St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Davidson, North Carolina
Part of the Music at St. Alban's Series
February 20, 2010
Performances of Buster Keaton's The General accompanied by a live pianist are rarer than staged performances of La Boheme or Aida. The explanation is not hard to find; the art of accompanying film died with the Talkies, more or less. But if silent film is an orphaned form, the loss is ours. To see The General on a large screen in an audience accompanied by Ethan Uslan at the piano, is to marvel once again at Keaton's profound but seemingly guileless ingenuity, his genius, which combined that of a storyteller with that of an acrobat in a way never done before or since, his stoic aplomb.
The General is the story of the railroad engineer, Johnnie Gray of the Confederacy, who has his steam-engine, the General, and his fiancée, Annabelle Lee, abducted by Yankee spies. His rescue of the General and Annabelle Lee -- they compete for his affections -- is based on a true story. It is a rescue thwarted by a sequence of life-threatening obstacles in dizzying succession involving jettisoned baggage, water pumps, rifle-fire, fuel supplies, cannons misfiring, tracks being routed, not to mention traveling deep into enemy territory. The seamless integration of intricate sight-gag after gag into the narration, each furthering the plot, is a great triumph of technique. To this, Keaton adds some of the most beautiful panoramas in film. This means nothing if the accompaniment is no good. Robert Israel's version for the Kino DVD is good, but it’s no match for the live experience.
Ethan Uslan's live accompaniment at St. Alban’s Church offered a medley of Civil War songs with rag-time closer to Keaton's day mixed in, a version of “Love Me Tender” harmonized to sound more like a hymn by Sir Arthur Sullivan than Elvis, and bits of Victor Herbert and Rossini. Uslan was alert to the timing of every gag -- which is a lot to juggle -- and to every emotional inflection, which is even more. At times he blew a steam-whistle or stomped his feet to accompany The General’s marching troops. How he managed to do this with both panache and good taste eludes me, but he did.
Old and young sat on the edge of their seats, and the applause Uslan received was not your standard knee-jerk standing ovation, but a matter of joy. How I wish there were a National Trust to sustain careers such as Uslan's, or, barring that, a Moorish-style theater nearby where he could revive such masterpieces regularly. People can get as much joy out of Buster Keaton as dinosaur bones is what we should say to the Smithsonian.
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This article was made possible by a grant from the Arts & Science Council.