John Bengtson is a business lawyer and film historian who discovered the magic of silent comedy at an early age. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Silent Traces: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Charlie Chaplin, Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton, and Silent Visions: Discovering Early Hollywood and New York Through the Films of Harold Lloyd. Bengtson has presented his work on Buster Keaton as keynote speaker at events hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. He is a featured columnist of the Keaton Chronicle newsletter, and lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his two daughters.
"""Bengtson captures the same eerie feeling I sometimes get when
watching Keaton, who is the greatest of the silent clowns: The
sense that Buster occupies not the fantasy world of many silent
comedies, but a real world right down to the street from our own."
--Roger Ebert, film critic and historian
"This is a cinematic and photographic detective story of the first
order. Time and artifice have been stripped away. What's left is a
wonderful portrait of a city, its principal industry, and one of
its best artists." --Ken Burns, author/director, "The Civil War,
Baseball"
"What John Bengtson has done is nothing short of remarkable: a deft
combination of detective work, archeology, and film buffery. I
can't get enough of it!" --Leonard Maltin, film critic and
historian
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