given the thematic function of constantly repeating
the major motif of the work. The long-shot is a device that recurrently
sets the terms of the theme that will be developed by the narrative action.
The Environment Approach
Insofar as the preceding “environment” approach to the use of the long-shot
derives feasibility from the conﬂict theory of Keaton’s iconography, the environment
theory of Keaton’s use of long-shots is faulty to the degree that we have
shown that the conﬂict theory is strained. However, one could maintain the
environment theory of the long-shot without buying into a conﬂict theory of
the iconography because the environment theory is compatible with any relation
between man and the environment including a merely spatial relation.
Admittedly, the environment view of the long-shot is better than an authenticity
theory when it comes to comprehensiveness. This is true mainly because
it is so vague. The only way the environment hypotheses can fail to apply
to any long-shot in any ﬁlm is if there are no people in the shot. In some
cases, even shots without people might be ingeniously integrated into the
environment theory by claiming that such shots represent the victory of nature
over man. In The General, every relevant shot has at least one person in it.
Thus, the environment approach does exhaustively cover the data we are concerned
with, but at the cost of unenviable amorphousness.
A defender of the environment view might argue that we have looked in
the wrong place for speciﬁcity when we object to the environment theory
of Keaton’s long-shot. The speciﬁcity of this explanation as a tentative
account of the Keatonesque function of the long-shot in The General comes
from the fact that a long-shot is an unusual device for a comedian. Chaplin
Style in The General 81
and Langdon prefer a theatrically derived “proscenium”medium-shot. In Lloyd,
the long-shot is generally an establishing shot. Hawks, in his comedy, prefers
intensive use of the plan américain. Here, the speciﬁcity of an environment
approach to the use of the long-shot in The General gains traction, not in contrast
to alternative possible uses of the long-shot, but in contrast to the very
different forms of representation deployed by other comedians. Thus, the environment
view is quite speciﬁc to what is speciﬁc in The General versus ﬁlms
by other comics because long-shots, per se, are rare in most comedies, but
profuse in The General.
In order to short-circuit this mode of defense of the environment theory
of the use of the long-shot in The General, we need only note that the later
ﬁlms of Tati seem to rely as much as The General on the use of long-shots.
Obviously, the preceding defense of the environment approach is suspect exactly
because it does not differentiate between Tati and Keaton. The fact that Tati
and Keaton share the use of the long-shot gives us an inroad to a possible
mode of analyzing Keaton’s use of it. If we can establish the difference between
the two men’s use of the shot, we may have a pivot from which to turn to
elaborate an analysis of Keaton’s use of the format.
In Tati’s Playtime, in the long-shots that depict the wreckage of the nightclub,
it seems that action pervades every square inch of the screen surface.
Humorous interactions are constantly occurring without special formal
devices, such as centering or diagonal composition, being used to draw audience
attention to exactly one sector of the frame. There is no highlighting
or underscoring of certain actions over others. The centers of interest in the
images are faceted. Tati makes virtually neorealistic comedies. For instance,
the audience looks about ﬁnding its own sources of interest. A key factor in
building this sort of open, multifaceted image is Tati’s use of sound. He records
voices in a garbled way. He does not erase ambient sound or increase the
decibel level of characters. There is little guidance from dialogue for the path
our eyes are to follow over the scene. Instead, our attention roves over an
image packed with incidents. We may or may not ﬁnd interesting aspects.
Tati is the type of comic who sees comedy as a philosophical stance or
viewpoint on life. He recreates Bazinian compositional patterns that facilitate
perceptual realism as a way of engendering a perspective on the ﬂux of
everyday life. He provokes the audience to view his comedy as one could
view an actual street scene; this is intended to be propaedeutic, one supposes,
to viewing actual street scenes as comedies.
In The General, the multifaceted aspect of the image is completely lacking.
One’s eyes are always led to the relevant sections of the long-shot through
82 Style in The General
strongly directive formal devices, such as diagonals. Keaton rigorously structures
his images in highly determinate ways. Keaton does not promote the
kind of roving attention Tati encourages. Our attention is forcefully led along
a predetermined pathway.
To begin to support this claim let us reconsider two of the shots so far
mentioned in this chapter. In the long-shot of Johnnie on the locomotive
driverod, the engineer, throughout the pan, is kept in the upper screen-left
corner of the shot. Johnnie is kept in the center of the frame. At times, when
the driverod rises, Johnnie is at the very epicenter of the image. This composition
employs a highly directive set of formal strategies. Johnnie is centered,
making him an immediate focus of attention. The cab window is a frame
within a frame, the sort of compositional rhythm that has strong attraction
for the average Western eye. Keaton further enhances the legibility of this
rhythm by framing the cab by the corner of the screen. The image is of one
90-degree edge proximately surrounded and enclosed by a larger one whose
sides are parallel to the smaller one. Here, proximity yields an undeniable
pattern that immediately rivets the eye. Keaton, by careful design, directs attention
to two points in the scene that are crucial for his gag to work.
In the long-shot of Johnnie entering enemy territory, we again see rigorous
formal structuring of the shot in operation. There is a shot of an open
ﬁeld; mounted troops, a wagon, and infantry race across it. This activity
is at some distance from the camera. Suddenly, the headlamp of The Texas
pulls in from screen-right. The camera stays stationary and The Texas
dominates the foreground of the shot. As The Texas pulls past the camera,
we see Johnnie Gray in the foreground chopping away at the lumber, while
in the background, the Southern army continues its retreat. This set-up, with
Johnnie in the foreground and the battle in the background, is repeated
several more times in this scene. It employs use of foreground/background
tension. Given the ﬁrst of these shots in which we initially see only the
battle and then see the train with Johnnie, we can say that the audience is
sequentially drawn from one point of interest to the next. There is no question
of a viewer’s roving eye making sense of this scene. Keaton is in total
control. First, he selects the battle as the focus of attention. Then, he shifts
attention to the train by ﬁlling up the foreground with The Texas. Keaton
carefully builds the shot, deliberately modulating the tempo and order of the
audience’s understanding of the situation. He uses a rigorously and simply
structured foreground/background format, enhanced by a sequential shift
of the focus of attention, to direct the audience to an apprehension of the
two facts. It is these two facts that must be grasped for the gag to work.
Style in The General 83
We note that a difference between Tati’s use of the long-shot and Keaton’s
involves Tati’s use of the format to provoke a multifaceted, open, roving
perception of the scene, whereas Keaton’s use of the format involves a
highly structured one intended to control viewing responses. Tati’s structures
result in multiple points of interest; Keaton narrows them. Keaton also
employs strident compositional devices to draw attention quickly and efﬁciently
to exactly those points of interest that he wishes to make salient.
To analyze the signiﬁcance of Keaton’s use of the long-shot in The General,
we might attempt to expand upon what we have already learned from our
comparison with Tati. An understanding of Keaton’s interest in this sort of
determinate composition will help us to understand the raison d’être of the
long-shot in The General.
The ﬁrst hypothesis we might offer for the determinateness of Keaton’s
long-shots is comic functionality. In the two examples considered so far, we
note that, in both cases, the two points of interest stressed by the structure
of the shots are the two elements that constitute the sources of humor in
the shots. Both shots are inattention gags: they rely on representing an absentminded
character misunderstanding or unaware of his situation. Both shots,
then, communicate two situations: the situation as it stands statically in the
mind of the character, and the situation as it actually is. This is an example
of what Bergson calls an “equivocal situation,” namely, “one which permits
of two different meanings at the same time, one merely plausible, which is
put forward by the actors; the other a real one which is given by the pub-
lic.”12
One might hypothesize that the long-shot, employed determinately, is
the best way to enact an inattention gag of an equivocal situation. If this were
true, we would have a perfectly functional account of Keaton’s use of the
long-shot as the best cinematic means for representing such gags. We could
also make use of part of the authenticity approach to the long-shot: that is,
for Keaton’s achievement gags and stunts, he uses the long-shot as the most
functionally efﬁcient means to conﬁrm the audience’s admiration of the character’s
skill. For the automatism/inattention gags of equivocal situations, the
long-shot is also favored for functional purposes. Thus, Keaton’s concern with
representing comic successes and failures at adaptation predisposes him to
the long-shot which, for different reasons, is the best device for portraying
both successes and failures at adaptation and this is what he wants to achieve
in The General.
The difﬁculty with this purely functional account of Keaton’s use of the
long-shot is that it is simply false that the long-shot is the best means for
representing inattention gags of the equivocal situation variety. The long-shot
84 Style in The General
is one way of doing this, but hardly the only way. Harold Lloyd, for instance,
often favors doing equivocal situation gags by editing à la Grifﬁth. In The
Freshman, Harold Diddlebock is tricked into giving a public address. As he
speaks, he holds an épée whose tip he absent-mindedly pushes along the ﬂoor.
An insert shot of the ﬂoor reveals an open light socket there, threateningly
close to the tip of Harold’s wayward rapier. One senses that, at any moment,
Harold will unknowingly plunge the sword into the open electrical outlet.
Lloyd returns to a frontal medium close-shot of the character speaking.
Anticipation builds; clearly the character is unaware of the danger that we,
the public, know of from the insert. Suddenly, the character starts dancing
frenetically as a shock of electricity courses through the steel sword and into
Harold’s body. Here, we have an inattention gag of the equivocal situation
variety. The character believes the situation is safe while the audience,
alerted by the insert, knows an accident is imminent.
This example from Lloyd indicates that there are ready alternatives to the
long-shot for representing equivocal situation gags. Lloyd uses editing, juxtaposing
a detail to a medium-shot in the case cited. An overhead, medium
long-shot might have turned the trick just as well. Someone like Keaton
could have done the gag by placing the camera over Harold’s head with the
open socket on the ﬂoor in focus in the background of the overhead shot.
However, this means of representing the situation is no more effective than
Lloyd’s two-shot format for conveying the information that is crucial to
understanding the gag. Consequently, why should the single-shot method be
considered a superior comic device?
To get the gag, you must know that: (1) the open socket is near the end
of the épée, and (2) that Harold Diddlebock is unaware of this. Such knowledge
can be communicated by either a two-shot or an overhead, deep-focus
shot. To make the gag work as a gag, either format is viable. There is no
reason to believe that the deep-focus long-shot is the best functionally available
means for representing equivocal situations, though it is one means.
Seeing How
The preceding discussion also reveals that a deep-focus long-shot does more
than simply serve the function of making gags viable. As the Lloyd example
demonstrates, all the audience needs for equivocal situation gags is the
knowledge of the alternative viewpoints on the situation. Such knowledge
can be conveyed synthetically without ever visualizing all the elements of the
Style in The General 85
gag in one shot. In short, we must look for another explanation for why Keaton
chooses to use deep-focus long-shots.
The gag will work if the audience knows that event x has happened.
Keaton’s use of the long-shot gives the audience something above just knowledge:
they see that the event happens. Knowing that x has occurred is
sufﬁcient for an equivocal situation gag to work. Such knowledge can be communicated
by fragments through editing, as one often ﬁnds in Lloyd. Keaton
goes beyond the basic requirements of comedy in his treatment of equivocal
situation gags by framing the action with long, deep-focus shots in such a way
that the audience sees x happening in its totality, that is, with all its relevant
elements visible.
We should abandon the idea that Keaton uses long-shots simply because
they are the best cinematic means for portraying the type of gags with which
he is most concerned. We realize that his use of the long-shot is more than
simply functional as a comic device. He is committed to the audience seeing
the whole event as well as its context, and, therefore, as more than a comic
concern.
