The General -Jessica Sims

What surprised me most about the style presented in The General was the overall aspect of Buster Keaton’s physical sacrifices to all the stunts in the film. Of course his expressions also have to be taken into account, as with all silent films, but it was really nice to see through the context of the film how much hard work and thought Keaton put in himself to provide the kind of performance he wanted the viewers to see. His flamboyancy with the comedy stunts wasn’t too overdone- each new disaster created a different layout for his reaction, and I really didn’t expect to see anything too surprising, but I was definitely impressed. I think the comedy dispersed throughout was evenly balanced so that it kind of left the viewer waiting for more.


I think with some silent films it may be hard to discern what’s going on, but the use of the exaggerated expressions to convey the character’s feelings wasn’t obscured and it was easy to follow and fun to recognize Keaton’s expressions of surprise or disgruntled guise when something went wrong and he was just almost too late to catch it. I also thought that the constant use of the train in the first few scenes were crucial to mapping out the storyline from the beginning so as to not move too slowly into getting the viewers to understand what was happening scene to scene, and I thought too that this pace allowed for a minimal use of transition/dialogue cards, which seemed important to the history of the locomotive chase in the film because it kind of gave an imaginative lift to the thought of ‘what’s going to happen next?’ with the action scenes.

I also liked the directional use of fixing the camera angles so that there wasn’t just one wide, central shot from scene to scene, but that the cameras were positioned so the viewers could really get a full sense not only of what was happening with the characters themselves, but also with the entire scene. The close-ups were awesome for conveying the sense of emotion, but the wide pans were as equally as important for getting the bigger picture.