As Melies revealed, film itself is the medium of manipulation of fragments. Some have suggested that film, by its very nature, is Modernist. A film requires the mechanism to photograph a scene, the need to put different scenes together for the continuity of the story and the discovered ability to shift the camera either close or far from the actors, depending upon the needs of the story. In this intricate interweaving of technical and optical tools with the presentation of an action, a story and characters, film draws on the major components of Modern sensibility by its very nature.

Buster Keaton was born into a Vaudeville family and appeared on stage for the first time when he was four years old. Like Chaplin, Keaton found income and outlet through his involvement in early film, comedy. Keaton’s genius is perhaps more existential than Chaplin’s. He is the master of trick photography, of rapid changes and of a dispassionate acceptance of the absurdity of the world. In one short, called “The Playhouse” (1921), Keaton depicts a vaudeville theater in which Keaton himself for a time plays all the actors, all the members of the orchestra and all the members of the audience. Using the technique of multiple exposures, developed by Melies, Keaton arranges scenes where through re-exposure he can appear as a number of different people in the same frame. This visual joke becomes both an astonishing feat of film manipulation and audience entertainment. It also challenges the naïve sense of the literal realism of film. To compound the confusion of surface appearances, Buster is interested in a young woman in a calico dress, who just happens to have a twin sister in the performance and clearly, Buster has a good deal of difficulty distinguishing his girlfriend from her twin sister.

In another remarkably innovative work, “Sherlock Jr.” (1925), Buster plays a film theatre projectionist who falls asleep and enters the movie. Keaton plays with both the comic potential of such merging of different frameworks and perhaps instinctively raises questions of perception and the evaluation of reality as a philosophical dilemma. Keaton was of such fascinating suggestion that the great Irish playwright, Samuel Becket, even wrote a film script in the 1950’s about and starring Keaton.

Keaton was a natural genius both with comic material and with his astonishing ability to use the technical means of film for both entertainment and philosophical reflection. He was not by any means a systematic philosopher, however in his manipulation of story and illusion, and his specific reference to theatricality and the technical elements of film, he brought a meta-dramatic awareness to the entire process of filmmaking and viewing seldom equaled by any other popular figure.

The immense popular and artistic success of Chaplin and Keaton has been remarkably influential. Writers of such sophistication of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett clearly invoked and interacted with the images and implications of these film comedians in some of their most important work. Beckett’s famous play, Waiting for Godot (1953) centers on two tramps waiting by a crossroads for a figure of authority to appear. Their bowler hats and shabby dress are clearly derived from the world of Chaplin and Keaton.