Slapstick!

Slapstick was the ideal film genre for the silent movie era.
But slapstick is also an attitude that makes the world and the failures in it easier to bear.
Because we are all in these poor creatures who stumble and fall by proxy.
Our laughter reflects our own fear of chaos.
This documentary tells the story of this comic genre, which found its way from the stage to the screen in the silent film era.
The Frenchman Max Linder was one of the early international stars until America discovered the genre for itself: Buster Keaton's dark hypnotic gaze, Harold Lloyd's wild escapades and Charlie Chaplin's poetic loser poses wrote film history.
The sound film seemed to be the caesura, the abrupt end of the grandiose body art that enchanted so many people.
But Laurel & Hardy with their fast-paced chases and the Frenchman Jacques Tati with his slapstick of things kept slapstick alive during this period.
And the journey continues, slapstick is far from dead.
In animated films, it climbs to a new level: the physical boundaries of actors no longer exist, the characters plunge with relish into every catastrophe.
And at the same time they remind us of the great masters and the time when it all began.