Buster Keaton as the cameraman: cinema and journalism represented as spectacle

Abstract

This article analyzes Edward Sedgwick’s The Cameraman (1928), starring Buster Keaton, to reflect on how journalism is represented as a media spectacle. Bearing in mind the historical and cultural context in which the movie was produced and released, the end of silent film, and through analysis of narrative and filmmaking procedures, our aim is to show how the metacinema found in The Cameraman sheds light on the making of the newsreel, with the character, acting as reporter and cameraman, also taking an active part in creating the journalistic event, which is then converted into so-called “documentary” images in the newsreel version. At the same time, the movie disconcertingly employs the boy-meets-girl formula throughout the plotline of the main character’s professional ascension in the field of journalism as an expression of modern times, in which he acts as a filmmaker and becomes a character in his own journalistic narrative.