The General
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
Accompanied on the piano by Roman Zavada
Preserved in our collections
The railroad worker Johnnie shares his life between his fiancée Annabelle and his locomotive, the "General". The Civil War breaks out, but he fails to enlist in the army. To prove that he is not a coward, he sets out alone in pursuit of Northern spies who have kidnapped Annabelle and the "General".
Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton was an American actor, comedian and filmmaker. He is best known for his silent films during the 1920s, in which he performed physical comedy and inventive stunts. He frequently maintained a stoic, deadpan facial expression that became his trademark and earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". As a child vaudeville star, he was performing as part of his family's traveling act. As an adult, he began working with independent producer Joseph M. Schenck and filmmaker Edward F. Cline, with whom he made a series of successful two-reel comedies in the early 1920s. He then moved to feature films such as Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and The Cameraman (1928), remain highly regarded. The General is perhaps his most acclaimed work; Orson Welles considered it "the greatest comedy ever made... and perhaps the greatest film ever made". Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929" when he "worked without interruption" as having made him "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies". He earned an Academy Honorary Award in 1959.
Clyde Bruckman
Clyde Bruckman was an American writer and director of comedy films during the late silent era, who continued working into the 1950s. He collaborated with such comedians as Buster Keaton, Monty Banks, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and Harold Lloyd. Hollywood chronicler Kenneth Anger considers Bruckman to have been one of the key figures in the history of American screen comedy.
