Buster Keaton is synonymous with seat-of-the-pants feats of physical comedy and a century after he performed them, many of his life-endangering stunts are still the stuff of legend.

So it’s only right, says pianist-composer Ashley Hribar, who will live score a double bill of Keaton classics as part of the Canberra International Music Festival, that he also works without a safety net.

“I’ve always felt that Keaton’s films were right on the edge of sensible,” Hribar tells Limelight. “I feel I need to be on the edge, too, and help bring the film to life in a completely original way every time.”

Hribar will be accompanying a Keaton double feature at Canberra’s National Film and Sound Archive. In the 1924 classic Sherlock Jr, Keaton stars as a movie projectionist moonlighting as an amateur detective. In the frantic two-reel comedy Cops (1922), he plays a man who accidentally becomes the Los Angeles Police Department’s most wanted.

Hribar has created many live film scores in recent years, including for the expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), F.W. Murnau’s Faust...