Bring back the 1920s

Public TV has a bonus, and it's that it's not subject to the influence of Hollywood and the special interests, and as thus can have a very broad view, and some gems that focus on history and true art, not just the latest-movie-of-the-week peddled by the film distributors.

Such is the case of Argentina's public TV channel, Canal 7. The only one that survived the privatization wave of the 1990s. Surely it's a long way from the Beeb, but it's been improving lately. Such is the case of "Filmoteca" a daily programme by film collectors, for film buffs.

Today, I had the pleasure of watching a series of Buster Keaton short films from the 1920s.


The best, IMHO, was "One Week", which you can watch on Google Video over here.

Buster and Sybil are newlyweds. Among their wedding gifts is a portable house you can easily put together in one week... but things won't be as easy as it seemed.

A great laugh and the amount of Busters' falls and hits is mind-blowing, specially considering he used no stunt performers. All the falls are real, and the programme presenters even explained that Buster Keaton broke a few bones several times during his career, only accepting to use a stunt performer on a jump once, because the length of a javelin jump would have been impossible for him to perform.

Thanks, Fernando Martin Peña, for letting us know about these gems from 1920s cinema.

[Fernando M. Peña and Pablo Manes host this daily view on the history of cinema]

I wholeheartedly recommend this programme dubbed "Filmoteca". It airs Mon-Fri after 01:00am on Canal 7 in Buenos Aires and its network of repeaters that spans several provinces (Mar del Plata in Buenos Aires, Mendoza, Cordoba, etc).

FC