A Buster Keaton film screening & book event with author Dana Stevens

1900 Shawnee Mission Parkway,Mission Woods KS 66205

21 July, 2022

Description

Buster Keaton’s early film classic, Sherlock, Jr. with live musical accompaniment launches our weekend Keaton celebration. Following the screening, Dana Stevens, author of the acclaimed film history hardcover, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, signs books and joins in conversation with Vivien Jennings, founder of Rainy Day Books. Kansas City jazz pianist and silent film music writer Jackie Meyers accompanies the 60-minute cinema classic, and movie snacks come from The Restaurant at 1900! In her recent book, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, culture maven and movie critic Dana Stevens explores the unstoppably creative society that transformed early movies into the American film industry. Deftly directing a wide literary lens, Stevens views seven decades of cultural history through the constantly moving figure of vaudeville star, stunt person, movie actor, producer, director and camera man, Buster Keaton. The cost of your ticket includes: Screening of Keaton's 1924 classic film, Sherlock Jr. (60 minutes) with live piano accompanimentMovie snack from The Restaurant at 1900.Your copy of Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, personalized by the author.Conversation with Dana Stevens and Vivien Jennings of Rainy Day BooksCamera Man, The Restaurant at 1900’s cocktail homage to Buster, will be available at the cash bar. “In the showstopping montage of trick shots in Sherlock, Jr. (1924), Keaton’s hero, a film projectionist who’s fallen asleep on the job, climbs into the frame of a movie in progress. As the movie he’s entered cuts from one landscape to another, he’s suddenly stranded on a rock amid pounding surf. Diving in, he finds himself landing headfirst in a snowbank, which transforms in its turn into a bench in an elegant garden. This dizzying demonstration of the power of film editing seems to predict the not-yet-made work of Soviet Director Dziga Vertov, whose avant-garde documentaries used montage to explore how motion-picture technology was changing human perception.” - Dana Stevens, an excerpt from Camera Man