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Back in the day of two-reel howlers when he was being chased by cops or girls, Buster Keaton already had the earmarks of an avant-garde hero; he was tormented, punished, alienated and couldn’t communicate. He was just way ahead of his time. Now times have caught up and he is hero of a high-class little film written by arch avant-gardesman Samuel Beckett (Waiting For Godot), and directed by Alan Schneider (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf). The movie, still untitled, will run with two other short films by avant-garde deans Harold Pinter (The Caretaker) and Eugene Ionesco (Rhinoceros).

Buster is playing a glum bum who hates to be watched. He shuns people’s eyes, bird eyes, fish eyes, even the eye of a god in a picture. The movie comes to a shuddery end when Buster realizes he and his universe exist only under the mastery eye of himself – the one pair of eyes he can never escape.

 Just after he has ousted a dog and a cat from their basket because he imagines that their spying eyes are intruding on his privacy, Buster discovers that they have trotted back. In his desperate efforts to keep from being observed, Buster even covers up a mirror on the wall, so that by mistake he will not watch himself.

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Buster is a longtime expert on chases, so when he has to be chased in his new film, he stops to figure how to keep in camera range and to survey the path so he won’t stumble. In this avant-garde chase he is not pursued by people, but by the gaze of human eyes.

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