The legendary silent film comedian Buster Keaton was born in 1895, the same year the Lumière brothers first publicly projected moving pictures. In her new book, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, Dana Stevens, the longtime film critic at Slate, spins the implications of this convergence into a unique work of literary nonfiction about how one great filmmaker’s life intertwined with the birth of a medium and of modern American life. Camera Man is a meditation on modernity that weaves together the story of one of the most enigmatic and beloved artists of the last century with the events and cultural forces that made his life and work possible. Propelled by Stevens’ wide-ranging insight and pellucid prose, this is the first book to take Buster Keaton’s fascinating life and timelessly funny work as a prism for understanding the dawn of the age of technologically reproduced images, which is now the place we all live.
Dana Stevens is one of the country’s best-known film critics and culture podcasters, with a loyal social media following. She is the film critic at Slate and a co-host of two Slate podcasts, the Culture Gabfest and the Spoiler Special. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Bookforum and Aperture magazine. She lives in New York City with her family and can be found on Twitter and Instagram as @thehighsign. This is her first book.