The comic functionality explication of Keaton’s use of the long-shot can
also be challenged by pointing out that Keaton uses the format in many situations
that are not comic. For instance, the Union troops stream across Rock
River in the background of the shot, while Southerners creep up into the
foreground, almost a quarter of a mile away from the Northerners. There
is no gag here, so a comic functionality explication of Keaton’s use of the
long-shot is unlikely. On the other hand, one notes immediately that this ambush
scene could be represented by editing. The narrative only requires that the
audience know that the ambush is taking place; the audience need not see
the ambush happening in its totality. Keaton, however, is at pains to represent
the ambush in its totality, with the major factors of the scene simultaneously
available visually to the audience. Both in gags and in actions in
The General, we see that Keaton seems to use the long-shot to enable the
audience to see events in their totality rather than merely to know what is
happening via fragmentary views through editing. Keaton’s interest can be
contrasted with much of Hitchcock’s practice, in which his use of various
cinematic techniques usually prompts the audience to know that x on the
basis of inference from discrete details that are not depicted simultaneously
and homogeneously. This explanation of Keaton’s use of the long-shot
shares an essential feature with the authenticity theory of Keaton’s long-shots,
since both theories acknowledge spatial integrity, à la Bazin, as crucial.
Yet this “seeing that” theory of the long-shot is not so closely bound as the
86 Style in The General
authenticity theory to certain kinds of subject matter, such as stunts. Thus
far, we only speculate that Keaton uses the long-shot because he wishes to
engender in his audience the cognitive and perceptual experience of seeing
that x as a visible totality rather than the different cognitive and perceptual
experience of knowing that x as a result of a synthetic mental construction
of fragments of information conveyed by a string of shots of details.
The discussion so far points away from an analysis of Keaton’s use of the
long-shot in terms of pure comic functionality. We have argued that Keaton,
by eschewing editing as a means of representing equivocal situation gags, shows
a desire to present events to his audiences, with all the crucial elements of
the gag simultaneously visible at the same time. We infer that Keaton is interested
in engendering in his audience a state that we have dubbed “seeing that
x.” This state involves knowledge. But it also contrasts with the cognitive state
where the audience merely knows that x on the basis of an inference from
the discrete details of a montage. The experiential modality, “seeing that x,”
can serve as a basis for all Keaton’s long-shots, not merely equivocal situation
gags. Thus, it affords a comprehensive basis for explicating Keaton’s use
of the long-shot. This explanation argues that the long-shot is used in order
to engender the experience of seeing an event happening in its totality.
The problem with explicating Keaton’s use of the long-shot in terms of a
desire to afford audience experience of the “seeing that x” variety is that this
interpretation, like the environment theory, is too broad. For instance, how
will this new formulation differentiate Keaton from Tati? We must not only
account for Keaton’s use of the long-shot; we must also account for his use
of it in a determinate versus a multifaceted way. We must add something to
the “seeing that x” state of mind that characterizes that state as having a highly
determinate structure. Keaton’s long-shots not only facilitate seeing that x;
they facilitate our seeing that x in a highly speciﬁc way. What way is that?
We have already noted that Keaton’s use of the long-shot presents us with
a situation. We have also claimed that these elements are arrayed in striking
compositional patterns such that the eye is drawn to them quickly and
efﬁciently; we are drawn to the central elements of x so that in a glance we
immediately size up the dynamics of the situation. As the camera presents
it, the situation is highly intelligible.
Reconsider the gag with Johnnie on the driverod. We see both Johnnie
and the engineer. Formal devices highlight these two quite effectively. We
see where both of them are looking: the engineer busies himself in the cab
and Johnnie looks listlessly away from the cab. Given this, we understand
each man’s ignorance of the other. This enables us, at a glance, to understand
Style in The General 87
how the ensuing situation happened. The highly directive structure of the
shot leads us to zero in on the crucial elements of the situation in such a
way that we understand, at an almost perceptual level, exactly what is causing
the situation to unfold as it does.
Keaton emphasizes situations as developing processes rather than simply
as facts. He shows a long-shot with the engineer in the cab in order to include
the causal antecedents of the event. The event, Johnnie’s ride on the driverod,
is represented as a process of causes and effects. He could have rejected this
method in favor of one that simply presents a medium-shot of Johnnie
where the rod starts pumping, and in which Johnnie gradually becomes aware
of his movement. This would record the fact of the situation, including the
comic fact of Johnnie’s inattention, but this method would not explicate how
the situation came about.
The long-shot in The General functions to foster intelligibility in scenes.
Intelligibility here is something more than knowledgeability. A close-shot of
the engineer starting the engine and a medium close-shot of Johnnie on the
rod would afford the audience the knowledge of the steps in the causal transaction,
but this would not completely explain how the action happened due
to the way the attention of the two men was diverted. Heightened understanding
is the result of seeing how the event evolved due to the simultaneous
and speciﬁcally situated inattention of the two characters.
Seeing how the event transpired is more involved than just seeing the event
itself. For instance, the driverod gag might have been represented so that the
cab was not in the upper corner of the screen, where it visually echoes
the edge of the frame. Instead, it might have been more to the center of the
image. In our imagined shot variation, let us call it “the Tati variation,” there
is also room for the lumbercar in the shot. Suppose a group of workmen
are on the lumbercar furiously chopping wood in a semicomical manner.
Otherwise, suppose the Tati variation is the same as we ﬁnd in The General.
It is entirely possible that one could view the hypothetical Tati variation without
attending to the perceptual behavior of the engineer. You might, but it
is equally probable that you might not. In Keaton’s version, it is undeniably
more difﬁcult to avoid attending to the engineer’s perceptual behavior.
In the Tati variation, you would see the situation in its totality; it is also
possible that you might see how the situation happened. Keaton’s highly
determinate structuring of the long-shot format makes the likelihood of one’s
seeing how the event comes about far less tentative. In the Tati variation, a
structure that facilitates curiosity and the possibility of discovery is adopted.
In Keaton, the structure aims at provoking the experience of understanding
88 Style in The General
at a glance. Keaton propels the viewer’s eye – virtually grabs it – and then
leads it where it needs to be to grasp the dynamics of the unfolding event.
Provoking the experience of understanding at a glance is not requisite for
representing comedy, even sight gag comedy. We have seen that such comedy
works as long as the audience knows what is going on. Grifﬁth-derived
editing can provide knowledgeability. Keaton, in The General, is interested in
engendering an experience of intelligibility not simply knowledgeability. To
this end he employs long-shots including intensive use of foreground/background
oppositions, assertive use of diagonal compositions, and high and low
angulation.
In the opening shots of The General, we see Keaton’s expertise in employing
long-shots involving careful play between foreground and background.
In the third shot of the ﬁlm, we have a long-shot of the main street of Marietta,
Georgia. In the foreground there is a horse and buggy. The driver is on foot,
struggling to quiet his excited horse. Suddenly, from screen-left, The General
pulls into the image. Here, we see the event of the train arrival narrated
in terms of an effect that the train’s movement has on the environment.
Keaton does not just give us a shot that reports the fact the train has arrived;
he also attempts to weave the arrival into a larger network of relations.
The faculty exercised by the arrival shot is not simply our ability to recognize
that the train is arriving; understanding is also called for. The horse
bucks, but why? It’s a mystery until the train appears; the mystery dissolves
in short order. The presence and sound of the train frightened the horse. The
structure of the shot is such that we are directed to the two elements of the
humorous anecdote of the troublesome horse.
First, the horse is alone in the foreground. In the background, there is a
sparsely inhabited street. The horse and buggy are in a passageway between
two fences. The central position of the buggy in the foreground, at a break
in the regular patterns of the two fences, drives our attention to the buggy.
Then, the movement of the train draws our attention to the background.
Finally, the enormous train ﬁlls the background, almost completely blocking
out a view of the town. Only the buggy and train remain as focal points
of attention.
Though both foreground and background come into play in this shot, one
can hardly fall back on Bazinian notions of ambiguity here. The fact that the
foreground and background are employed sequentially makes the structure
of the scene highly directive. Keaton, in this shot, even though it is in many
ways merely an establishing shot, prompts the audience to more than just a
recognition of the narrative fact that the train has arrived.
Style in The General 89
He uses the occasion of establishing the setting for narrative action in order
to promote a problematic: why is the horse bucking? He presents the situation
as a process to be understood rather than just as a fact – the arrival of
the train – to be recognized. He uses sequential modulation of the foreground
and background to assure that we notice the relevant causal transaction. If
the shot began with both the train and the buggy, attention might have only
been drawn to the train and not to the trouble with the horse. Representing
the process in a hysteron-proteron format also facilitates the audience’s grasp
of the process by reversing the causal order of the event in the order of
presentation of the key elements of the event.
Another example of an early use of a long-shot in The General occurs in
the gag discussed in chapter 1 in which Annabelle Lee falls in line behind
Johnnie and the two young town boys mimic him. Here again the very aim
of the shot appears to be to show the audience how the event transpired,
rather than merely that the event did transpire.
Johnnie and the boys are in the mid-ground of the shot. Their cadence
evokes a parade. Appropriately, their eyes are riveted ahead with a frozen martial
ﬁxity. We see them march past a hedge. In the background, standing slightly
behind the hedge and out of the line of the parade’s ﬁxed vision, we see
Annabelle. As the parade passes, she lines up behind them. How Annabelle
gets behind them, unbeknownst to Johnnie, is thus intelligible at a glance.
The shot of Johnnie chasing the hijacked General is another example of
the use of the long-shot we are considering. Johnnie is running away from
the camera. He is initially in the foreground. In the deep background of the
shot, we see The General pulling away. Johnnie turns, beckoning his comrades
to follow him. The comrades jog into the foreground of the shot and
then stop. Johnnie runs on alone.
This gag can be easily imagined as a montage. We could have a shot of
The General pulling off. This could be followed by a medium-shot. Johnnie
and his comrades could show shock and run toward the camera. Cut back
to the train. Then, cut to a tight medium-shot showing Johnnie’s comrades
halted. Perhaps, one of them waves his hand downward, signaling that he’s
disgruntled. Then, ﬁnish off the sequence with a tight, moving shot of
Johnnie running alone. This format will make the gag work. The average
audience, aware of editing conventions, will know that Johnnie is chasing the
train all by himself. Yet they may not understand how this came about because
the shots enumerated above could support a number of theories about why
Johnnie is unaware that his comrades are no longer following him. For instance,
it may be that the tracks swerve a great deal so that it is impossible for Johnnie
90 Style in The General
to see behind himself. Or, it may be that Johnnie is just too imprudent to
ever check behind.
For Keaton, it is important that the audience comprehend the how of a
situation. Keaton uses the long-shot to enable the audience to see how a state
of affairs evolves. We see in the shot we are discussing that Johnnie, despite
the fact that he is on a straightaway, is simply too ﬁxated to ever check behind
himself. We see his comrades in the foreground as he tears away from them
into the background. Johnnie and his comrades are standing in between railroad
tracks that lie in the center of the image. The perspectival pull of the
tracks rivets our attention along this central axis in the frame, organizing the
crucial elements of the scene along a perceptually almost irresistible trajectory
of vision that makes the dramatic foreground/background juxtaposition
of elements even more compelling.
The shot in which Johnnie gets drenched with water from the water tower
is a striking case of Keaton’s use of the long-shot for the sake of intelligibility.
In preceding shots, the Union hijackers of The General have pulled away
from the water tower leaving the spout open. Then, we see a shot of The
Texas from behind. In the foreground, Johnnie is bending over in the cab.
We also see the window of The Texas and notice that Johnnie is not looking
out the window. In the background of the shot, in the upper, screen-right
corner, we see water ﬂooding out of the tower. The shot is executed so that
we can see the railway running right under the tower.
All the elements of the gag are laid out on the right side of the screen so
a narrow pathway of movement is set out for the eye. From the moving cab,
we move along the track in the direction of the motion. This draws us deeper
into the shot where we see the tower cascading water. The fact that the tower
is framed by the corner of the screen adds emphasis.
The compelling structure of the composition directs us to the crucial elements
of the gag, ﬁrst and foremost, by setting out the two elements via a
forceful foreground/background juxtaposition. Including a clear view of the
track also facilitates the movement of the eye by drawing us into the depth
of the shot. Setting the right edge of the frame proximately parallel to the
stanchions of the water tower also highlights their vertical linear pattern
in a way that elicits attention. Each of these strategies is a determinate compositional
element that can modify and facilitate a complete and efﬁcient
scanning of the crucial elements of the situation.
