To each his own, but can I ask what about Buster Keaton movies motivates you? Just wondering.

I was impressed with Die Hard (1988) when I first saw it; so well engineered, as a movie and story and visual spectacle. Now that's the way action movies should be made, I thought, and hoped there'd be more like it -- even while wary of formulaic recombinations, like 'Die Hard on a boat', etc.

Years later, I saw The General (1927), and it blew my mind. There, 60+ years earlier, was 'Die Hard on rails'. There were so many action-movie scenes and stunts and plot points that have been repeated over and over in the decades since.

But: when Keaton did it, he wasn't cribbing anyone else. These weren't old familiar cliches (yet). He was risking his health with dangerous stunts. He didn't have the help of later special effects. He didn't even have sound or spoken dialogue. But still it all worked: the humor, the story, the stunts, the tension.

It was like discovering the common ancestor of hundreds of later movie and TV tropes, the very first action flick that crawled out of the oceans of text and imagination to walk on the dry land of motion pictures.

To have created that, with the limited tools of the era, prefiguring so much of what came later -- well, we can only hope to do something similar with the still-young digital and network media of our age.

One one level, it's something kind of simple: Buster's character is under-qualified & frequently failing, but he's also determined, unrelenting, and ultimately gets the job done.

But he is special because he's a genius at failure: his disasters are beautiful, cinematic, and spectacular. Here's a simple but representative example from the Cameraman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgS55PvjXHM&feature=relat...

He's taken the title job, but he doesn't really know how to operate a camera, so he accidentally double and quadruple exposes the film. He's ridiculed, since he obviously failed to do what he was trying to do (gather news footage), but the images he does create seem on another level sublime, magical.

I'm reluctant to map it directly to startups/HN, but let me try anyway: People talk about failing frequently, learning from failure; they say that startupers need to allow specific projects/ideas/initiatives to fail. That's correct, but failures still can hurt and sometimes demotivate; it's tempting also to move on before we've learned from the failure so as to put the failure as far behind as possible. These movies remind me that there can be great stuff to see and learn during a failure; I think they make failures less taxing emotionally and sometimes joyful.