Buster Keaton took ordinary movements and events – a guy luckless in love, or getting into the wrong place at the wrong time – and worked them into a comic and stylistic purity that for one decade, the 1920s, was almost unmatchable. He turned out dozens of films in which his beautiful but inscrutable face confronted the speeded-up America of the new century, and, most often, ran from it as from a falling house.

In Keaton’s world, houses do fall on him, just as hordes of distraught wannabe brides pursue him, and overzealous policemen chase him through traffic jams and parades and other hazards of newly born urban life. Somewhere between the dense alienation of Kafka and the surprisingly similar comic tragedy of Beckett, Keaton’s dapper, undaunted, and astonishingly light-limbed figure whips around and around.

In fact, Keaton would end his career playing in Samuel Beckett’s silent movie, “Film” (1965). It’s a one-reeler (10 minutes long, like the first silents). Keaton scowled in disapproval through much of the shooting (Beckett, a fan, remained appreciative), but the movie itself is remarkable, not only for its own sake but to see two great comics, from opposite poles of art, form a masterwork on common ground.

Keaton came to film because it was a more exciting art form than vaudeville, where he was raised. Born in 1895, by the turn of the century Buster was bucking up the family acrobatic act as “The Human Mop,” a child so indestructible that the act climaxed with his father picking him up and tossing him into the audience, from which he would scamper back onstage for a bow. In adulthood, Keaton was shrewd enough to know he had to make his own films to hone the perfectly framed lunacy his comedy flourished in, and he became a director as well.

Tonight, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosts a tribute to Keaton as a silent-film comedian. Inspired by Edward McPherson’s recently published “Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat” (Newmarket Press, 290 pages, $26.95), the entire program consists of two films and lasts just over an hour – one of the finest hours in film-going possible, as BAM will be showing two of his greatest films, “Sherlock Jr.” (1924) and “Cops” (1922).

“Sherlock” is the film in which Keaton plays a mystery buff who falls asleep on his job as a projectionist in the local movie house. The detective thriller onscreen proceeds, and in one of the most remarkable moments in any film, the dreaming Keaton walks right through the dark theater and into the movie, an effect done so naturally it’s impossible not to believe. This moment echoes through film history, from the Warner Bros. cartoon “Duck Amuck” (1953) to Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985).”Cops” is not as intriguing as “Sherlock Jr.,” but it’s the quintessential chase film, never bettered despite countless imitations.

For those who can’t make it to BAM, a number of fine Keaton films are available on DVD. Kino releases the best (including both pictures screening at BAM) separately and in a boxed set, “The Art of Buster Keaton,” which offers 30 shorts and features. Warner Home Video’s smaller set, “The Buster Keaton Collection,” including a good documentary, covers an aspect of Keaton that Mr. McPherson’s book moves through too swiftly – the decades Keaton spent working in talking films and, eventually, television.

Mr. McPherson bills his new biography as “a fan’s notes,” but this should not deter readers from seeking it out. For one thing, it’s an impassioned championing of Keaton’s life and work. For another, Mr. McPherson is a young man, someone who has come to love Keaton and silents with no possible prior living connection to them. This is a hopeful sign for the perpetuation, on any scale, of appreciation for silent film. Most valuable books on the silents came from those who grew up with them, and cherished them after “talkies” became the new standard.

But the poetry and awesome grace of silent film is a ghost American cinema still has not put to rest, and has never improved upon. Few sound films can quite match the silents’ combination of spectacle and intensity of interplay between their silvery, voiceless images and the viewers watching them. Acting without words demanded a physical virtuosity almost no performers today command. When Gloria Swanson’s deposed silent goddess in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) howled “I stayed big! The pictures got small!” she was crazy, but still correct.

Keaton will always be paired in cinematic history with his friend and rival Charlie Chaplin (himself superbly represented on DVD by Warner), and fans of both men continue to argue their greatness. Mr. McPherson quotes Keaton remarking that he played working men while Chaplin played a tramp. Chaplin’s humor embraced everybody, and the world took his homeless, abject persona to heart in a way Keaton never allowed. Chaplin creates a bigger world than Keaton: It’s fast, too, but there are people in it (Keaton only has sidekicks) and their humanity and loneliness deepen the comedy.

If we admire and even adore Keaton, Chaplin we love. Something about Keaton’s swiftness and sternness holds us off. But it doesn’t keep us from seeing, and appreciating, his unique genius.

“Sherlock Jr.” and “Cops” at 7 p.m. (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, 718-636-4100).