Also in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's opening night this year will feature the newly restored The Cameraman. It's at the fabulous Castro Theater, with live accompaniment by the SF Conservatory of Music, on May 1.
Also, as it hasn't been mentioned, Keaton's The General is generally considered to be his masterpiece. If you see a picture of Keaton on a locomotive, or with a very fat, very blunt cannon, it's from this film.
One one level, it's something kind of simple: Buster's character is under-qualified & frequently failing, but he's also determined, unrelenting, and ultimately gets the job done.
He's taken the title job, but he doesn't really know how to operate a camera, so he accidentally double and quadruple exposes the film. He's ridiculed, since he obviously failed to do what he was trying to do (gather news footage), but the images he does create seem on another level sublime, magical.
I'm reluctant to map it directly to startups/HN, but let me try anyway: People talk about failing frequently, learning from failure; they say that startupers need to allow specific projects/ideas/initiatives to fail. That's correct, but failures still can hurt and sometimes demotivate; it's tempting also to move on before we've learned from the failure so as to put the failure as far behind as possible. These movies remind me that there can be great stuff to see and learn during a failure; I think they make failures less taxing emotionally and sometimes joyful.
Hacker Cinema
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Also in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's opening night this year will feature the newly restored The Cameraman. It's at the fabulous Castro Theater, with live accompaniment by the SF Conservatory of Music, on May 1.
Also, as it hasn't been mentioned, Keaton's The General is generally considered to be his masterpiece. If you see a picture of Keaton on a locomotive, or with a very fat, very blunt cannon, it's from this film.
One one level, it's something kind of simple: Buster's character is under-qualified & frequently failing, but he's also determined, unrelenting, and ultimately gets the job done.
But he is special because he's a genius at failure: his disasters are beautiful, cinematic, and spectacular. Here's a simple but representative example from the Cameraman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgS55PvjXHM&feature=related#t=8m1s
He's taken the title job, but he doesn't really know how to operate a camera, so he accidentally double and quadruple exposes the film. He's ridiculed, since he obviously failed to do what he was trying to do (gather news footage), but the images he does create seem on another level sublime, magical.
I'm reluctant to map it directly to startups/HN, but let me try anyway: People talk about failing frequently, learning from failure; they say that startupers need to allow specific projects/ideas/initiatives to fail. That's correct, but failures still can hurt and sometimes demotivate; it's tempting also to move on before we've learned from the failure so as to put the failure as far behind as possible. These movies remind me that there can be great stuff to see and learn during a failure; I think they make failures less taxing emotionally and sometimes joyful.