The Cinematheque

“The evidence of Cops [and] Sherlock Jr. is sufficient to stamp Keaton as the most enduringly modern of classical directors.”

Andrew Sarris

One of Buster Keaton’s most perfectly realized films, this harbinger of the surrealist avant-garde has the Great Stone Face as a movie projectionist (and novice detective) who falls asleep and enters the world on screen—a world where the ordinary laws of physics have been replaced by the capricious rules of film editing. Keaton can’t keep his nose out of a pocket manual for how to investigate a crime scene, and this film, a two-reeler within a two-reeler, is just as obsessed with investigating all the slips and rearrangements that occur in the passage from waking life to dream, actuality to film. Among Sherlock Jr.​’s many antecedents and influences is Delmore Schwartz’s short story ​“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” whose title might just as well suggest the wild inventions of Keaton’s filmography.

Silent with English intertitles

“He was, as we’re now beginning to realize, the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema.” Orson Welles

“Keaton didn’t like to read books, but in his teens, [during] a star turn on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, he mastered the art of reading an audience.” John Lahr, London Review of Books

preceded by

Cops
USA 1922
Buster Keaton, Edward F. Cline
18 min. DCP

Keaton’s gift for carrying a comic gag so far that it becomes a test for the laws of gravity is on epic display in Cops, a Kafkaesque tale about the perils of moving furniture across town.

Silent with English intertitles