Both editions presented here are from the same sources controlled by France's Lobster Films. The main difference in content is that additional footage has been discovered since the release of the Arte set in 2001, notably a new master of The Cook with three additional minutes of footage that has been restored for the MOC release. Other than that I cannot account for the big disparity in listed running times between the two sets. It would seem that all the known existing prints of the material presented here are in fairly rough shape. In many cases, complete prints of these shorts are not known to exist. These collections, along with other Buster Keaton DVD's available to us, such as the Kino releases, may be as good as it ever gets. It is fortunate that what survives has been dealt with as carefully as it has been. For that I am grateful to companies like Eureka and Arte video.

Transfers: Both sets have the same aspect ratio of 1.33:1 and are windowboxed. The Arte set uses an interlace transfer which is very apparent in the captures. The MOC collection is a progressive transfer but shows remarkably little improvement over the Arte set. In fact, in some of the shorts, the Arte set has the lead in detail and sharpness. Just look at the third and last captures. When I investigated this further, I found that the average bit rate of the Arte set was higher at 5.29mb/s than MOC's which is 4.8mb/s. Has compression technology improved enough in the last five years that this is not the issue? I wouldn't be able to say either way using this comparison.

Eureka has created all new English intertitles for this release replacing the Arte set's French intertitles in around 75% of the shorts.

Special Features: The Arte set comes with an 11 minute look at Keaton's work by French film-maker Pierre Etiax on disc two. On disc four is a 14 minute trailer for Arte DVD releases made up of film clips accompanied by music.

The MOC set is attractively packed in a box that includes a wonderful 183 page book full of photographs, many seldom seen, and an interesting array of articles about Keaton and his early work. The bulk of the booklet is a round table discussion by film critics Jean-Pierre Coursodon, Dan Sallitt, and Brad Stevens conducted via email during the spring of 2006. I have not run across this form of published discourse before and found it very interesting. Film professor, critic and screenwriter Joseph McBride provides commentary on six of the films (see menu captures). Also included on disc four is an informal audio recording of a party at TV writer Bill Cox's home in May of 1962. Buster holds court for 23 minutes singing songs and telling old stories.

Conclusion: Both of these releases are important collections of Buster Keaton's work, easily ranking with the better looking feature films that have been recently restored and released by mk2. Together, they are a guarantee that Buster Keaton's work will survive nearly intact into the 21st century.

On the other hand, though I consider the Masters of Cinema version of Keaton's shorts to be the best overall release of this material thus far, it is due to the footage added since the earlier Arte release and the special features rather than the quality of the progressive transfer. I believe that they could have done a much better job on the technical side of this project than they did.

 - Gregg Ferencz