The Cameraman

Buster Keaton's last great silent, made at MGM after he had signed away independence. A tintype photographer (Keaton) buys a newsreel camera to impress a secretary at MGM News and spends the rest of the picture learning, the hard way, what a camera is. The Yankee Stadium sequence — an empty ballpark that fills, in his mind, with a World Series — is a thesis about looking. The Tong War in Chinatown, shot as if the camera itself were a combatant, is the other. Edward Sedgwick directed; Keaton, as usual, designed the gags. Released 1928, it is the film in which the studio system both enabled and began to swallow him. The cameraman gets the girl and a job. The man who made it would not stay that lucky.