Perception is directed from one point to the next in a highly selective
way by means of formal compositional devices that give special salience to
key elements of the water tower gag. Not only can the audience see all the
Style in The General 91
elements of this event, but those elements are laid out in such a highly
determinate way that a rapid comprehension of the situation is abetted
immensely. Moreover, once the composition sets off the basic elements of
the gag, seeing how Johnnie’s unfortunate drenching comes about is virtually
unavoidable.
Johnnie is bent over. We can see out the window of the cab. As the train
approaches the tower, we can literally see the water fall through the window.
We also see Johnnie’s line of movement as he stands up. We see him
bypass the window in the front of the cab and instead move to lean out the
window on the screen-right side of the cab, thereby unknowingly missing
his last chance to notice the water coming and duck. As Johnnie leans out
the side window of the cab, the water hits him squarely in the face.
The highly directive strategies employed in the formal layout of the water
tower shot enhance one’s comprehension of how the event happened by exactly
honing in on the relevant factors in the situation. We not only know that
Johnnie, from his point of view, was inexplicably drenched. We also understand
what Johnnie does not, namely, the source of the water, and why Johnnie
failed to see it coming. From the above, we note that a frequent device Keaton
uses to direct audience attention in The General is exploitation of the possibility
of play between the foreground and background of deep-focus longshots.
In Keaton, this device does not involve ambiguity. Rather he uses the
visual categories of near and far in order to juxtapose elements. The formal
opposition of foreground and background is used to lay out or align crucial
elements of the scene, generally by placing one element in each zone. In this
way, Keaton exploits the normal perceptual habit of looking close and then
looking into the distance. As we have seen already, Keaton enhances this
foreground/background play by employing added formal strategies to move
the eye from one element to the next. One of the most important and
frequent of these devices is diagonal composition in depth.
A number of the diagonally composed long-shots in The General rely heavily
on the curves in the roadbed of the tracks over which the trains are racing.
For instance, shortly after hijacking The General, the Union spies stop to remove
a rail from the tracks in order to derail Southern pursuers. The shot that
records this is a medium long-shot with the spies in the mid-foreground, and
the recently stolen General in the background. The rail is being removed from
the screen-right side of the tracks. The tracks sweep from just screen-right
of the center of the image and proceed diagonally into the background. The
curve of the tracks is slow but sure, the eye drawn along the uniform articulations
that result from the intervals between the ties in the roadbed. The
92 Style in The General
General continues this diagonal pull into the depth, its huge bulk sprawling
around the bend, enticing the eye deeper. The recession into depth along
this diagonal moves the eye gently further. This formal arrangement serves
the narrative quite well. First, the eye moves along the track to the derailing,
and then the eye moves back to the train as the center of attention as
the action shifts to the vehicle. One might hesitate to say that the formal
arrangement here causes the viewer to move from the ﬁrst point of interest
to the second. However, the careful organization of elements in this instance
does facilitate, perhaps by overdetermination, an extremely clear presentation
of the subject.
Shortly after the spies remove the rail, we are shown a long-shot of Johnnie
approaching the portion of track that has been tampered with. Johnnie is
in the background. The stretch of track, as mentioned above, is curved. In
the foreground, we see the rail missing. Johnnie comes around the bend,
getting closer and closer to the gap in the rails. There is nothing to obscure
his view of the tracks in front of him. He just keeps pumping away on the
lever of the handcar, until he and the car go crashing onto the roadside.
The design of this shot is striking. In the foreground, the roadbed is visually
dominant. It is quite large given its proximity to the camera. The eye darts
to it. Again, the rhythmic recession of the ties of the tracks pulls us into the
depth of the shot, past the absent rail, and then back even further to Johnnie.
The natural path of vision here, as dictated by the formal arrangement of
elements, leads from one crucial element of the situation, the missing rail,
to the next, Johnnie. Editing can be eschewed in favor of a highly directive
mode of composition which not only restricts details to what is relevant, but
which also further enhances the legibility of those details by setting them in
an arresting formal context that exploits foreground/background play, and
which also enhances this juxtaposition by aligning the key details along a continuously
articulated diagonal running from the front to the back of the shot.
From the above shot we can see that Keaton’s use of the diagonal articulation
of long-shots involves the same penchant for clarity of presentation
that we saw in his particular use of foreground/background play. The rigorous
structure of the shot is meant to give salience to the basic elements
of the comic events so that the audience sees how the event transpired instead
of merely knowing that it did transpire. The use of the diagonal in these shots
also has another striking effect; namely, it gives the audience quite a dramatic
sensation of depth as the distance from the foreground to the background
of the shot is continuously annotated by the virtually measurable units of
the spaces between the railroad ties.
Style in The General 93
The subject of depth is constantly reemphasized by the long-shots in The
General. The long-shots with diagonal schemas are particularly important in
this regard. On many occasions, when Keaton represents trains as stopped,
the format he chooses is a long-shot from the side of the train with the entire
train stretching diagonally from one of the lower corners of the frame
backwards toward one of the upper corners. For instance, this method is
used when The General ﬁrst arrives in Marietta, when The General leaves
Marietta, at the hijacking at Big Shanty at Kingston, where Johnnie enlists
The Texas, and at many other stopping points along the chase. In all these
many shots, as in the handcar shot, a strong sense of depth emerges given
the constantly articulated recession. The uniformly spaced elements of ties
and of railway cars in these shots are like dotted perspective lines, fostering
a powerful sense of depth.
When I say that depth is the subject of these shots, I mean that depth and
distance, as physical dimensions of the scene, are given prominence by the
composition that Keaton favors. This is not to claim that there is no depth
in shots by other comedians who do not employ the diagonal. Depth is there;
it is a feature, just not an especially highlighted feature. In this regard, we
see a special interest in Keaton not only for depicting action in a way that is
intelligible at a glance, but also for engendering a sense of the scale of the
action by prompting the audience to exercise its faculty for distance judgment.
Keaton’s concentration on the subject of physical judgment, which is
presented to a passive audience through some of the gags and feats in his
ﬁlms, is dealt with in these diagonal compositions in The General by way of
activating the audience’s spatial intuitions.
An interesting use of the railroad tracks that more or less falls into the
category of diagonal composition occurs in the shot in which Johnnie realizes
that the Confederate troops are not attached to The Texas. Initially, this
begins as a medium-shot. The camera seems to be mounted on the bridge
that runs from the cab of the locomotive to the cowcatcher. In the foreground
of the shot we see Johnnie staring ahead. We know that the troops are not
attached to the train and we know that Johnnie is unaware of this. There is
a certain comic reaction to Johnnie’s conﬁdence, given that it is groundless.
In the screen-left background of the shot, we see trees lining the roadway.
We can also see a receding line of the tips of the railroad ties that make up
the roadbed. Initially we cannot see the track. Because the rails are straight,
we cannot see behind the train. Given the position of the camera, the locomotive
and the timbercar completely block out the track behind. The effect
is somewhat like that which Keaton achieves in The Playhouse when Big Bill
94 Style in The General
Roberts camouﬂages the entire line of Zouaves by standing in front of them
with his enormous bulk. Since the stationary camera can’t see around corners,
it is easy to interfere with the sheaf of light rays that is being delivered
to the audience by interposing objects in that sheaf.
In the shot in The General the blocking effect is only momentary.
Suddenly, the train hits a bend in the track and as the locomotive and lumbercar
snake around that bend, the lumbercar jostles out of the camera’s path
of vision and the open track behind The Texas comes into view, pulling off
diagonally toward the upper, screen-right corner. The audience again sees
evidence of what it already knows: there is nothing behind Johnnie; he has
lost his army.
The foreground/background tension is comically exquisite with Johnnie,
conﬁdent yet totally ignorant, counterpoised against the devastating absence
of his confederates. Eventually, Johnnie turns around, brieﬂy pausing before
poking his head out of the side window of the locomotive. Pausing again,
he then thrusts his entire torso out of the train. He turns his face toward the
camera in a look of disbelief that gradually metamorphoses into a mixture
of anger and determination.
The use of deep-focus, foreground/background play and diagonal composition
in this gag are hardly necessary for the gag to be effective. A much
easier mode of representing the event would be to break the scene up into
four shots. There could be an establishing shot from the side of the train showing
the locomotive and the lumbercar with nothing behind them. Then, there
could be a close-shot of Johnnie turning around, followed by a point-of-view
shot involving the camera moving over an empty track. Then, we could return
to another close-shot of Johnnie in order to catch his comical disgruntlement.
Alternatively, the shot might have been done in a single shot from alongside
the train. Here, the camera would pull up from behind the train, at ﬁrst
registering the absence of the troops and then passing by the cab of the train
at just that moment when Johnnie leans out the window and realizes that
he is alone. This variation of the shot might end with Johnnie turning forlornly
toward the camera.
What is achieved by Keaton’s way of handling the scene as opposed to the
suggested alternatives? The answer has to do with that swerve in the track.
The audience understands how in the geographical context of the situation
it is physically possible for Johnnie to learn that the troops are not attached
to the train.
In the montage we suggested, the audience would know that Johnnie learned
that he was alone. But they would not know how he was able to see from
Style in The General 95
the cab that he was alone. It is a notorious fact about point-of-view shots
that, though they tell you what a character sees, they do not supply evidence
of how he manages to see what he sees. There is a noteworthy example of
this in Ford’s Fort Apache (1948). Kirby York ( John Wayne), aided by binoculars,
sees Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda), get killed in a box canyon. Or,
at least, this is what the point-of-view shot establishes. One would have thought
that given the distance, the narrowness of the canyon opening, and all the
smoke and fury of battle, this feat of vision on York’s part to be unbelievably
extraordinary. Given the point-of-view shot format, we understand
that York sees Thursday die. But we have no idea how this incredible feat is
accomplished.
In our hypothetical, alternative single-shot method for the relevant scene
from The General, the audience does see that Johnnie learns he is alone; it
does not just know that he learns this. However, in our alternative singleshot
variation, the audience does not see how it is physically possible for Johnnie
to learn what he does. Keaton’s actual approach makes the swerve in the
track absolutely perspicuous. Shooting from the side would, in all probability,
ﬂatten out such a subtle curve. But, even if the shooting angle didn’t
obliterate the curve, it would still require a somewhat thoughtful viewer to
make the connection between the curve and the possibility of Johnnie’s rude
awakening. The viewer would have to reconceptualize the lateral scene
frontally.
Keaton’s approach, of course, starts frontally. To account for why he does
this we have to go beyond what is required to make the gag work, for, as
we have outlined, there are at least two other formal structures that will probably
make the gag work. Keaton’s choice has more behind it than merely
comedy: he wishes to engender a particular cognitive/perceptual state in his
audience – the state that we have dubbed “seeing how.”
“Seeing how” is perhaps an awkward locution. For that reason, it may be
better to refer to the effect of Keaton’s highly determinate composition as
“visible intelligibility,” where this is understood as a situation which one comprehends
at a glance in terms of its causal processes. So far we have found
that it is fruitful to explicate Keaton’s highly determinate long-shot compositions
in terms of his desire to facilitate visible intelligibility in the situations
he depicts. The fruitfulness of this explication can be measured by the large
number of shots we have been able to explicate under this concept. By large,
I don’t mean to suggest that this explanation covers the majority of shots
in the ﬁlm. I don’t even mean to claim that I’m handling every long-shot
in the ﬁlm; there are many merely establishing shots. By large I mean there
96 Style in The General
are a signiﬁcant number of highly determinately composed long-shots in
The General especially compared to the works of other comic directors,
including Tati. For that signiﬁcant group of shots, the explication in terms
of visible intelligibility seems more compellingly appropriate than competing
explanations.
