The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 262

vs i i i ru2' up1 'v ft JMl-' in b( isS iM Courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arteuid Science STONE FACE: Buster Keaton rides high in 1925's "Go West," one of a dozen features he made in a remarkably potent seven-year stretch from 1923 to 1929. His Silents Are Gold en Buster Keaton's name, like the laughter that his classic films evoke, reverherates around the world on the 100th anniversary of his hirth. By Kenneth Turan to Buster Keaton" will feature 75 minutes of superb clips, plus a conversation between Eleanor Keaton and silent film authority Kevin Brownlow, who is flying in from London just for the event and whose 1987 "Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow" documentary, made with David Gill, remains the best look at the man. always comes back to the face, the Great Stone Face, a face, it's been said, "that asks to be left alone." Samuel Beckett had it in mind when he wrote "Waiting for Godot," and critic James Agee believed it "ranked almost with Lincoln's as an early American This year, with the 100th anniversary of Keaton's birth, the most expressive blank face in film history has been getting special attention. A new biography, "Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase" by Marion Meade, has just been published; a new documentary on his life will air Dec.

11 on the channel; Kino on Video has issued a comprehensive 10-cassette series called "The Art of Buster Keaton," and film festival tributes are going on worldwide in cities that include Berlin, Rio de Janeiro and New York. And, Thursday night at 8, in collaboration with the AFILos Angeles Film Festival and the L.A. County Museum of Art (whose own nine-week Keaton retrospective begins Saturday), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gets into the act. "An Academy Tribute archetype; it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful." It's a face that continues to astonish, even today. "Wherever I go, there's a great deal of speculation about whether he could actually smile or not," says Eleanor Keaton, Buster Keaton's widow, smiling herself.

"The answer was yes, as long as there weren't any cameras One of the twin pillars (along with Charlie Chaplin) of silent film comedy, Buster Keaton had an unusual combination of talents that has helped his reputation do nothing but rise since his death in 1966. He brought an engineer's mind and a poet's sensibility to slapstick, ending up, in critic Peter Hogue's words, with "some magical and around. 8 i W( i. LOS GELS-TlMEf.