Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
Sherlock Jr.
A projectionist falls asleep at the machine and walks into the screen.
The medium's first great essay about itself, disguised as 45 minutes of stunts. Keaton plays a projectionist who dreams his way into the film he is showing, and the cutting inside that dream — the landscape changing under his feet mid-stride — is still taught as a masterclass in match cuts. He performed everything himself; the water-tower shot broke his neck and he didn't notice for years. Watching it inside a broadcast, on a screen, about a man inside a screen, is the correct way to watch it.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Buster Keaton · Roscoe Arbuckle
- Photographed by
- Elgin Lessley
- With
- Buster Keaton · Kathryn McGuire · Joe Keaton · Kewpie Morgan · Ward Crane
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Two comedies about the movies from inside them. Keaton's projectionist dreams himself through the screen into the picture; Davies's Peggy Pepper walks through the studio gate and finds the picture is a factory. Both know that the joke and the trick are the same thing.
Keaton's two pictures of 1924, months apart, both about a man swallowed by a machine too big for him: a cinema screen, then an ocean liner. Watch how calmly he lives inside each.