There are some films that have been so celebrated and so often written about that it is difficult to imagine that one could have anything new to say. However, only a few of these films, these timelessly popular masterpieces, seem to actually deserve such acclaim. Even fewer such films celebrate the wonder, awe, and possibility of the medium that has brought them into existence. Sherlock Jr. (1924) is one such film.
One may not have anything new to add to the discourse surrounding Sherlock Jr. but that isn’t really the point. Buster Keaton and his crew made this picture for everyone without any artistic pretensions or the elitism inherent to such pretensions. Just as Sherlock Jr. aesthetically connects Winsor McCay’s Gertie The Dinosaur (1914) to a post-modern blockbuster like The Last Action Hero (1993), so does it suggest that the wonder of possibility in the movies will spring eternal.
The gift that directors Buster Keaton and the uncredited Roscoe Arbuckle had for imbuing their collaborations with a sense of discovery is the direct result of the fact that for them the cinema was still in its infancy. By trying to best capture a physical gag on film, from jumping through a lady to walking into a projection, these earliest auteurs charted the limits of the medium’s possibilities that had them gasping in awe.
Sherlock Jr. is classic Keaton right down to the symmetry of the narrative. The film draws on his short film gags and elaborates on them while also finding a more emotive narrative context in which to live. What is unique about Sherlock Jr. is that it so blatantly incorporates Keaton’s own relationship to the cinema into its narrative and its spectacle equally. When Keaton first crosses the threshold between “reality” and the movie within the movie his inability to literally navigate the time-space disruptions of montage is a reflexive gag that abstractly illustrates how other gags (avoiding the number 13 billiard ball and falling off the motorcycle) are accomplished.
In terms of plot, by the time Keaton dreams himself into the cinema the “real world” conflicts have all been resolved. Keaton, ignorant of this, resolves his role in the drama via the fantasy of the cinema. In essence Keaton’s character diffuses conflict and self-actualizes in the world of cinema in the same way as Keaton the filmmaker does (though without any of the physical labor and fewer time constraints). Sherlock Jr. is a bittersweet piece of self analysis on Keaton’s part that is so simply rendered that it becomes accessible to anyone who dreams or watches movies.
It’s this kind of intentional self-reflective dreaming that clearly influenced both Jacques Rivette and Věra Chytilová. For Keaton, Rivette and Chytilová the cinema is the physical apparatus of dreaming; the ability to dream beyond the mind. In Sherlock Jr. lies the blueprint by which the modernist and post-modernist cinemas would be charted. And, also like Keaton, Rivette and Chytilová treated the cinema as an abstract psychological space that, rendered in the two-dimensions of celluloid, becomes public, accessible, and universal.
Sherlock Jr. celebrates the cinema and part of joining in that celebration is to write or to talk about this film. With a picture like Sherlock Jr. it isn’t about what one writes or says, it’s about expressing something. It is about passing on some of the wonder and the awe that Keaton and Co. have captured with Sherlock Jr.