Intelligible Physical Relationships
What is interesting about many of the examples that we have so far considered
is not only that they promote visible intelligibility per se, but that they
promote visible intelligibility about physical relationships and physical processes.
Keaton’s composition makes crucial physical elements and relationships
in a situation salient. For instance, the curve in the track in relation to
the movement of the train is made prominent in the shot that depicts
Johnnie’s realization that he is alone. In this light, we can say that an important
feature of Keaton’s composition in The General is the way that it can sensitize
the audience to key physical variables in the situations being portrayed.
To consider yet another example of Keaton’s diagonal composition, recall
the scene in which Johnnie, again in command of The General, topples
the Union telegraph pole. The scene is portrayed in several shots including
a long-shot of Johnnie hurling a rope over the telegraph wires, and then
tying the rope to The General, plus another long-shot of The General starting.
The third shot in this chain is especially interesting. It is taken from the
top of a freightcar that is attached to The General. In the lower screen-left
corner of the frame we see a cleat with the rope wrapped around it. The
rope stretches diagonally across the frame upwards toward the screen-right
corner. It is connected to the telegraph pole. As the train moves, the pole
crashes onto the track. Keaton then cuts to a shot of Union troopers futilely
attempting to wire ahead to their advance positions. Then Keaton returns
to the shot from the top of the boxcar; Johnnie Gray enters the frame with
an ax in hand. We see the telegraph pole being dragged along the track. Johnnie
severs the rope with his ax and we see the pole lying still on the track. What
is important about the above shot of the cleat and the pole is its extraneousness
to the narrative. The narrative would be perfectly served by a single
lateral shot of The General tearing down the telegraph pole. The ﬁrst
shot set-up in this interpolation could have sufﬁced here. However, Keaton
adds this extra set-up of the cleat and the pole. Why? He clearly conceives
of physical work processes as intrinsic to his viewpoint of the situation. There
Style in The General 97
is no comic effect here, nor is key narrative information being added.
Neither comic nor narrative functionality explains the shot. Rather, postulating
that Keaton is committed to concentrating on the physical process dimension
of situations seems a more apt explanation.
The way that Keaton supplies this additional dimension on the toppling
of the telegraph pole is also worthy of note. The forceful diagonal composition,
with the cleat bracketed by the edge of the frame and the rope
strikingly taut, leading the eye across the visual ﬁeld, directs us almost
sequentially to the key physical variables within the physical process. Because
of his interest in physical processes, Keaton shows us the whole event,
including much more detail than is required to make a simple comic narrative
function. Furthermore, he shows us the physical process via a compositional
structure that emphasizes the crucial physical elements of the situation in
such a way that we understand the physical unfolding of the scene at a glance.
The composition renders the process visibly intelligible immediately.
The use of the rope in the above shot is highly reminiscent of the scene
in Steamboat Bill Jr. where Willie Jr. rescues King’s daughter. King’s daughter
is on the roof of a house. The house ﬂoats next to the steamboat. Willie throws
a line with a grappling hook onto the house. He climbs across and then attempts
to inch his way back to the steamboat along the rope with King’s daughter
hanging on his neck. Two of the set-ups used to portray this situation recall
the use of the diagonal spoken of above. One shot, taken from the boat side
of the action, diagonally aligns the physical elements of the action. Then, Keaton
reverses the action to the house side of things. In both shots what is emphasized
by the diagonal is the rope and its anchor points. That is, the crucial
physical elements of the event are emphatically advanced as primary features
of the situation for the audience to attend to.
Editing, of course, enhances the salience in these elements by enabling
the audience to view the same elements from systematically different viewpoints,
thus engendering a felt sense of greater familiarity and intelligibility.
One feels one has a better grasp of the environment due to the reverse-ﬁeld
cutting. The systematic alternation of the same strikingly diagonally articulated
event also activates one’s sense of depth, drawing the audience into a
context that engages its faculties of physical judgment. Moreover, the use of
the diagonal in The General seems to parallel its use in this sequence of Steamboat
Bill Jr. In both, the aim appears to be to use highly directive compositions in
such a way as to put the audience in a “seeing how” frame of mind.
Examples of Keaton’s use of diagonal composition in The General can be
multiplied handily. In the shot where The Texas pushes the burning boxcar
98 Style in The General
from the enclosed bridge, Keaton diagonally sprawls the locomotive and the
freightcar across the screen in such a way that the point of contact between
the two vehicles is placed in the center of the screen so that one can see how
the slope of the cowcatcher of The Texas rides under the carriage of the burning
car, pushing it along.
Keaton also employs a diagonal composition in the shot showing the disabling
of the retreating Union train during the battle. In the ﬁrst shot of this
retreat, Keaton includes two boxcars in the image of the withdrawal of the
train. The cars pull away from the camera diagonally. The shot is also somewhat
low, chopping off the top of the boxcar nearest the camera. The diagonal
nature of the shot draws the eye to the last boxcar, while the lowness
of the shot leads the eye to the wheels. A cannon shell hits the wheels, crumbling
the boxcar to the track. The composition here directs the eye exactly
to the relevant physical point in the action.
In the next shot, Keaton continues the diagonal approach by taking an
extreme long-shot of the entire train starting with the locomotive in the lower
screen-right corner with the line of boxcars aligned higher and higher into
the upper screen-left quadrant. Here, the shot emphasizes the great mass of
the train jammed against the shattered axle of the last boxcar that has been
so effectively bombarded. The interrelations of the scene are thus strikingly
arrayed via a highly determinate composition that makes the situation physically
intelligible at a glance.
Another compositional strategy in the long-shots in The General is the recurrent
use of high and low angulation. An important example of a high-angle
shot has already been discussed in our analysis of the gag in which Johnnie
Gray attempts to run the boxcar onto a siding. There, the camera is mounted
high on the lumbercar. We see Johnnie Gray busy in the cab of the train. He
is in the center of the foreground of the shot. Off in the background, in the
upper screen-left corner, we see the wayward boxcar on the parallel track.
The rectangular boxcar echoes the edge of the frame while the rectangular
window of the cab sets up a third resounding echo. We move naturally through
this formal pattern. Johnnie is bending down under the window, ﬁddling with
this or that. The high-angle shot not only shows us the key elements of the
situation, but also shows how the boxcar winds up in front of The Texas again,
and why Johnnie is insensible to this sequence of events.
Editing could have easily rendered the event. One shot from the side of
the moving vehicles, a close-shot of a preoccupied Johnnie, a shot of the point
where the tracks converge, and a return to the lateral shot of the boxcar
sliding ahead would have done the trick. But Keaton is not interested in the
Style in The General 99
easiest way of hammering home the gag; rather he is interested in the
formal structure which will facilitate the audience’s seeing how the physical
situation yielded the results it did.
In the second part of the boxcar gag, shot angulation again is central.
Unbeknownst to Johnnie, the boxcar goes careening off the track when it
strikes a piece of debris the Union spies have thrown there. The shot that
represents this is a low-angle long-shot. Here, angulation substitutes for editing
in terms of selecting the relevant aspects of the situation. The low angulation
directs the audience to the track and to the wheels of the boxcar. We
anticipate and then effortlessly understand how the crash occurred. Rather
than starting with a close-shot of the tie on the track and then shifting to a
standard lateral medium long-shot of the crash, Keaton employs a single longshot
with low angulation so that the eye follows the subtly rising trajectory
of the low angle to the center of the screen where, on the track, we ﬁnd the
tie that overturns the car. At a glance, the whole event is comprehensible
because the low angle immediately gives prominence to the tie and sensitizes
us to the key physical variable in the situation.
The shot in which Johnnie is pinned under a railroad tie on the cowcatcher
of The Texas provides another example of the way the overhead shot sensitizes
us to the relevant physical feature of the situation. Here the overhead
shot emphasizes the weight of the railroad tie, which will be crucial when
Johnnie hurls the tie on his chest onto the tie on the track, thereby catapulting
it out of his path. In this way the overhead shot of Johnnie pinned to the
cow-catcher emphasizes the dimension of the railroad tie that is crucial for
the physical process that is being depicted.
This is not to deny that the audience is aware of the weight of the tie in
the level-angle shot of Johnnie pinned on the cowcatcher. Rather what is claimed
is that Keaton adds the high-angle shot to the level-angle shot which on its
own is perfectly suitable for narrating the gag. Keaton adds the high-angle
shot to heighten, enhance, and emphasize the matter of weight in the scene,
thereby sensitizing the audience to the key physical variable in the situation.
What the audience is sensitized to is exactly that property of the tie that Johnnie
must concentrate on for his “catapult insight.” Seen in this light, the high
angle anticipates the determinant factor of Johnnie’s reconceptualization of
his predicament.
The preceding shot from The General is reminiscent of the overhead shot
in The Navigator in which Rollo Treadway bombards the attacking cannibals
with coconuts. The cannibals have laid a tree against the side of the oceanliner
intending to use it as a ladder to climb onto the deck of the ship. The
100 Style in The General
overhead shot that depicts the battle gives particular salience to the length
of the tree, and to the distance between the oceanliner and the canoe of the
marauding natives. The tree runs down the center of the screen acting as a
virtual measuring rod of the distance between the oceanliner and the canoe.
Our spatial intuitions are titillated, drawing our attention to the fact that the
tree is just long enough so that, if it were pushed from the side of the ship,
it would arc over and topple down, crashing the cannibals’ boat.
Because of the overhead shot, we anticipate the insight that Rollo is about
to have. The overhead shot emphasizes the length of the tree whereas a shot
from the side of the ship would emphasize the function of the tree as a ladder.
In a manner of speaking, the overhead angulation of the shot performs
for the audience that transformational operation of reorganizing the elements
of the visual ﬁeld that Rollo must perform mentally.
Here we see that the condition of intelligibility as a cognitive state for the
audience is a close analogue to the operation of concrete intelligence on
the part of the character. Angulation is a literal means to reorient the visual
ﬁeld. This serves as an analogue to the processes of mental reorganization
that Keaton’s successful adaptation gags presuppose. Thus, Keaton’s highly
determinate compositions may be seen as a means of returning, at the level
of style, to the concern with concrete intelligence that dominates his gags.
The function of Keaton’s highly determinate compositions seems to be to
elicit extreme audience awareness and sensitivity to the key physical elements
of physical processes. This is not undertaken simply for comic functionality
since Keaton’s attention to physical detail occurs in contexts that are noncomic.
Rather, Keaton gives salience to key physical details through highly
determinate compositions in order to engender in the audience an alertness
and concrete sensitivity to the environment, which is what characters lack
in failure gags and which is what characters have in abundance when they
excel. The visual intelligibility manifested in Keaton’s cinematic style corresponds
neatly to the theme of concrete intelligence that recurs in the action
throughout the ﬁlm.
We have cited foreground/background juxtaposition, diagonal composition,
and angle elevation as major means in Keaton’s highly determinate manipulations
of the long-shot. As our analyses of shots so far should bear out,
we are not claiming that these strategies are the only ones that Keaton employs
to give prominence to key elements of the situations that he depicts. For
instance, on occasion, we have cited echoing structures as further determinations
of the composition added to angulated, foreground/background,
and diagonal composition.
Style in The General 101
Furthermore, there are strategies that result in highly determinate longshot
compositions that we have not discussed because they often occur once
and thus are not classiﬁable in an overarching category such as diagonal
compositions. An example of this sort is the shot in which the Union spies,
sitting atop a high railroad bridge, drop lumber on Johnnie Gray in The Texas
below. Here, the shot has an incredible vertical emphasis. The extremes of
the vertical positions of the shot are employed as the only centers of narrative
interest. The extreme high point of the shot and the low point are respectively
occupied by The General and The Texas. An imaginary perpendicular
line could be drawn from one to the other. This striking geometrical array
of crucial elements gives them visible intelligibility.
A simple objection might be offered against the preceding interpretation.
