Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Jivan Gandhi
10 November 2015
In Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr., the movements of the main character, Sherlock, and of
the setting itself help to illustrate the central tenets of film and cinema. These tenets are
partially elucidated in Maxim Gorky’s essay on the films of the Lumière brothers; the
relationship between Gorky’s essay and Keaton’s film is the focus of this paper.
About halfway through the film, there is a scene that begins with Keaton jumping into
the frame of the film that his character is projecting. This film-within-a-film sequence is the
section of the scene that I would like to analyze. It begins from about 20 minutes into the film;
in the shot, Sherlock (Keaton’s character) is stepping forward off of the stoop of a mansion
when the setting suddenly changes; instead of landing on the sidewalk, he falls off of a small
park bench, flipping end for end. The new set is a small garden, with a few trees, a large, brick
wall, and the bench. Sherlock, completely taken aback, gets up and looks around confusedly,
startled by the sudden change. After a moment he resigns himself to it, but just as he goes to
This time, he is in the middle of a busy road, with cars passing through the frame from
left and right. Sherlock falls flat on his back. He again rolls over and jumps up, this time to be
rustled by two pedestrians trying to avoid him and his baffled antics. He again takes a moment
to situate himself and observe the street; just as he begins to move across the frame, the
setting again changes. It is a cliff-face, which he almost walks off. There are taller mountains in
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the distance, and Sherlock dangles precariously over the edge before falling back, again on his
face. He holds on and scrambles up from the brink; he looks outraged at the change. He once
more looks around, moving only slightly, as he must avoid the steep drop. As he inches
forward to peer down over the edge, there is another set change.
Sherlock doesn’t move for a moment. What was just the empty air off the side of a
mountain is now a lion that is lounging in the shade of a tree. Another lion is lying on
Sherlock’s other side. Both of them are gazing aimlessly around. Sherlock slowly straightens
up. His movement is minimal. He looks directly at the camera, and appears completely
helpless, standing between the two lions. He looks at each of them, does an about face, and
slowly begins to walk away. Suddenly, one of the lions sees him, and jumps forward to where
he was just standing. Sherlock jumps back, startled, and walks away more quickly, when the
Now he’s in the middle of the desert, in a ditch. He for the fourth time falls over, but
quickly jumps up and bitterly makes his way out of the ditch. But just as he takes a moment to
look around, he jumps out of the way of a train, which blows through the frame. He sits and
watches it, until he gets fed up with laying in the sand and goes to sit on a dune.
The setting changes twice more, first to Sherlock sitting on a boulder in the middle of
the ocean, and a second time, to Sherlock nose-diving off of a mountain of snow and getting
stuck at the bottom. Finally, as Sherlock goes to lean against a tree in a winter wonderland, the
setting shifts one last time, back to the garden with small park bench, over which he falls once
again.
The actions in Sherlock, Jr. are significant in that the characters and settings are in
constant motion on screen, and this is central and exclusive to the medium of film. Maxim
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Gorky, who wrote a newspaper review of some of the first films of the Lumière brothers,
elucidates this clearly: “Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture
are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people
appear and loom larger as they come closer to you; in the foreground children are playing
with a dog, bicyclists tear along, and pedestrians cross the street picking their way among the
carriages” (5). To Gorky, seeing a motion picture for the first time, his main focus is on the
movement of the various objects within the frame. His description, of carriages, people,
children, and bicyclists focuses on how life-like all of the individuals are. He also says, “All this
moves, teems with life and, upon approaching the edge of the screen, vanishes somewhere
beyond it” (5). Here, he is hitting on the limitation of the frame in film, and how the audience
can only see so much at a single time. All that is within the frame “teems with life” and draws
attention, but will invariably disappear upon “approaching the edge of the screen.”
Gorky’s comments and observations are reflected in Sherlock, Jr. in the montage
his surroundings, and as such the audience also observes his surroundings. What might best
correlate with Gorky’s statements is the shot of Sherlock in the busy street. Cars drive along,
pedestrians cross, people stand waiting for taxis. Sherlock’s movement is in this case almost
secondary to the movement of the setting, the complete immersion into a busy world. Also
expressed in this shot is Gorky’s statement about the frame; the cars driving, the pedestrians
walking all vanish as soon as they leave the frame, and this is reinforced for the audience by
the film-within-a-film set up, because the audience can completely see all that is around the
screen.
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Interestingly, Sherlock, Jr. also utilizes motion and movement to express static
concepts. That is, every time the setting changes, Sherlock is in the same position as he was
before. While it seems to the audience that Sherlock is the object onscreen moving most, in the
broader montage sense, he does not move at all, and is only the thread that binds the other
shots together. Gorky hints at this influence of montage where he writes, “Suddenly something
clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen” (5). From the audience
perspective in Sherlock, Jr., one almost hears the “click” of the projector shifting, and suddenly
in film. Maxim Gorky’s observations about the medium, in that the motion of a film is what is
most noticeable about it, and that said motion stops as soon as the object moves out of frame,
are reflected throughout Sherlock, Jr. as well as throughout cinema itself. These observations
are observations of the central tenets of film, and understanding their importance can lead us
Works Cited
Gorky, Maxim. “The First Sight.” In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema. Ed.
Colin Harding and Simon Popple. London: Cygnus Arts, 1996. Print.