The Fun Factory. The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture

by Rob King
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2008
376 pp., illus. 40 b/w. Trade, $60.00; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-520-25537-1 ; ISBN-13: 978-0-520-25538-8.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens
KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be

Rob King’s ambitious and innovative study on Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company –a short-lived company that produced numerous slapstick films between 1912 and 1917, while launching also the fashion of the ‘Bathing Beauty’ movies– is an important contribution to film history as well as to our knowledge of the social and cultural stakes of laughter in cinema. Best known for the burlesque comedies featuring the Keystone Kops –a bunch of characters to laugh at rather than to laugh with–, Mack Sennet’s company is often only remembered from a purely nostalgic point of view. What Rob King’s book convincingly demonstrates is that the Keystone Company has played a crucial role in the global transformation of cinema into a wide, cross-class cultural practice, and that its own history –as frantic as that of the films it produced– cannot be separated from the broader cultural and historical context of an America that was rapidly evolving towards a mass-cultural society in which the late 19th Century gap between working class culture and genteel culture could no longer be taken for granted.

Rob King’s book is in the first place a history, that of a man, Mack Sennett (the ‘King of Comedy’, as he would define himself in his 1954 autobiography), and that of the company (by far the most successful of the companies devoted to comedy in these years of growing industrialization of film production). Rob King explains very well, first the working class immigrant culture and the vaudeville burlesque entertainment business where Mack Sennett came from, second the type of ‘sensational’ productions that his company has been making over the years, and third the reasons why the Keystone Company had lost its original inspiration and spirit when the company disappeared in 1917 and its members continued their work in a less independent manner in larger film companies. Throughout the book, Rob King adopts a perspective that is much indebted to the classic views of cultural studies on popular culture as a place of resistance to legitimate (and in this context ‘genteel’) culture. Mack Sennett was making films that transferred the typical elements of working class culture as they were expressed and experienced through the popular entertainment forms of these days –physical violence, presence of the body, anarchist and anti-bourgeois humour, frenzy of rhythm, pleasure taken in utter vulgarity, resistance to new forms of taylorized labour, and refusal of any moralizing effect– to the new cultural practice of cinema, where its main competitors were less the other production companies specializing in comedy than the desire of the very film business to become a socially acceptable and cross-class practice. Catering to a working class audience, whose values and taste it faithfully and militantly reproduced on screen, the Keystone company was in its first years deeply involved in the defence of this working class culture, not just in the films it produced (these films expressed a deeply rooted distrust of any form of discipline and disciplinarization), but also in its own system of making films (contrary to other companies, Keystone did not follow –or pretended not to do so– the assembly line logic and the strong division of labour applied elsewhere) and in the political stances taken by its members (one of the female stars and directors of the company, Mabel Normand, rallied for the socialist party in the first years of Keystone). Keystone did not only invented a specific type of short, one or two-reel comedies, it also opposed, at least in the beginning, the new trends in cinema: on the one hand, the gradual introduction of narrative (in theatres, the Mack Sennett productions were often shown alongside Griffith and other ‘serious’ movies, and all historical evidence proves that it was only thanks to the burlesque cinema of the Keystone company that other productions could find an audience); on the other hand, the growing influence of the melodrama format and the moral, Victorian values it entailed (the civilizing role of women, of the family, of the home, etc.). A Keystone film meant not only ‘no time for action’ (and in this respect the influence of the cinema of attractions, which privileged sensational ‘showing’ to narrative ‘telling’ is paramount), but also a strong distrust of authority and the authorities (hence the systematic burlesque parody of the police).

What Rob King shows very clearly in his book is the complexity of the cultural dynamics revealed by the history of the company. In order to gain a wider audience, Sennett had to negotiate his defence of working class values and forms in the broader context of an industry eager to forget its own roots so that it could be accepted by the whole of society. This basic observation will lead Sennett to various compromises, among which the progressive acceptance of a minimal form of narrative (Keystone made for instance experiments with the feature long comedy) and the gradual erasing of working class elements (which eventually prepared the field for the commercial exploitation of formerly progressive aspects such as the sexual independence of women and their claims to access the job market). This process of negotiation will follow to steps. First, the Keystone Company will contribute to the shaping of a cross-class culture, wiping out the previous ethnical and labour class aspects of its burlesque humour without losing the progressive elements of its anti-establishment stance. Second, it will accept to abandon the liberal and emancipatory dimension of its typical humour in order to find its place in a mass cultural system eager to delete all marks of social difference in favour of a more unified approach of shared commercial entertainment (the rapid commoditization of the ‘bathing beauties’ is a good example of this tendency). Nevertheless, this evolution is not a one-way road, for if the bottom-up integration of labour class culture in mass culture did imply a number of modifications of the former; the top-down reappropriation of popular elements in more legitimate forms of comedy did not leave the genteel approach of cinema unaffected. In the modern mass culture that emerged in the 1910s, both low and high culture were dramatically transformed and the commercial mass culture that emerged was more than just the ecumenical merger of high and low.

Rob King’s book is a wonderful analysis of the historical and cultural complexity of this key moment of modernity and one of its major industries. It will definitively change our vision of this era. Its influence on film and cultural studies will prove essential, and the reading of The Fun Factory should be compulsory to all scholars in the field. Moreover, since the book is so well written, it will be a delight to all those interested in short and long-term history of the movies.