In this essay I am going to examine the mise-en-scene of the short film The Neighbours by Buster Keaton. To start I am going to introduce little about his early life and carrier.
He is born October 4th, 1895 and from early age he was involved in acting and performance.
His life is drastically changing overtime with bankruptcy, divorce and alcoholism, but still he is considered one of the most influential and ahead of his time filmmakers. The art that Buster Keaton has created is still used in many modern films, and without him modern comedy would not be the same as we know it. He pulled the most expensive shot in silent film history because it is very well know that he insisted a gag or a stunt to be real so can people believe it. And that is the stunt for the movie General in scene with the train.“Someone would have faked it, or used miniature, but not Keaton he destroyed a real train, to make it as authentic as he could” (Jeffrey Vance, Buster Keaton biographer, Doc. The Real Buster Keaton,). In Keatons world there are very simple but powerful rules he was a visual storyteller and he never liked it when other directors were telling their story by the title cards. “The average picture used 240 titles, that was about the average, and the most I have ever used was 56” (Buster Keaton old interview ,Every Frame a Painting 21 nov. 2015)
He was focusing on action and not subtitles. His idea is to avoid any subtitles or titles if they can represent the story with body language and action.
In his world if the camera cannot see it the character cannot see it too so in that way for a gag or a scene the camera position and placement was very important some gags are impossible to be recreated with a different camera angle. In Busters flat world the character is limited by the sides of the frame, which allows him to make jokes which make sense visually but not logically. The character can go left, right, up and down, away from the camera or towards it. He often gives the joke a shape, such as lines, triangles or the shape of the frame itself which makes us the people who are watching to scrub across the whole screen with our eyes and follow the movements and actions done by the character. In the scene that I am going to examine the mise-en-scene all of his rules are applied. The story of The Neighbours is basically representation of modern Romeo and Juliet. “The opening iris reveals the Dream Garden: a tenement yard divided by a tall fence” (Gabriella, 2014: 57). The barrier between them both represents real materialistic world and emotions. “They lean wistfully on each side of the large fence-even though the door stands wide open an ironic barrier.” (Gabriella, 2014: 57). We can see how each of the character is living in their own world divided just by the fence, later in a sequence we can see the differences between the families with proves my previous point. They are passing notes trough a hole in the fence and we can read on one of the notes in a close up “I love you”, then we are introduced to the families of the two loving birds which are completely against their affair. And we can tell that by the body language. The father of the girl is angry and he is pointing to the house so she can go inside and basically keep here away from her lover. The reaction of the mother is the same but with a difference in the way she shows her son where he needs to be and in the same time she is also curious about the hole in the fence and peaks at it, but apparently disturbed because of her husband who thinks she is such a way is experiencing and affair with the neighbour, while they are having an argument the neighbour is passing another note and he peaks above the fence to see what happens and in the same time his wife catches him in the same way as the husband did on the other side seconds ago. This ironically represents that both families share same situations but in a different manner. As the sequence continues with both families arguing over the notes the young girl goes up the stares to the third floor typical way of movement as I mentioned earlier and we see a cut where she opens the window and calls for Buster. He breaks one of the first sets where they were only communicating with notes, opens the door and after that he “skilfully jacknifes smoothly up to and into her window. We cut to the darkened hallway as Buster croons to The Girl before Joe (the father of the girl) suddenly lunges at him”(Gabriella, 2014: 58). Again after that we can see the practical escape Buster uses which is very common for his style “In three shots, we follow Buster's daring escape: (1) as he travels across the laundry line into the third-floor window of his building; (2) interior shot, as he careens down the banister out the second-floor window; (3) exterior shot again, as he travels the laundry line into the opposite window and Joe”(Gabriella, 2014:58