| | The Narrative-Machine: Buster Keaton's Cinematic Comedy, Deleuze's Recursion Function and the Operational Aesthetic |
 | | Buster Keaton's two-reeler My Wife's Relations (1922) is prefaced by an intertitle which reads: In the foreign section of a big city where so many different languages are spoken, the people misunderstand each other perfectly... Following this, alternate montage connects two utterly disconnected situations. |
 | | While Deleuze himself is loathe to specify the role of the comic performer or the comedic in the discussions of cinematic comedy in either of his Cinema books (5), this essay explores the connection between the aesthetic that he identifies as specifically Keatonesque and the humorous quality of Keaton's narratives. |
 | | The subordination of the comic to narrative, or of the possibility of the comic replacing logical causality with surprise, fate, chance, luck, etc., or of slapstick existing as a non-narrative kind of cinematic attraction are the most vehemently debated questions by theorists of cinematic comedy. |
| www.sensesofcinema.com /contents/04/33/keaton_deleuze.html (11977 words) |