Buster Keaton and Modern European Drama. An American Filmmaker Anticipating Aesthetic Multiplicity

As one of the most ingenious artists of the silent film era, Buster Keaton stands out for his legendary comedies. While drawing on vaudeville traditions, he also knew how to exploit techniques the new medium film offered to create - visually surprising - comic situations, many of which became an unforgettable part of film history. Transferring and adapting his theatrical skills to the screen, he invented a whole new repertoire of aesthetic devices. Numerous elements of his approach to the art of mise-en-scène would turn up again, albeit in modified and more radical forms, in dramatic theories and plays of playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, Luigi Pirandello, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and Antonin Artaud. This study looks at how Buster Keaton anticipated an aesthetic multiplicity that would come to shape dramatic concepts, the art of representation, and the language of performance in modern European theatre.