Lisa Trahair

The Ghost in the Machine: The Comedy of Technology in the Cinema of Buster Keaton

In his essay ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology,’’ Martin Heidegger argues that the essence of technology is not itself anything technological. Heidegger’s intention here is to conceive of technology under the broader rubric of poiètic revealing rather than in its narrow instrumental sense as a means to ends.1 Poiètic revealing includes not only technè, but also poetic and artistic bringing into appearance and physis as the bursting open, which belongs to bringingforth in itself.While Heidegger in no way refutes the correctness of an instrumental conception of technology, he nevertheless argues that to limit it in this way blocks the possibility of uncovering the breadth of what is at stake in our dealings with technology. By comparing the different conceptions of causality implied in poiètic revealing and instrumental technology, Heidegger draws out the limitation of understanding the essence of technology as simply technological. The causality of poiètic revealing is complex and multidimensional, whereas that of instrumentality is simple and linear. The former is ancient; the latter is modern. The Greeks, Heidegger reminds us,

Short-circuiting the Dialectic: Narrative and Slapstick in the Cinema of Buster Keaton

Halfway into Buster Keaton’s second two-reeler film, One Week, an extended gag develops as Keaton’s character attempts to install the chimney on his house’s roof while his wife takes a bath. The crosscutting between two separate spaces establishes the components of the gag that will eventually intersect in the gag’s penultimate moment. Numerous incidental and isolated gags occur while the extended gag is being articulated. Keaton cannot transport the chimney up the ladder to the roof except by wearing it on his head—he becomes literally a blockhead and somewhat phallic to boot—which causes him to lose his balance and fall. Keaton’s wife drops the soap on the floor and cannot retrieve it except by exposing herself to the camera. She motions to the camera, directing a hand to cover the lens until she is safely back in the bath. On the roof, Keaton now wears the chimney as a skirt (his sartorial extravaganzas contrast with his wife’s nakedness) and slides down the eaves, his legs catching the chimney hole and permitting him to insert the object appropriately. But carried by the momentum of his action, Keaton slips through the chimney and lands in the bathtub in the room below. The coital image that seems to be propelling this gag is, however, ultimately unfulfilled. Keaton does not land atop his wife as we might expect because she has elusively taken refuge in the shower recess, where she stands modestly clad in the curtain. As she scolds Keaton, he escapes through a doorway—unfortunately one that leads nowhere—and he ends up for the umpteenth time on the ground below, a puff of dust dramatizing his fall. This extended gag contributes to the development of the film’s narrative to the extent that Keaton has successfully completed the task of inserting the chimney in its appropriate place, but there is clearly much more to the sequence than this.

Belief in Cinema

This paper takes issue with the idea recently promulgated by film-philosophers that the relationship between philosophy and film is untroubled by the encounter between reason and art. To do this I consider how in Je vous salue, Marie Jean-Luc Godard uses allegory, cinematic automatism and montage not to provide rational arguments but to raise questions about the legacy of the Christian aesthetics for contemporary cinema.

Belief in Cinema: revisiting themes from bazin

This paper takes issue with the idea recently promulgated by film-philosophers that the relationship between philosophy and film is untroubled by the encounter between reason and art. To do this I consider how in Je vous salue, Marie Jean-Luc Godard uses allegory, cinematic automatism and montage not to provide rational arguments but to raise questions about the legacy of the Christian aesthetics for contemporary cinema.