Sherlock, Jr.
(1924) dir. Buster Keaton
viewed: 04/12/08 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA
I’ve been digging Buster Keaton a lot since viewing his masterpiece, The General (1927), and so when I saw that the Club Foot Orchestra was playing a live accompaniment to the film as part of the SF Jazz Festival, I quickly ordered tickets and signed up for it.
The orchestra tuned up and played live with a Felix the Cat cartoon, Felix Woos Whoopee (1928), another brilliant masterpiece of surrealistic animation by the tremendous Otto Messmer. It also gave a good sense of the character of the original composition that the group would play. It was a brilliant way to see these films.
Sherlock, Jr., which I had seen in a literature class a couple of years back, is a genius film. In the introduction by the representative of the Club Foot Orchestra, he commented that this is the best of Keaton’s work, even though The General gets “more ink”. Well, I won’t dispute that purported notion, but actually, The General is a far more ambitious film, more narrative. Sherlock, Jr. is purely hilarious, filled with clever stunts, outrageously striking, and is a very modernist work in its play with narrative.
I won’t try to capture what has probably seen far more in depth and interesting criticism over many, many years, but it is so inventive in its breaking with the narrative when Keaton climbs into the film screen and finds himself (via a dream) in the narrative of the movie, transposed with the characters from his life. There is a sequence that plays actively with setting and film genre in which the backgrounds change his situation every couple of seconds.
Keaton is tremendous in the big and the small. I was struck again how influenced Jackie Chan has been by his work. The film is endlessly inventive, turning gags from happenstance, choreographing the madness into a lively and suprising dance.
I can’t say how much I enjoyed this experience. The best of the best. And they were playing with both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922), two of the major exemplars of German Expressionist cinema. I kind of wish I’d stayed for those two as well. Brilliant stuff.