It might be claimed that Keaton really uses the long-shot because of the scale
of his comedy and not because of his desire to instill the initiation of visible
intelligibility in his audiences. This alternative seems ill-advised. First, there
is no reason to suppose that, just because a ﬁlm is about a train, it must be
developed predominantly by means of long-shots. Several establishing shots
of the train might initiate a train narrative, after which the narrative could
be depicted by the use of medium-shots and close-shots. It might be
objected that, to do the kinds of gags Keaton employs in The General, the
long-shot is called for. However, as we have demonstrated in several of our
analyses, montage solutions are available that would make Keaton’s gags work.
It is not the scale of the gag that offers an account of Keaton’s use of the
long-shot; something else is required.
Another weakness with the scale objection to our thesis is that, even if
it explains the use of the long-shot, it gives no account of Keaton’s highly determinate
employment of that device. It hardly covers all the data to be examined.
If it went on to account for the determinate composition in terms of visible
intelligibility, then it would hardly count as an objection to our theory.
I do not claim to be the only commentator to have realized the correlation
between Keaton’s use of the long-shot and the way this technique elucidates
the processes it records. Gerald Mast writes:
Keaton favored the far shot not only to juxtapose his individual body with the
natural universe but also to provide a distant view of how a particular mechanism
works. The cinematic far shot provides the means to see both cause
and effect, to see all the relevant elements, to illuminate the total process of
a mechanism. And that is why Keaton’s far shots are so memorable and so
revealing – not just a little man on the vast plains in Go West or a little man
102 Style in The General
falling from a rope bridge in The Paleface or leaping from train car to train car
in The General, but the principle of showing how a totality works.
In both The Haunted House (1921) and The High Sign, a Keaton far shot reveals
all four rooms of a house (one wall cut away) and exactly how the chase progresses
from one to another. In The Navigator (1924), a far shot reveals exactly
how a ship’s hugeness can keep two lone passengers from ﬁnding each
other.13
I certainly agree with these observations of Mast, and ﬁnd much in them
that is compatible with my position on Keaton’s use of the long-shot. However,
my position is even more reﬁned since I have cited recurring strategies
within the long-shot that facilitate the kind of intelligibility that Mast speaks
of. Though acknowledging an undeniable convergence between Mast’s formulation
and my own, I must also point out that I part company with Mast
in what he counts as the signiﬁcance of Keaton’s use of the long-shot – a
means to show how a total process works as a mechanism. Mast describes
the physical processes as mechanisms, holding that the motivation of Keaton’s
far shots is to turn “human processes into mechanisms.”14
Mast attempts to
assimilate Keaton’s shooting style into a Bergsonian perspective which cites
a constant correlation between what is laughable and the intrusion of the
mechanical in human behavior. He holds that it is the basis of Keaton’s comic
endeavor to evoke laughter through the synthesis of man and machine in
such a way that the mechanical predominates, thus causing laughter. Since
not every case of long-shots that shows how things work in The General is
laughable, we should reject Mast’s analysis of the signiﬁcance of Keaton’s
use of the long-shot. For instance, Keaton shows us how Johnnie Gray has
anchored one end of the rope on the boxcar cleat to pull over the telegraph
pole. In this case, it neither seems appropriate to claim that rendering the
process intelligible is to render it a mechanism, nor does it seem that the
situation is humorous in any way.
Thematic Signiﬁcance
In order to understand the thematic signiﬁcance of Keaton’s highly determinate
use of the long-shot in The General, I turn, like Mast, to the iconography of
the ﬁlm. However, I do not turn to a simple, Bergsonian characterization of
that iconography, but rather to the more comprehensive, more speciﬁc, and
more elaborately structured interpretation of that iconography that I offered
in chapter 1.
Style in The General 103
In chapter 1, I claimed that the major theme of The General concerned an
aesthetic examination of the role of concrete intelligence in the manipulation
of things. This examination was exempliﬁed by the behavior of the characters,
notably Johnnie. At a stylistic level, we are now faced with making
thematic sense of a highly determinate use of long-shot composition which
seems directed toward rendering physical processes visibly intelligible in a
salient way.
At the level of the iconography, concrete intelligence is the theme. At the
level of style, concrete intelligibility appears as the consistent effect of the
major recurring representational formats. How are the two related?
The relationship between concrete intelligence and concrete intelligibility
does not seem hard to divine. The success and failure gags present the audience
with representations of different ways of responding to the physical processes
in the environment. The highly determinate long-shot compositions
of The General are stylistic manipulations by which the audience participates
in a certain way of seeing the physical processes of the environment. The
theme is concrete intelligence in both style and content, though in one case
this faculty is exercised by the character, and in the other case it is provoked
in the viewer.
In terms of content, the conditions of concrete intelligence are manifested
in action; the audience is passive in its reception of the subject matter. At the
stylistic level, the audience is participating; it adopts a perspective on the action
that is maximally legible in terms of the physical processes and factors
involved. Composition, through highly determinate long-shots, embodies a
viewpoint on the environment that is sensitive to relevant, ongoing physical
processes. The camera, here, organizes the visual ﬁeld in a manner that is
virtually, unavoidably conducive to the understanding of the ongoing events
in the environment. The camera incarnates the kind of perception that characters
should but don’t have in the failure gags concerning concrete intelligence.
At the same time, the camera replicates the kind of attentiveness the
characters do have in the success gags and feats concerned with concrete intelligence.
Concrete intelligence as a theme that the audience witnesses passively
in the behavior of characters is the active, participatory equivalent of
the stylistic theme of the visible intelligibility of physical processes which the
audience engages in through the mediation and promptings of Keaton’s highly
determinate use of the long-shot. Keaton’s visual style promotes the kind of
perspective on the physical environment that an engineer might have and
thereby encourages the activation of a comparable species of intelligence in
the viewer, namely, a variety of concrete intelligence.
104 Style in The General
By means of the concepts of concrete intelligence and concrete, visible
intelligibility, we can explicate a uniform preoccupation underlying both the
iconographic content and the long-shot style of The General. The relationship
I am postulating involves a doubling relation between the character’s experience,
which concerns concrete intelligence, and the audience’s experience, which
vis-à-vis the long-shot display of processes, concerns visible intelligibility. Concrete
intelligence and concrete intelligibility are related as passive and active
refrains of a single preoccupation, which involves sensitivity to and understanding
of the ongoing physical processes of the environment. Characters either show
this sensitivity or fail to show it. The audience is led to exercise this faculty
of understanding through compositions that select and array the signiﬁcant
physical variables in a salient way. Keaton makes geometers of us all.
Concrete intelligence is a matter for the character who fails to adapt if he
does not constantly reorient himself to the changing environment, and who
succeeds in adaptation if he is able to reorient himself to the environment.
The process of organizing visual information is also a theme of the style
of the ﬁlm, which lays out the pertinent visual data in ways that facilitate
immediate audience insight into ongoing physical processes. The concrete
intelligence of the audience is thereby prompted and engaged by compositional
formats that prime the audience’s cognitive faculties, leading one to
an immediate insight into the processes at hand. Keaton examines the conditions
of concrete intelligence through the success and failure gags of the
character. The theme is also developed at the level of style, which exercises
the audience’s faculty for concrete understanding by means of highly determinate
long-shot compositions that facilitate the audience’s comprehension
of how the processes happen. Here Keaton seems concerned with engendering
a very deﬁnite cognitive state in the audience, one in which the audience
sees how events happen rather than a cognitive state where the audience
simply knows that an event has happened. What Keaton’s compositions aim
at appears to be to produce a ﬂash of understanding in the audience, thereby
doubling, at the level of the audience’s experience, the motif in the success
gag of the character’s insight into physical interrelationships.
Postulating a thematic unity of style and content in The General between
the iconography of the gags and feats, on the one hand, and the highly determinate
long-shot compositions, on the other hand, places us in a position
to transfer, almost as an inheritance, certain explanatory dimensions of our
account of the iconography to an elucidation of Keaton’s long-shot style. We
suggested that part of the power of Keaton’s iconography in The General was
the way it was compensatory. That is, Keaton’s imagery, to a certain extent,
Style in The General 105
exempliﬁed, celebrated, and valorized certain dimensions of concrete intelligence
that were no longer part of, or at least were a diminishing part of,
the everyday experience of twentieth-century, white-collar society. This
compensatory gratiﬁcation can also be attributed to the highly determinate
long-shot composition of The General insofar as that composition makes it
possible for the audience to exercise a faculty for concrete intelligence that
is either a declining or extinct part of the audience’s everyday work experience.
In the short time of the ﬁlm, the audience is presented again and again with
occasions for insights into the workings and physical interrelations of things.
The visible intelligibility of the shots reawakens an aspect of intelligence that
our service-oriented culture leaves dormant in most workers.
This possibility of compensatory gratiﬁcation is not an invariant causal effect
of Keaton’s composition. Rather, it is a possible response to the structure of
the imagery which the highly determinate composition favorably affords, but
does not necessitate. Moreover, that this style promoted compensatory pleasure
can sensibly be attributed to audiences in the twenties, many of whom
had already lost the everyday experience of exercising concrete intelligence
in their work. Compensatory gratiﬁcation can also act as a source of pleasure
for our contemporary audiences who are even less practiced in the daily
employment of concrete intelligence. The highly determinate long-shot
compositions engender pleasure by the way they intelligibly represent physical
processes. A dimension of experience, the faculty for concrete intelligence,
is animated again, and regaled with the possibility of insight after insight into
the workings of things. The iconography of concrete intelligence, exempliﬁed
in the behavior of characters, is reinforced by the viewer’s experience involving
the felt exercise of concrete intelligence. Keaton’s preoccupation with
physical interrelationships informs both style and content in The General.
Culturally, the way in which a concern with physical interrelations compensates
for an absence in twentieth-century work makes The General an emblem for
an earlier industrial civilization in which creativity and insight in relation to
things were a common source of satisfaction.
Because we have extended our analysis of Keaton’s iconography to Keaton’s
single-shot composition, it may be objected that our argument is incomplete.
We noted two modalities in Keaton’s iconography: (1) failures at adaptation
which correspond to character ﬁxation and (2) successes at adaptation that
correspond to character insight. In the analysis of Keaton’s composition, however,
I have only considered salient organizations of the visual ﬁeld which
can be identiﬁed as audience correlates to insightful character organizations of
the visual
ﬁeld. But shouldn’t we also expect there to be stylistic correlates
106 Style in The General
to the failure imagery in the ﬁlm if the model is to be comprehensively extrapolated
from Keaton’s imagery to his compositional strategies?
To answer this question, it should be admitted that had I discovered a
string of compositions in The General that corresponded to the failure gags,
I would have claimed this discovery as supportive of my hypothesis as it
further systematized the data of the ﬁlm. However, there is no reason this
explanatory model for the iconography has to correspond to my explanation
of the composition point-for-point. It might be an added nicety if the correspondence
were a point-for-point correlation of each feature of the analysis
of the iconography with a related feature in the composition, but this is
not necessary.
Exact symmetry of iconographic and compositional analysis would be intellectually
dazzling. But there is no reason to postulate that all works are designed
so intensively. My analysis respects the data of the ﬁlm; there are compositional
correlates to the insights, but not to the failure gags. Our explanation
is not symmetric because the ﬁlm is not symmetric in this way. This is not
a limitation unless one has prior expectations that analyses and the masterpieces
they dissect must display point-by-point symmetries between style and
content. Such an expectation seems completely unhistorical.
For the reader who does place some weight on symmetric correspondences
between content and style explications, I can say one thing in favor of my
analysis. In Keaton ﬁlms other than The General, we can isolate elements
of compositional style that do correspond to Keaton’s failure gags. Keaton’s
failure gags presuppose that the character is ﬁxated on one, generally misconceived,
picture of how the environment stands. Such characters have a
misleading organization of the elements of the visual ﬁeld.
