Here’s the best eight minutes you’re likely to spend today. (At least, it was for me.) Buster Keaton had an incomparable ability to frame physical comedy — and then, midway through his early career, wiped an entire color spectrum from his palette. In moving to features, he stripped “impossible gags” from his repertoire so that people could invest more fully in the “reality” of his full-length films — even when those full-length films existed in multiple levels of reality. (As with “Sherlock, Jr.,” when “real-world” Buster becomes a cinematic Buster, entering the life of the film he’d been watching.

This eight-minute video covers that shift, and much more — including framing Keaton’s comedy in four directions (up, down, left and right). By watching this, you can’t go wrong.

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