silver nitrate notes

Sherlock Jr and the Projectionist's Dream

1 mar 2010

Buster Keaton made Sherlock Jr. (1924) in the year before The General and at a point when he had full creative control of his production unit. The film is his most self-reflexive work: a projectionist falls asleep at his post, walks into the screen of the movie he has been showing, and becomes the detective in the film. The diegesis is split. What happens on screen-within-the-screen is partly the projectionist's dream, partly the film being shown, partly what Keaton wants us to notice about the medium we are in.

The technical achievement is the sequence where the projectionist, in his dream, walks into the screen and is subjected to a series of abrupt scene changes in the film he has entered. In one shot he is on a city street; a cut, and he is stepping off a cliff; another cut, and he is in the middle of a desert; another, and he is in a snowfield. Keaton and his cinematographer Elgin Lessley built this sequence by surveying Keaton's body position relative to the frame with exact precision, so that across each cut his silhouette remained in the same place even as the background changed completely. Every cut was made in camera: the camera was locked, the backgrounds were swapped between takes, Keaton's feet were in the same spot.

The motorcycle chase in the film's second act is equally controlled. Keaton rides a motorcycle without a driver (he is seated behind the handlebars, with a driver in front who falls off early in the sequence without Keaton noticing). The chase was shot on a Los Angeles street with minimal safety. Keaton broke his neck during one of the stunts and did not realise it until an X-ray in 1935.

Sherlock Jr. ran forty-five minutes in its original release. That was short for a feature. Audiences in 1924 were uncertain what they were watching. Modern audiences are usually certain, which is the point. Keaton was making, four years before Vertov published his manifesto on the cine-eye, an argument about what the camera's relationship to reality was. The argument was that the relationship was unreliable, and that the unreliability was where the cinema lived.

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sources
[1] Dardis, Tom. Keaton: The Man Who Wouldn't Lie Down. Scribner, 1979.
[2] Meade, Marion. Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase. HarperCollins, 1995.
[3] Bordwell, David. "Play it again, Buster." In Figures Traced in Light. University of California Press, 2005.
[4] Keaton, Buster. My Wonderful World of Slapstick. Doubleday, 1960.