Similarly, sometimes in Keaton ﬁlms other than The General the audience
is presented with shots that provoke misunderstanding of the situation at hand
because the shot organizes information in a misleading way.
Cops opens with a shot which leads the audience to believe that the character
is in jail while actually he is behind a cast-iron gate. The closeness of the shot
is misleading; it organizes the information in a way inappropriate to locating
characters behind gates. We might call these occlusion set-ups since they are
composed in a way that blocks a correct understanding of the shot.
In The Blacksmith, the shot of the chestnut tree also subverts our expectations,
while in The Navigator we are as misled as Rollo about the number on
the pier, due to the angle of the shot vis-à-vis the gate.
The point of the shots in Keaton that trick the audience is that such
shots represent faulty organizations of the elements of the visual ﬁeld. These
Style in The General 107
occlusion set-ups correspond to the faulty perceptual habits and ﬁxated
misconstruals of the characters that lead to failures of adaptation. These shots
also contrast with the types of shots we have analyzed in The General where
the organization of elements is such as to provoke a correct, insightful grasp
of the situation. The shots of The General that we have discussed correspond
to Keaton’s success imagery, and contrast with shots in other Keaton ﬁlms
that correlate with Keaton’s failure imagery. So my model for the explanation
of Keaton’s gags is systematically expandable to Keaton’s style if we consider
all Keaton’s silent ﬁlms and not just The General.
On the other hand, my analysis cannot be faulted because The General
does not contain any of the kinds of misleading shots previously cited.
For even the critic with a predilection for explanations of the most elaborate
structural variety will acknowledge that not every permutation of an artist’s
structural variations has to appear in every one of his works. It is enough
that our analysis of the iconography successfully predicts stylistic correlates
to both the success and failure imagery across Keaton’s oeuvre.
Editing
Shifting from the composition of The General to the editing, one discovers in
the latter the same lucidity concerning physical processes that was evident
in the former. One technique that accounts for the terriﬁc clarity in the depiction
of physical processes is the sedulous way that Keaton breaks down a
process into a careful, step-by-step causal analysis of the event. This technique,
let us call it causal ordering, is hardly Keatonesque; virtually every ﬁlm, one
would hazard, has some causal analysis. What seems Keatonesque about the
causal ordering in The General is not that the technique is unique, but rather
that the volume at which it occurs is quite distinctive. Many ﬁlms contain
causal orderings of events. In The General, these causal orderings are very often
not merely operating on events, but on very speciﬁc events, namely physical
processes or actions involving physical manipulations. Few ﬁlms seem
so completely devoted to laying out incessantly the causal underpinnings
of the physical events depicted. In the second and fourth parts of the ﬁlm,
it appears that predominant stretches of narration seem to be based on an
action/reaction model of cause and effect with nary a stray shot for a colorful
detail or a touch of psychology.
Keaton hardly invented causal ordering, but the intensive use he makes
of the technique colors one’s experience of the ﬁlm quite profoundly. It
108 Style in The General
gives one a sense of it as a virtual clockwork of causes and effects. Typical
examples of causal orderings are rampant in the ﬁlm. For instance, the Union
hijackers stop The General and run over to a telegraph pole. There is a cut
to a medium-shot of a telegraph operator banging the telegraph key. Cut back
to the hijackers; the wires are severed. Cut back to the telegraph operator;
there is something wrong with the mechanism. Or, the hijackers remove a
rail from the roadbed. There is a shot of Johnnie pursuing on his handcar.
Then, there is a shot of The General escaping. These two shots establish that
sufﬁcient time has elapsed for Johnnie to have reached the sabotaged portion
of track. Finally, there is a shot of Johnnie approaching that section of
roadbed and derailing.
Again and again, the editing traces a strict process of cause and effect. In
a medium-shot from inside the boxcar in the repossessed General, Johnnie
knocks out the back of the boxcar, littering the path of the pursuing Yankees
with dangerous debris. In the next shot, we can see the Union troops removing
the obstacle. This shot is followed by a medium-long-shot from Johnnie’s
perspective; he is heaving barrels and boxes from the freightcar onto the track.
This is followed by a deep-focus long-shot that perspicuously records a line
of barriers from the foreground of the shot to the background where the
Union troopers struggle to clear the track. The rhythm of the sequence is
cause/effect, cause/effect. The intensive use of this causal ordering method
of narration focuses the subject succinctly on the process dimension of physical
interactions, while also fostering in the audience a detailed comprehension
about the ﬁctional environment as almost every event is laid out in respect
to its causal genesis. The ﬁlm narration becomes an almost constant process
of explanation, detailing the why and wherefore of every physical process and
manipulation.
Through the addition of striking details that clarify the relevant ongoing
physical process, Keaton contributes an added degree of lucidity to his development
of the causal ordering technique. For instance, when Johnnie pulls
up the switchtrack to permanently sidetrack his Union pursuers, Keaton
uses two shots. The ﬁrst shows Johnnie in a medium long-shot behind The
General. He attaches a chain from the back of the tender of The General to
the switchtrack and then runs over and pushes the lever that switches the
track. He waves to Annabelle, urging her to start The General so as to bend
the switchtrack permanently in the wrong direction. Then, Keaton cuts to
a close-shot of the switchtrack being bent into the wrong position. This second
shot shows the audience how the switchtrack is bent out of shape. However,
from the point of view of the narrative, the shot is extraneous. The ﬁrst shot
Style in The General 109
would have sufﬁced to convey the narrative information that Johnnie was
preparing to sidetrack his Union pursuers. Yet, Keaton adds a shot, thereby
enriching our comprehension of the causal process by showing us exactly
how the desired condition was effected. Keaton’s way here is to supply further
details so that the audience not only knows what is going on, but also
sees how it happened. Perfect clarity on the matter of physical interactions
is Keaton’s motivation.
The switchtrack example is also analogous to the earlier example we offered
concerning Johnnie Gray’s dismantling of the Union telegraph wires. That
sequence begins with a long-shot of Johnnie hurling a rope over the telegraph
lines, and then attaching the rope to the top of a freightcar. Next there is a
shot of The General starting up, followed by a shot that we have already analyzed,
of the rope diagonally extending from the top of the boxcar to the
telegraph pole. The pole is toppled. After this, we see a shot of Union troops
futilely attempting to wire ahead. We then return to the third set-up in this
shot interpolation as Johnnie cuts the telegraph pole loose. In this causal ordering
the third set-up is extraneous from a narrative point of view. Keaton might
have returned to the camera set-up of the ﬁrst shot to record the telegraph
pole’s crash, but instead he includes the third set-up, thereby adding a
signiﬁcant detail to our picture enabling us to see precisely how the physical
process emerged.
The causal ordering technique as well as the addition of illuminating details
is not special to Keaton though he executes this conventional technique masterfully.
He also uses it to promote his major effect, that is, clarity about
physical processes. Of course, the technique of causal ordering with striking
detail does not always result in giving the audience the sensation of a ﬂash
of intelligibility that the composition promotes. Consequently, we would not
attribute the importance of this technique to a doubling of the experience
of the characters and the audience. Nevertheless, even though the ﬂash of
immediate comprehension is often missing in the causal orderings, the topic
is still the examination and understanding of physical processes. The causal
ordering technique performs a compensatory function by concentrating on
a dimension of experience, such as interaction with tools, raw materials, nature,
and industrial objects, that was diminishing in the broader work culture as
well as being a rare ﬁlm topic. Furthermore, the intense lucidity about physical
processes afforded by Keaton’s use of the causal ordering framework compensates
for two elements: (1) the lack of attentiveness to the exact chain of
physical causation in most action ﬁlms; and (2) the lack of the need to understand
the exact causal interrelations in twentieth-century work.
110 Style in The General
A technique that is more distinctively Keaton’s than the causal ordering
format is his variation of the ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld trope. In The General, on
several occasions, Keaton reverses the ﬁeld of a long-shot. What seems distinctive
about this technique is that it is a long-shot that is being reversed.
Everyone employs the shot–countershot convention for interpolating closeshots
in the representation of dialogue, but, in The General, Keaton occasionally
uses this device with long-shots. This technique does not appear as
prevalently in the work of Chaplin, Lloyd, or Langdon. This may be because
this particular structure is closely connected with the characteristically
Keatonesque adaptation of the long-shot, that is, with editing functioning
as a means to accentuate the foreground/background juxtapositions of
elements by systematically rotating them in relation to their screen position
and prominence.
An example of the sort of shot interpolation that I have in mind occurs
when Johnnie ﬁrst acquires The Texas. Southern troops crowd on to the ﬂatcar
behind the timbercar of The Texas. This shot is diagonally organized. In
the lower, screen-right quadrant of the image, we see the cab of The Texas.
Stretching diagonally upwards in screen position and backwards in photographic
space is the ﬂatcar the troops are on.
In the far background, we see the stationhouse of the Kingston depot. Johnnie
sticks his body out the cab window to see if the ﬂatcar is loaded, and if all
is ready. Keaton then cuts to the reverse of the ﬁrst shot. Flipping the diagonal,
the ﬂatcar loaded with troops is now in the foreground in the lower
screen-right quadrant while the locomotive is in the background. Whereas
previously the camera was in front of and slightly to the side of the locomotive,
now it is behind the locomotive and the ﬂatcar. As the locomotive
starts, a gap grows between the edge of the ﬂatcar and the locomotive. Johnnie
has forgotten to attach the two. The ﬂatcar stays stationary while the locomotive
plunges ahead. Some soldiers leap from the ﬂatcar and shout to Johnnie,
but to no avail, given the presumably great noise of the chugging engine.
Off Johnnie goes alone and falsely conﬁdent.
Several factors seem to justify Keaton’s way of representing the above scene.
Clearly, the scene could have been depicted with one shot from the side of
the train, but Keaton chooses to use two. One reason for this seems to be
his desire to portray the event from behind. This approach might be preferred
because it underscores the theme of Johnnie’s departure from the Southern
outpost as he is also moving away from the audience. Thus, the shot from
behind serves to emphasize the departure theme since we are in the same
orientation as the Confederates vis-à-vis the train.
Style in The General 111
Shooting from behind also serves to emphasize in a crucial way the
distance between Johnnie and the depot. The uniformly articulated tracks
provide a palpable measure of the growing distance between Johnnie and the
Confederates. Since the scene is about Johnnie inexorably moving away
from his cohorts, shooting from behind viviﬁes the event and engages the
spectator’s spatial intuitions by providing a felt sense of the distance that Johnnie
is from his allies.
The same shot can also elicit a sense of audience participation because of
the way in which the shot gives prominence to the motion of the locomotive
versus the stasis of the ﬂatcar. The diagonal composition draws the eye
along the side of the train emphasizing the edge of the ﬂatcar and the edge
of the tender. As the train begins to move, one immediately notices that the
edge of the ﬂatcar is getting progressively lower in relation to the back of
the timbercar. Here Keaton is exploiting the natural perceptual tendency to
use what psychologists call “edge phenomena” in order to judge distance.
The eye is instantly drawn to the edge of the ﬂatcar and its background by
the diagonal composition. The eye is automatically sensitive to that gray edge
of the ﬂatcar moving relative to the black back of the timbercar, which functions
as a ﬁeld for the lighter edge.
Keaton has found a telling way to alert the audience to the central aspect
of the scene. Had the shot been taken from the side of the train, one’s spatial
intuitions would not have been engaged in the same emergent realization
sort of way. Essentially, in this shot, Keaton is triggering a natural depth and
movement cue, enabling the viewer to discover motion through an exercise
of concrete judgment. The viewer participates in the scene, relying on an
almost subliminal feedback mechanism about a change in the environment.
In this way, the audience is prompted to employ the mode of attention Johnnie
ought to be using to avoid many of his failures at adaptation.
