The General- Amanda Carman

The limitations of the medium of silent film as a method of conveying story forced certain stylistic elements to emerge in the earlier films. The most notable of these is the use of text to explain locations, characters, and to share the dialogue with the viewer, but (most notably in The Great Train Robbery) also led to melodramatic, mime-like, and almost hokey acting styles. We saw this first in the Lumiere brothers’ short about the photographer; the actions of the photographer are overemphasized and unrealistic, but convey clearly his frustration with his subject. Here too we see another technique employed by silent films: slapstick comedy. The photographer trips over his equipment and both he and his tripod go tumbling to the ground, an act of physical comedy that requires no words and is easily caught by the lens of the stationary camera. The Great Train Robbery also makes use of overacting, particularly in any death scene; the poor victim experiences full body seizures, clutching his chest and spinning about dramatically in order to convey his pain and tragedy to the distant stationary camera.

Buster Keaton, by employing a variety of shots, was able to take a subtler (and often more successful) route of explaining the story to his audience. The film opens on an extreme long shot of a train, arguably a main character of the film, traveling along the tracks. The camera follows the motion of the train, enhancing the sense of movement and keeping the key figure in audience’s eye to impress upon us the importance of this train. The next shot introduces our hero, the engineer, and his relationship with the train by framing both in the shot, close enough to see the engineer but far enough away that the area of the train in which he currently sits is the predominating figure on screen. The camera then pans over the name of the train, “General,” and thus in a few varied and short shots the film has introduced the main characters in a clean and interesting way.

As the film continues, there is a certain logic to the use of close-ups, long shots, and extreme long shots. The close-ups allow the audience to fully appreciate the subtle facial expressions Buster Keaton uses to convey clearly his character’s thoughts. It is the subtlety of his acting (for example, in the scene where he is trying to get rid of the train car that has been released in front of his train) that is the source of some of the greatest humorous moments in this film, and these moments would have been completely lost without the close-up shot. Conversely, without the use of long and extreme long shots, the impressive scenes that captured the power of both armies, the actions of war, and, of course, the spectacle of a train collapsing through a bridge would have been significantly less memorable or remarkable.