Re: TCB's 1,001 Films to Watch Before You Die
66. Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
One of Buster Keaton's finest silent films. Included many special effects that are eye-popping even today. Fun fact: Keaton busted his spine while filming the water tower scene and damaged it pretty bad yet didn't even know it until a doctor told him years later.
I haven't seen this film since high school, so here's what past me wrote about this film in a paper on dreams versus reality in the cinema which also covered UN CHIEN ANDALOU and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (and bear in mind I was a pretty ****ty writer then):
"In Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. (1924), which is also a narrative short, Keaton and his filmmaking crew take advantage of the manipulation techniques of cinema as well, and play with the viewer's perception quite a bit. The film appears to be a fairly normal story of a man attempting to woo a woman. That is, until the endlessly entertaining midsection of the story arrives. The central character (Keaton again), a film projectionist, falls asleep on the job and enters a completely unrealistic world. From the moment the dream begins, the audience knows they are being taken somewhere special when Keaton's character casually walks right into the onscreen action and enters a film within a film. This scene is a metaphor for the moviegoing experience as a whole. As an audience member, sitting in a darkened theater with walls of sound surrounding you, the eye will naturally focus on the bright, flickering light of the moving pictures up on the screen. As a result, everything else fades away and, if the film successfully achieves its goal, the audience member will feel as if they are right up there with the characters they are watching. The sequence from Sherlock Jr. is similar to the one described from Un Chien Andalou in that a character was just allowed a portal to exit one location and immediately wound up somewhere else, somewhere far away. Again, this is all something one would never be able to accomplish in the world of 'realistic cinema'"
I think I got a C plus on the paper, btw.
There's no trailer for SHERLOCK, JR. but Google Videos has the whole film
here.
