‘Neighbours’: a Buster Keaton love story
Although many important filmmakers pushed the art form forward during the silent era, nobody did it quite as hilariously as Buster Keaton. With his iconic deadpan stare, incredible athleticism and intuitive understanding of both action and comedy, Keaton changed cinema forever and created one of the most influential bodies of work in the history of the medium. Ranging from Salvador Dalí to Orson Welles, some of the greatest artists have been deeply inspired by Keaton’s artistic approach.
Having been born into a family of vaudeville performers, Keaton was inevitably drawn to the performing arts, and he did have a natural talent for it. However, it was film that would prove to be the perfect platform for his comedic vision, allowing the engineer within him to devise brilliant gags with the illusions that silent cinema had to offer. Like all great art, Keaton’s work transcended the limitations of genre and asked important questions.
From his anarchic meditations on architecture in One Week to his reflexive investigation of the cinematic medium in The Cameraman, Keaton’s films have retained their cultural significance because of the complex themes that form the foundation of his comedic efforts. One such work is his 1920 two-reeler Neighbours, a seemingly standard drama of conflict revolving around two lovers whose families do not want them to be together.
However, Neighbours is actually an interesting addition to Keaton’s oeuvre because it has some fascinating moments embedded around the general arc of the love story. Throughout his oeuvre, Keaton repeatedly poked fun at figures of authority, but his critique in Neighbours is actually an indictment of the entire system. While the use of blackface in early cinema has aged terribly in almost all instances, Keaton’s incorporation is neither superficial nor insulting.
In the scene when a police officer looks around for a Black man after seeing Keaton’s mud-covered face, he uses blackface to point out the unjust racial profiling all cops are trained in. Playing around with the social realities based on race and racial appearance, Keaton demonstrates how the American police’s idea of a criminal is undoubtedly based on racial stereotypes. It’s probably fair to say that this will always be one of the most politically layered sequences in the entire history of early cinema.
While the narrative tangent about racial politics is definitely the most philosophically dense part of Neighbours, it also attacks the power structures of patriarchy where women are exchanged between the male heads of the families as commodities in the name of marriage. In a world where men seek to control and impose their authority, Keaton is always a pleasant counterpoint with his gentleness, sad eyes and chaotic penchant for mischief.
Watch the film below.
