One Week

In the short silent film One Week, Buster Keaton and his newlywed wife, played by Sybil Seely, assemble a prefabricated house kit they received as a wedding gift. The house comes with instructions that read: “to give this house a snappy appearance put it up according to the numbers on the boxes.” During the process, a jealous rival swaps the numbers … And within one week we see emerging the result of a surrealist house with canted angles, skew windows, a too-small roof and a door that opens to nowhere on the first floor, culminating in a spinning merry-go-round home in the storm.

Inspired by an advertising campaign for kit homes, Keaton uses the straightforward plot to unfold his slapstick acrobatics and finding ingeniously pragmatic solutions to every problem along his way.

This short film gives an entertaining glimpse into Keaton’s signature style: visual gags built on physical stuns and his famously stoic expression. It is an invitation to rediscover the cinema classics of the silent era – online with the Buster Keaton short film collection on Kanopy or on DVD available at the media centre.