I didn’t teach my yoga class on Friday because I had work at OCADU that afternoon for Diane Pugen’s drawing class. Most of the students were using electronic drawing tools. They had graphics tablets and a stylus, which could be made to imitate various drawing tools like charcoal or different sized paintbrushes. She had most of the class assembled before start time in order to critique some drawings they’d done of outdoor scenes on paper. She invited critiques of each student’s work from other students. One guy said enthusiastically of a young woman’s drawing, “It’s like a photograph! It’s sick!” to which Diane rolled her eyes. She had me doing five-minute poses for almost the whole time. Only the very last sitting went for eight minutes.
At one point while I was posing, Diane asked me how long I’d been modelling. I reminded her that she was the very first person I’d ever posed for back in 1982. Several students went “Whoa!” She had been teaching a class sponsored by Hart House in a room in the basement of the Architecture Building on College Street.
Diane now has long white hair and hobbles around, but she’s still extremely dedicated to her work, and it’s interesting to see her teaching a class with electronic drawing tools, because I don’t think she’s all that tech savvy. At one point she told the students that they needed to each give her a usb stick with their drawings on it. They informed her though that they could just upload it to Canvas, the student submission website. She hadn’t known that was possible.
I was kind of tired after class, so I just went straight home, rather than riding up to Yonge and Bloor and back down.
That night I watched the two last films I have starring Buster Keaton. Both of them were shot within months of one another in 1965, and both of them are as different from one another as day and night.
The first was a Canadian film directed by Gerald Potterton, called “The Railrodder”. Buster plays an Englishman in London who sees a tourist ad about seeing Canada. He immediately jumps off a bridge into the river Thames and when next we see him he’s wading to shore on the east coast of Canada. He begins to walk along the railroad tracks and bumps into a single passenger speeder, which is used for track maintenance. It immediately takes off and he begins his trip across the country. Against the backdrop of the scenery of each province he passes through, there are the kinds of gags that only Buster Keaton could do, even at the age of 69. There’s a bin with a hinged lid at the front of the speeder that would probably normally hold tools or sand or something like that, but there seems to be, in Buster’s case, an infinite supply of things that can be pulled out of the box. At one point he sees some Canada geese flying and so he stops in the woods and next we see that he’s turned the speeder into a duck blind, with just his head and a gun sticking out. Keaton came up with that idea and several others while they were shooting.
The second film was the only film that Samuel Beckett ever directed. It was a silent movie starring Buster Keaton and it was entirely silent, with no soundtrack whatsoever. It was called “Film”, though the original working title of the script was “Eye”. Keaton is only shown from the back for the first three quarters of the film. There are three or four other actors at the beginning, who when they make eye contact with us, are terrified. Keaton walks into a house and hides from an elderly woman descending the stairs. She looks at us and either faints or drops dead. Keaton goes to a room nearly bare of furniture. He covers the window and any paintings on the wall that have eyes. There are a kitten and a Chihuahua puppy together in a basket. He picks up the kitten and carries it to the door to put it out of the room, then he walks back and carries the kitten, but when he opens the door the kitten runs back in. This goes on a few times with each animal running back in as he puts the other one out. It seems actually like something Keaton might have suggested, Keaton also covers up a gold fish bowl so the fish can’t look at him. Then he sits down in a chair and opens a dossier containing old family photographs, each of which he tears into quarters and throw on the floor. It’s only around this time that we see Buster’s face. He is wearing his classic porkpie hat, but he also has an eye- patch.
It’s a bizarre movie. Beckett called it “an interesting failure”. Film students love it but theatre students hate it. Keaton apparently hated it. He died eighteen months after it was shot. Of cancer. Not because he hated it.
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