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Subversive Comedy

Buster Keaton in "Cops."

For our first class, we watched Charlie Chaplin's "Easy Street" and Buster Keaton's "Cops." Both are silent films, and some students thought the movies seemed to move very quickly, sometimes too fast to really figure out what was going on. Interesting! It can take a while to get used to the way a silent film presents all its information visually. We're so used to being told and shown what's happening at the same time that you have to learn to watch a silent film in a different way. From here on out, in any case, all the films this semester are "talkies."