One Week (Buster Keaton, 1920)
One week is a silent short film which is about a newly married couple trying to build their house. The film is a comedy and starts with a married couple leaving their wedding. They get into a car but the driver is a man who previously got rejected by the woman. They start to drive away but the couple try to escape him multiple times before successfully getting to their plot of land. While they are building the house, the man finds them and changes the number on some of the boxes containing the wood required to build the house.
Time passes and we see the finished house but it is messed up and some part can rotate. The couple struggle to add furniture and decorations to the house and once they finally do, their house gets hit by a deadly storm completely destroying it. They try to put it on wheels and move it to another plot but the car breaks off the house leaving it on the train tracks. The second train hits their house and they give up and walk away.
The film is a comedy and despite the lack of sound (except added music), it still manages to convey genre features through silly and unrealistic but funny actions. Buster Keaton is the director of the film and plays the main guy in it and the film displays a few auteur qualities. Keaton clearly wanted to make the audience laugh but didn’t really have a true message since in America, film was mostly for money. Keaton used a variety of techniques in his films and a lot of special effects. The most impressive considering the time at which the film was made (there were no CGI) was the house spinning around on a turntable and the train collision which are all real.
Buster Keaton definitely experiments with performance and Mise-En-Scène and his style is a more light hearted, comedic version of German Expressionism. The film does have a distinct aesthetic which is black and white with up-beat non-diegetic music with a comedic plot. His films tend to include lots of dangerous stunts which have caused him actual injuries such as jumping out of the two story high door.
Keaton creates humour through performance due to the lack of sound. The plot is comedic because of how far fetched but also real it could be during the time it was made. Make your own houses used to be a thing and there was a chance you could build it very wrong. Keaton began using a structure seen in this film which is where the film starts with a funny opening scene then a slow build up to a crazy climax which is then surprisingly outmatched by an even crazier ending. This structure is built to make people laugh which is Keaton’s aim.
I personally enjoyed the film and many people in 1920 agree as it was the highest grossing film that year. I thought the house turning scene was very enjoyable and clearly a lot of effort and work was put into the setting. My rating is 4.5/5.