So far, I have given reasons for Keaton’s use of the second shot in the
interpolation under description. But the question arises as to why he didn’t
simply use the second shot to characterize the scene? Why does he have a
shot of the situation from two orientations? Three reasons seem to come
into play here. First, in the initial shot, Johnnie is included; ironically Johnnie
is looking behind himself, a procedure he unfortunately fails to repeat when
the train starts to move. Second, by including both vantage points, the two
key elements of the scene, the locomotive and the ﬂatcar, are highlighted
by being systematically repeated through the rotation of the visual ﬁeld
whereby the two major elements sequentially occupy the prominent foreground
screen position. And third, the major common feature of the two shots is
112 Style in The General
the continuous line that the train forms. It is this aspect of the scene with
which the gag is concerned. Consequently, the ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld functions to
draw attention to precisely the key dimension of the scene. In this light, the
ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld technique functions like Keaton’s compositional manipulations
as a means of directing attention to the critical dimension in the situation.
After directing attention to the crucial element of the situation, Keaton
arranges the shot from behind the locomotive in a way that engages the
audience’s spatial intuitions, provoking the audience’s faculty of concrete judgment.
The shot from behind, by underscoring the distance and the forward
velocity of The Texas, gives the audience a visual account of how the soldiers
can’t catch the engine. The billowing smoke from the locomotive indicates
that the chugging of the engine makes it impossible for Johnnie to hear the
shouting soldiers. We see that this ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld interpolation involves
many of the same modiﬁcations of attention we ﬁnd in Keaton’s long-shot
composition. In this example, the ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld technique directs the viewer
to attend to the crucial physical factors in the situation so that the manner
in which the event happens is intelligibly represented. The audience arrives
at its understanding by employing a concrete cue of spatial intuition, thus
practicing the kind of adaptive attentiveness valorized by the ﬁlm.
Perhaps the most memorable and most brilliant sequence in The General
– the mortar sequence – relies heavily on the ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld technique we
have just discussed. This scene involves 11 shots of which the ﬁeld reverseﬁeld
interpolations are among the most central. The scene progresses as
follows (shots 1 to 11, shown in ﬁgures 2.1–2.11).
Shot 1: a medium lateral shot. Johnnie loads and lights the mortar.
Shot 2: a medium lateral shot of a space adjacent to that of shot 1. Johnnie
moves from the mortar carriage to the timbercar. He gets caught up in the
Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2
Style in The General 113
linkage between the two cars. When Johnnie frees his foot, he unfortunately
drops the linkage between the two cars onto the track. This disconnects the
mortar car from the locomotive. The mortar carriage is slower than the train,
so it drifts out of Johnnie’s control.
Shot 3: a medium, three-quarter lateral shot of the mortar carriage alone
in the frame. It bounces on the track. The elevation of the artillery piece is
jostled and it lowers until the muzzle of the gun is parallel to the track,
Shot 4: a lateral long-shot that displays the timbercar with Johnnie on the
back on the extreme left side of the frame with the mortar on the extreme
right side of the frame. In between there is an open space. The mortar is
seen to be pointed directly at the timbercar. This shot is composed in a highly
determinate manner, using the sides of the frame as striking formal markers
or brackets to underscore the signiﬁcant narrative elements.
Shot 5: a medium long-shot from behind the mortar with Johnnie in the
background of the shot. His foot is caught in a chain. He is stuck on the top
of the ladder on the back of the timbercar. Our sight line runs along the
trajectory the mortar shell will take. Here the foreground/background
juxtaposition aligns all the crucial elements of the scene. In the foreground,
we see the mortar; we see its fuse; we see it is directly aimed at Johnnie.
The composition makes all the important elements stand out. The shot also
emphasizes the interrelations of the elements since the line of vision of the
camera is virtually the same as the line of ﬁre of the mortar.
Shot 6: a slightly closer shot than shot 5 of Johnnie from the cannon’s side
of things. He succeeds in shaking off the chain that shackled him.
Shot 7: a frontal long-shot with the camera mounted on the timbercar. In
the foreground we have lumber; in the mid-ground, Johnnie climbs onto the
top of the car; and in the background, we see the implacable gun, its fuse
Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4
114 Style in The General
steaming, and its muzzle lowered directly at The Texas. Johnnie throws
several chunks of wood at the mortar, hoping to alter its elevation, but to no
avail. This shot is especially important because it reverses the ﬁeld of shot 5.
In this way it formally underscores the two crucial features of the scene –
the cannon and The Texas. The foreground/background juxtaposition of the
ﬁfth shot, of course, already achieved this.
Shot 7 further accentuates this formal underlining by systematically
rotating the visual ﬁeld so that the gun and The Texas exchange the most
prominent screen positions. This is a powerful means of giving utmost
salience to key elements. Field reversal also gives the audience more data about
the relative positions of the two objects, eliciting from the audience a felt
sense of depth via the systematic permutation of screen conﬁgurations.
Lastly, this shot alerts the audience to the fact that there is a curve in the
track, a factor of decisive importance in what follows.
Shot 8: a medium-shot on the top of The Union boxcar. The Union spies
have their weapons drawn; they are ready to ﬁght.
Figure 2.5 Figure 2.6
Figure 2.7 Figure 2.8
Style in The General 115
Shot 9: a lateral medium-shot of the cowcatcher of The Texas. Johnnie
has put the whole train between himself and the mortar in an effort not to
be blown to smithereens.
Shot 10: an overhead long-shot with extreme depth of ﬁeld. In the foreground,
in the lower screen-left corner of the image, the mortar rolls into
the frame. In the mid-ground, there is The Texas and in the far background
we can see The General. From behind the mortar, we can no longer see its
fuse smoking; it is about to discharge. Between The Texas and the mortar,
however, we see a fast curve in the track. As we know from previous gags,
Keaton can exploit curves magniﬁcently. The Texas is suddenly pulled out
of the trajectory of ﬁre by the swerve in the roadbed. The gun ﬁres, the shell
whizzes past The Texas, and the explosion detonates a mile away, just missing
the last boxcar of The General, deep in the background of the shot. In
the foreground a cloud of white smoke hovers over that part of the track
where the fuse burned out; it is just before the curve. The mortar ﬁred just
as The Texas lurched out of its line of ﬁre.
Shot 11: another long-shot. This
shot is taken from the top of The
Union boxcar. It reverses the ﬁeld of
shot 10. The explosion in the background
of shot 10 is in the foreground
of shot 11. The Union spies are
shocked. They’ll not stand and ﬁght the
entire army that they mistakenly
assume just bombarded them.
These 11 shots represent one of the
most carefully and brilliantly edited
Figure 2.9 Figure 2.10
Figure 2.11
sequences in ﬁlm history. Many elements of style we have analyzed individually
are incorporated in this shot interpolation including foreground/
background play, ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld cutting, shot angulation, and a canny use
of curves in the track. As a result of these techniques, the scene is extremely
intelligible despite the scale and complexity of the physical process involved.
The audience understands completely how the mortar misses The Texas
due to the swerve in the track. The high angle of shot 10, with its striking
design, is especially important here in drawing the eye from the mortar to
the track to The Texas and then to The General. This masterful shot clearly
arrays the four crucial elements of the scene in such a way that the audience
immediately sees how the event happened. There is a rush of excitement as
the gun discharges, due to one’s awe at the precision synchronization in
the scene, but also due to a ﬂash of comprehension of exactly how these elements
interact to save The Texas from damage.
The extreme salience of the crucial elements in the scene is prepared prior
to shot 10 in the various compositional and editing strategies employed earlier.
In a fairly conventional manner, shot 3 isolates the gun as a major detail.
Shot 4, a medium lateral long-shot of the gun and the timbercar, is a highly
determinate composition that not only records that the gun is lowered at
the train, but also formally underscores this relationship by placing the key
elements at the extremes of the frame.
Shot 5, a medium long-shot from behind the mortar is an example of the
kind of foreground/background juxtaposition that we spoke of at such
length. This shot gives special emphasis to the interrelationships of the gun
and the train because the line of vision of the camera and the line of ﬁre of
the gun are coincident, underlining the key physical relationships in the most
dramatic way, virtually predicting the trajectory of the bombardment by suggestively
aiming the camera.
Shot 7 reverses the ﬁeld of shot 5. The elements of shot 5 exchange screen
position with those in shot 7. As in our earlier example, this is an inductive
means of narrowing attention to pertinent visual information in the two shots
to what is common to them. Again, in shot 7 the gun, Johnnie, and the timbercar
predominate. Reversing the ﬁeld gives emphasis to these elements
through repetition. It also adds to the intelligibility of the situation by
reconﬁrming, from another perspective, the line of ﬁre of the gun.
Given shot 5, one assumes, in a predictive way, how the basic elements in
the scene will be aligned from the train side of things. Shot 7 conﬁrms these
assumptions. This gives us a much more familiar scene of the situation. Our
cognitive map, derived from earlier shots, is corroborated. The more angles
116 Style in The General
we have of a situation, the more we feel it is in our grasp. Shots 4, 5, and 7
give us a very rich cognitive map of the situation, visualizing the material
from three different perspectives. The reversal of ﬁeld in shots 5 and 7 is also
telling because of a divergence between the two shots that stands out
because the two shots are so systematically interrelated. That is, in shot 5
the track is a straightaway, while in shot 7 there is a curve in the roadbed.
The juxtaposition of the two shots underlines the basic relationship of key
elements, while also giving salience and alerting us to a new element, the
curve in the track. This fact, of course, will be indispensable in shot 10.
Shot 10 is certainly composed in a way that maximizes the intelligibility
of the scene in and of itself. Nevertheless, the earlier ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld alternation
facilitates the clarity of the situation by formally underlining the basic
elements and relations of the event. The ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld here, in a manner
of speaking, primes the audience for the basic insight of shot 10 wherein
one sees how the event happens.
Shots 10 and 11 of this sequence also involve a reversal of ﬁeld. The background
elements of shot 10, the explosion and the hijacked General,
become the foreground elements of shot 11. Shot 11, however, does not facilitate
any insight into the event. But it does give the audience a greater feel
for the space of the event by proposing two systematically linked vantage
points on the action. The result is a more elaborate mental map of the situation.
One has a more vivid sense of spatial relations of the basic elements
of the situation from having seen those elements transformed from more than
one perspective or orientation. This is true of shots 5 and 7 as well as of shots
10 and 11. Thus, Keaton’s ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld long-shot technique not only fosters
intelligibility vis-à-vis causal relations but also vis-à-vis spatial relations
by giving the audience several orientations on the same event.
The mortar scene just considered might be said to be edited in-the-round
since Keaton shoots from the side of the train as well as employing the
ﬁeld/reverse-ﬁeld strategy that we have noted. Keaton does not approach the
scene from one perspective, but rather has camera set-ups at many different
points around the scene. Contrast this to the incessant frontality of the scenes
inside the hut in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. A major effect of supplying the
audience with different orientations on the action is to familiarize them with
the geography of the event by enriching their mental maps of the situation.
Of course, having many camera set-ups around the event, in and of itself,
does not guarantee a sense of geographical intelligibility; the different orientations
must be linked. This linkage is not merely sequential. It must include
a kind of cross-referencing whereby elements of one shot are included in the
Style in The General 117
next shot in a way that concretizes the relation of the spaces of the two shots.
For instance, in shot 7 the composition repeats the elements of shot 5 in a
way that one can concretely relate the space of the two shots. In shot 11,
the repetition of the explosion makes it simple for us to mentally place the
freightcar in relation to the wayward mortar.
Throughout The General, we have repeatedly argued, Keaton’s stylistic preoccupation
is with the lucid representation of physical states of affairs and
physical processes. Field/reverse-ﬁeld editing in particular and editing in-theround
in general vivify this by imbuing causal factors in events with salience
and/or by rendering the geography of settings highly intelligible.
One method of editing in-the-round that we have not emphasized so far
is Keaton’s recurring tendency to include set-ups from in front of the action
along with set-ups from the side of the action. In the mortar scene, the
transition for shot 5 to shot 6 is an example of this. The ﬁlm abounds with
examples of this schema of frontal/lateral editing. Johnnie’s entry into
Union territory involves four alternations comprised of two shots each.
