Buster Keaton Rides Again
1965 · 55m · Canada
Directed by John Spotton
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, humorous
Aging comedian Buster Keaton travels across Canada making a travel film while sharing stories from his silent-era career.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A doc about a washed-up silent comedian making a travelogue sounds like the exact institutional pablum everyone expects—except Spotton somehow uses Keaton's real exhaustion and fragmentation as the actual subject, turning nostalgia into something genuinely unsettling.
Spotton's film sits beautifully in the lineage of cinema-about-cinema, where the act of documentation becomes a meditation on artistic mortality; the formal restraint in letting Keaton's silences and deflections speak louder than any voice-over is curatorial restraint at its finest.
The decision to let Keaton's offscreen presence—his hesitation, his refusal to perform on cue—carry the film rather than exploit his legend is what makes this breathe; a single moment where he almost smiles and then doesn't reshapes everything we've been watching.