Spreading the laughter

By ANNE KAZMIERCZAK
Register Reporter
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“Silent films were never really silent,” Buster Keaton aficionado Martha Jett told school children in Iola Thursday.
“There was always music” that expressed the emotion of the film.
Jett, in town for the annual Buster Keaton Celebration, gave presentations at the three Iola elementary schools about the nature of silent film, props and silent comedy methods.
“When you kids go out for Halloween, you dress up in props,” she explained, placing a classic Groucho Marx nose and eye glasses on Hayden Hillbrandt at McKinley Elementary Thursday morning.
Jett displayed props popular with Charlie Chaplin — a set of forks and some dinner rolls. She then showed a film clip of Chaplin making the rolls dance across a table using the forks as legs.
Props and slapstick antics can make “a silent film funny without using any words,” she told the kids.

Introducing children to Keaton’s — and other silent comics’ — work is something of a quest for Jett, who together with children’s book illustrator Marlene Abadi composed a booklet on Keaton distributed to young readers in Muskegon, Mich. The town, where Keaton’s father, Joe, had formed an artists and actor’s colony in 1908, hosts a Buster Keaton film festival every fall.
Jett claimed no knowledge of Keaton before 1995.
That year, “the centennial year of his birth,” Jett saw her first silent film, “Seven Chances” on cable television station AMC. The station was showing a Keaton marathon in honor of the anniversary, she said.
Watching the silent star and his stunts, Jett said, “I was blown away by his talent and his ability to tell a story without words. I just wanted to learn more about him.”
She devoted her spare time to her new hobby.
“This is my second life,” she said. (In her first, she is a buyer at West Virginia United Health Systems.)
“I didn’t realize how beautiful silent film could be,” Jett said. “I’d always thought it was just Keystone Cop stuff.”
Keaton, though, “was doing all this stunt work — nothing was faked,” Jett said. “Watching him, my jaw just dropped.”
Jett has since learned how silent film influenced society.
“Back in the days when they showed these films in theaters, there were a lot of illiterate people,” she said. Theaters hired actors to read the title cards — the written frames in a silent film — during the showing of such movies, Jett noted.
“Many people learned how to read by reading the title cards along with the speaker,” she noted. Some European immigrants learned English by following along the same way, she said.
These days, Jett said, children can learn about humor through the films.

JETT ended her presentation with a showing of “The Scarecrow,” a Keaton/Joe Roberts film that exemplifies the use of props.
In the film, Keaton and Roberts are roommates who have devised any manner of contraptions to make housework easier — from a table top with permanently secured dinner plates that can be hosed off, to a wash tub that automatically tips outdoors into a duck pond.
Other props include a pie-eating dog, a pile of hay and copious use of string.
Without words, the children got the jokes.
For adults, Jett presents “The Great Dane — the Life and Career of Karl Dane” Saturday at 11:10 a.m. at the Bowlus Fine Arts Canter.
To the children, she said, “There’s showings of more silent films Friday and Saturday night. Have your parents bring you; they’re free.”