Similarly, the battle at Rock River is epically laid out with long-shots, from
the Southern side of the battle, overlooking the frontal thrust of the Union
assault, and with lateral long-shots from the Union ﬂank as the Yankees wade
across the river. This frontal/lateral editing contributes to a vivid sense of
familiarity and spatial intelligibility in the audience. Any object, even a toy,
becomes more familiar if we can rotate it, looking at it from many orientations.
We come to recognize it with its various facets arrayed in different
conﬁgurations. We have a more concrete feeling for the object. Keaton’s editing
in-the-round and his frontal/lateral editing perform the function of
rotating the geography of the event for us, steeping us in the various facets
of the place and process from different orientations, thereby rendering the
event extremely intelligible. As a result, we have a richer experience of the
environment in Keaton than we do with many other ﬁlmmakers because
Keaton includes many vantage points on the action that are extraneous in
terms of narrative information but which nevertheless enrich our mental map,
our schema of assumptions and correlative expectations, about the environment.
It is important to reemphasize that not just any montage will result
in the effect we are describing The editing must be systematic and crossreferential
in order to give the concrete sense of geography that Keaton
elicits.
Consider, for instance, the sequence in which Annabelle removes the linkingpin
from The General so that she and Johnnie can hijack it from the Yankees.
There is a frontal shot of men heaving provisions into a freightcar. In the
118 Style in The General
foreground, a Union ofﬁcer with a beard directs the activities. Johnnie,
with Annabelle hidden in a bag on his shoulders, walks past the point where
he should throw the sack into the freightcar. Instead, he walks to the lower
screen-left corner of the frame where there is a junction between two
freightcars. The Union ofﬁcer gesticulates. Then, Keaton cuts to a lateral shot.
This shot is mounted from behind Johnnie. The camera looks down the alleyway
between the two freightcars. A hand, Annabelle’s, reaches out from the
sack and lifts the linking-pin from between the two freightcars, thereby disengaging
them. In the background of the shot, over the top of the sack, we
see the Union ofﬁcer from the previous shot still gesticulating. He orders Johnnie
to put his sack in the freightcar that Johnnie just passed. Keaton then cuts
back to the frontal long-shot set-up and throws the sack, with Annabelle and
the pin, among the provisions. The second shot in this chain is essential. By
repeating the ofﬁcer from the foreground of the ﬁrst shot in the background
of the second shot the spectator can concretely locate the action of the second
shot in regard to the action of the ﬁrst shot. A tighter shot of Annabelle’s
removal of the pin that did not include the ofﬁcer would have rendered the
geography of the scene more synthetic and abstract. By systematically crossreferencing
the elements, however, Keaton conveys a concrete, intelligible
picture of the situation. Eisensteinian montage, since it generally lacks crossreferencing
of details in this way, does not engender a sense of geographical
intelligibility, though in terms of camera set-ups, Eisenstein certainly edits
in-the-round. Rather, it is Keaton’s use of systematic cross-referencing that
allows us to attribute to him a theme of geographical intelligibility.15
The frontal/lateral interpolation just described also seems committed to
another Keaton theme which we have described as visible intelligibility. The
effect of the second shot is not only to orient the audiences geographically
to the ﬁrst shot, it also functions to show us how Annabelle could remove
the pin undetected. We see how Johnnie and the sack obscure the ofﬁcer’s
vision and camouﬂage Annabelle’s activity. The centrally organized foreground/background
juxtaposition, in a highly determinate way, illuminates
the physical relation between the ofﬁcer, Johnnie and the sack, and the pin.
A much tighter shot could have been used here; an insert of a hand removing
the pin would have sufﬁced. From such a shot the audience would
know that the cars had been disconnected. By opting for a wide lateral shot
Keaton enables the audience to see how the cars were successfully detached
in a secret manner. We have seen on earlier occasions as well that the
frontal/lateral format can be used for the purpose of enhancing the visible
intelligibility of events. Both the catapult gag and Johnnie’s dismantling of
Style in The General 119
the Union telegraph involve frontal/lateral alternations that are extraneous
to the narrative, but which enhance the visible intelligibility of the physical
process being recorded. The themes of geographical and visible intelligibility
are aspects of the lucidity with which Keaton attempts to represent the physical
environment. As for geography and causal processes, Keaton strives to
ﬁnd editing patterns and compositional formats that will facilitate the audience’s
comprehension of the location and cause of events. One is constantly
struck by the insistent physicality of The General, not only in terms of what
is represented, but also in terms of the way it is represented. Again and again,
one’s judgment of depth and one’s sense of spatial orientation are engaged,
prompting a kind of cognitive-perceptual participation in concretely placing
elements of action in relation to each other. This attitude to the geography
of the environment is to be expected from a director so devoted to prompting
a consonant reaction to the causal processes in the environment. In both
cases, Keaton seems to aim at enlivening and awakening categories of judgment
that are less and less part of the daily practice of work in the kind of
urban, postindustrial society that was arising during his youth, and which
predominated during his maturity.
Summary
In this chapter, I have focused on the cinematic elements in The General, including
especially Keaton’s forcefully articulated long-shots, his long-shot ﬁeld reversals,
his editing in-the-round, his use of camera angulation, and his abiding
preoccupation with detailed causal editing. These are stylistic features that
give Keaton’s work and The General in particular their characteristic look and
feel. The leading question in this chapter is: what, if anything, does this panoply
of formal strategies add up to?
Beginning with an analysis of Keaton’s highly determinate long-shots – longshots
that draw the viewer’s attention emphatically to selected points in the
visual array – we noticed that Keaton deploys this technique for a recurring
purpose: to direct audiences to the pertinent physical variables in scenes and
events in order to facilitate and even to prompt seeing with understanding
how those events came about. The itinerary of the eye assigned to spectators
by Keaton’s extremely directive long-shots with their pronounced diagonals
and subtle angulation is one that is predicated upon making the events,
notably the physical events, that transpire in The General visibly intelligible,
where visual intelligibility is a matter of enabling viewers to see how and
120 Style in The General
to comprehend how events, especially at the level of physical processes,
unfold. Whereas, for most purposes, ﬁlmmakers aspire mostly to assuring
that viewers know that the pertinent events happen – what we call knowing
that x – Keaton, through his particular use of the long-shot, manifests commitment
to showing how events, particularly physical processes, evolve. This
concern with visual intelligibility, as initially located in Keaton’s long-shot,
moreover, can also supply a persuasive explanation of the other recurring,
characteristic cinematic forms in The General – the long-shot ﬁeld reversals,
the camera angulation, the detailed causal editing patterns, and the editing
in-the-round. These all contribute to the visual intelligibility of the ﬁlm,
most of them with respect to the evolution of a physical event, like a train
derailment.
But what is the purpose of this stylistic preoccupation in The General? Does
it have some larger point? In response to this, I advance the hypothesis that
the cognitive state engendered in the audience by these cinematic techniques
is an analog to the concrete intelligence exhibited operationally by the
character of Johnnie Gray in the course of the sort of insight gags discussed
in the previous chapter. That is, the concrete operations engaged by the
Keaton character as he negotiates various and sundry challenges posed by
the physical environment and its objects presuppose the mental reorganization
of the physical factors that beset him. This is not a matter of reﬂection,
but of what Merleau-Ponty might call “bodily intentionality.” Nevertheless,
it is a species of intelligence. Keaton’s cinematic techniques, then, make
comparable cognitive experiences available to the audience by making the
pertinent physical variable and their relationships salient, thereby affording
the audience, nonreﬂectively and automatically, the kind of insight and
bodily understanding of the physical environment that is presupposed by the
character’s successful concrete manipulations of troublesome objects.
For example, cutting to an angulated shot is a literal means to reorient
the visual ﬁeld, serving as an analog to the processes of mental reorganization
that Keaton’s successful adaptation gags presume. Likewise, Keaton’s highly
determinate long-shot compositions may be seen as returning, at the level
of stylistic presentation, to the concern with concrete intelligence that dominates
his gags. Visual intelligibility as a stylistic theme ideally promotes a
certain cognitive state in viewers that is the formal correlative of the insight
demonstrated by the Keaton character at the level of the comic content of
his successful adaptation gags. Keaton’s visual approach manages the physical
environment in terms of a cognitive-perceptual style that parallels the sort
of concrete intelligence the insight gags imply. In this way Keaton’s cinematic
Style in The General 121
stylization matches and reinforces his thematic fascination with concrete
intelligence and the operations that embody it. It bequeaths to the viewer
the kind of concrete organization of visual ﬁeld the character needs in order
to negotiate it.
Keaton’s highly determinate compositions are intended to elicit heightened
audience awareness of, sensitivity to, and a nonreﬂective or bodily grasp of
the key physical variables and interactions in Keaton’s material environment.
Since Keaton’s attention to physical detail occurs in contexts that are noncomic,
the compositional clarity one ﬁnds in The General is not reducible to
comic functionality. Instead, I argue, Keaton gives salience to key physical
details through highly determinate compositions in order to engender in the
audience an alertness to and a concrete comprehension of the environment,
which is precisely that which Keaton’s characters lack in the failure gags in
The General, but have in abundance when they excel. Thus, visual intelligibility
as a stylistic theme advances the concern with concrete intelligence explored
in the behavior of the characters which constitutes the most important content
of the ﬁlm.16
Just as the purpose of Keaton’s ensemble of cinematic techniques can be
illuminated via the relation of the concept of visible intelligibility to the theme
of concrete intelligence in The General, so the cultural signiﬁcance of the ﬁlm’s
devices can be speciﬁed by reference to what was said in the last chapter about
the ways in which the content of the ﬁlm enlivens and reawakens faculties
of judgment and thought that, though commonly available through labor
at the height of the steam, steel, and industrial culture of Keaton’s childhood,
were beginning to disappear for many by the 1920s and perhaps for
most in contemporary American culture. Keaton explores that species of
concrete intelligence through his gags, but also celebrates it through a series
of coordinated cinematic strategies that virtually incarnate a concrete intelligence
about things through the point of view advanced by the shooting and
editing. In this respect, The General – in terms of both its subject matter and
the manner in which it is presented – offers a powerful emblem of compensation
for viewers whose lives have alienated them from any sustained intelligent
interaction with things qua things.
notes
1 Quoted in Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1968), p. 490.
2 Quoted in Rudi Blesh, Keaton (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 150.
122 Style in The General
3 See E. Rubinstein, Filmguide to The General (Bloomington and London: Indiana
University Press, 1973), p. 68; and Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and The
Movies (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), p. 130.
4 See Rubinstein, p. 69.
5 Raymond Rohauer, “On the Track of The General,” in The General, ed. Richard
J. Anobile (New York: Flare Books, 1975), p. 7.
6 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, tr. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1967), vol. I, p. 52.
7 Buster Keaton with Charles Samuels, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1967), pp. 168–9.
8 Quoted in Rubinstein, pp. 67–8.
9 Keaton, p. 93.
10 Ibid., p. 174.
11 Rubinstein, p. 67.
12 Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1956), p. 123.
13 Mast, pp. 130–1.
14 Ibid.
15 The fact that throughout the chases the camera is generally mounted on moving
vehicles also enhances one’s sense of the geography of the ﬁlm. That is, the
continuity of offscreen space and onscreen space is constantly reconﬁrmed by
these moving shots, for at the edges of the frame adjacent spaces are always
being added or subtracted. Thus, besides dynamizing the image, the recurrent
moving shots in the ﬁlm also engender a sense of the continuous geography of
the world of the ﬁlm.
16 That is, Keaton’s style of presentation itself is a contribution to the theme
or content of The General. This way of putting it, moreover, may be one way,
albeit a moderate one, of understanding Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that form
cannot be separated from content. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The World of
Perception, tr. Oliver Davis (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 96–7, 101.
Style in The General 123