One of the things that makes Buster Keaton’s filmmaking so iconic and influential today was the way he would frame a scene during a stunt or gag. Keaton’s world in film was flat, and most of his jokes relied on visuals. The characters in Keaton’s films could only see something if it was in frame. Also a number of his visual jokes relied on the audience seeing and understanding something before the character does. And setting up a joke like that is all about camera positioning and editing shots. This provides the praised “trajectories of action” a lot of the time, where the scene set up a sense of “inevitability to impossible feats”. The editing and framing of stunts was inherent to whether it would work in front of an audience or not. Modern…show more content… The gag and sense of inevitability is set up in the framing of the very first shot. Keaton jumps over to the back car of the train and the cannon is already pointed at his head as to already plant the idea of it hitting him in the heads of the audience. After a first failed attempt at firing the cannon and it tossing the ball into the front of the car with Keaton. But even the way that shot is framed as a wide establishing shot it looks like the cannon ball should hit him, but it does not, the next shot we see is looking into the car with Keaton in it, and we see the ball has simply landed next to him at his feet. So he tries again. The second attempt at using the cannon is more absurd, instead of filling it with gunpowder, he stuffs the entire can inside along with the balls. And again, the way that shot is positioned, the cannon is pointed almost directly at the camera. To the right an explosion goes off as Keaton lifts his head up near the cannon placing it over the hole, the climaxing action of the stunt has almost two minutes of visual foreshadowing, which sets up the