Saturday Matinee: Sherlock Jr.

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By André Crous

Source: Cinemuse Film Society

Sherlock Jr. is a film that uses every trick in the book to produce electrifying moments of comedy that can still thrill audiences today. It is also a shrewd representation of the place of film in our lives.

The poster shows Buster Keaton as a detective and as a beloved (projectionist). The credits merely list him in his parenthetical capacity, and in fact this occupation embraces the central part of the film, which takes the audience on a journey full of twists and turns that is very clearly related to the first part of the story.

Keaton, the man with the expressionless face who manages to find himself in extraordinary situations, stars as a guy who wants to be a detective as much as he wants to marry the Girl, but when he is framed by another suitor in the matter of a lost pocket watch, and his detective skills fail him, he dreams up a scenario in which he is the ultimate sleuth. This part of the film is presented in a way that excites by means of its presentation and its content.

This medium-length film is interesting on many levels, and while the action transcends mere slapstick (it is not repetitive and does not have any condescension for the film’s characters), Keaton’s conception of the film’s biggest stunts makes for remarkable commentary on the perspective of the viewer. Consider the following movements:

1) During a film screening in a big theatre, with a large audience watching, Keaton approaches the big screen and walks into the film. He subsequently appears in different scenes as the film cuts from one location to the next, and Keaton has to keep up with objects that appear out of nowhere.

2) In this film-within-a-film, Keaton follows some undesirables to their hide-out. He puts a rounded suitcase with a costume inside on the outside of the window, and when he escapes from the house by jumping through the window, he is instantly covered by this costume, and the criminals don’t recognise him. This particular scene is further enhanced by a cut-away image (produced by means of a kind of double exposure, a gimmick Keaton also uses to great effect in his 1928 film, The Cameraman) when the inside of the house can be seen “through the walls”. Technically, it must have been quite a job, but the final effect is breathtaking.

There are many other instances of such trickery, and in spite of (occasionally) less than perfect editing to disguise the manner in which they were done, the products are unexpected and work very well. Two other moments specifically target the perspective of the viewer:

1) When Keaton has already “entered” the screen, the camera dollies closer and closer, until the screen fills the frame, so that any subsequent scenes or cuts would appear like any other film and we forget that we are watching a film that is also being watched by the film’s audience. In this way, the second-level film becomes just as real or just as fake as the first-level film.

2) When Keaton wakes up from his dream and looks through the window of his projectionist’s booth towards the screen, his face is framed by a very clear border, similar to the image he himself is looking at: the framed image of the film in the theatre.

While Keaton doesn’t approach his subject with the same complexity as Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo, it remains a very entertaining film that touches on some important aspects of film reception. Unlike Chaplin, Keaton does not behave at all like a child, but rather like a very lucky average Joe, and since his technical skills enable a very entertaining telling of his story, he is by far the more serious director. In Sherlock Jr. he manages to craft a film that, while clearly not meant to be a feature-length idea, has enormous potential to entertain.

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Country USA

Released 1924

Director(s) Buster Keaton

Screenwriter(s) Jean Havez, Joseph A. Mitchell

Directors of Photography Clyde Bruckman, Elgin Lessley, Byron Houck

Running Time 44 minutes

Saturday Matinee: Persona

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By Roger Ebert

Source: RogerEbert.com

At first the screen is black. Then, very slowly, an area of dark gray transforms itself into blinding white. This is light projected through film onto the screen, the first basic principle of the movies. The light flickers and jumps around, finally resolving itself into a crude cartoon of a fat lady.

Then the pace picks up. There are shots of cops in old cars, maybe the Keystone Kops. There is a flicker of a tramp; maybe it was Chaplin. There is some footage from an old horror movie, and now there is a sound track too. We hear creepy music. Then some other shots, harder to place.

All this takes several minutes, before the titles for Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” finally appear on the screen. Apparently Bergman intends his film to begin with the invention of the “moving picture” and then to work its way forward in time to the present moment. He is establishing “Persona” as a definite episode in the history of the movies.

Most movies try to seduce us into forgetting we’re “only” watching a movie. But Bergman keeps reminding us his story isn’t “real.” At a crucial moment in his plot the film seemingly breaks, and after it rips for a dozen frames it seems to catch fire within the projector. We see it melting on the screen. Then blackness, then light and then the old silent comedies again, as “Persona” starts again at the beginning.

Near the end of the film, there is even a transition made by cutting from one of the actresses to a shot of the camera crew. Light men, camera operators, script girls and Bergman himself look at us dispassionately. Then the on-screen camera turns, and in its view finder we see what will be the next scene. We have been brutally reminded that the story is being filtered through technical equipment.

Bergman’s preoccupation with illusion and reality seems to be tied into the plot of “Persona,” which involves a neurotic actress (Liv Ullmann) and her nurse (Bibi Andersson). The actress stopped speaking one night in the middle of a performance and hasn’t said a word since. The nurse’s duty is to try to win her confidence during a summer of seclusion in the country.

As the two women grow intimate, a strange exchange of personalities seems to occur. “No, no I’m not you,” the nurse cries, “I’m myself.” The actress doesn’t reply to this or anything else, and the nurse is driven to desperate means in an attempt to get through to her. Who is she? Who is anybody? What is real?

This is a difficult, frustrating film, seeming at times to have more in common with the “personal cinema” of Jean-Luc Godard than with Bergman’s usual cool control. The director keeps reminding us that he’s right there, creating his film before our eyes. And the distance between his presence and the story he tells is like the distance between what the actress is and what she reveals. The nurse is maddened by the unspeaking actress in the same sense that the audience is frustrated by the movie: Both stubbornly refuse to be conventional and to respond as we expect.

Saturday Matinee: Sane Man

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Dangerous

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Source: Combustible Celluloid

Bill Hicks (1961-1994) was the original punk stand-up comic. Other comics were poets or performance artists — or, in the case of Hicks’ pal Sam Kinison, heavy metal rock stars — but Hicks took the stage with a pointed wrath that made him unique and worth remembering. Infuriated by pop culture, politics and the industrial age in particular, as well as people’s indifference to same, Hicks raged with a brutally potent humor. His routine about Jimi Hendrix and Debbie Gibson could easily be updated to Britney Spears or the “American Idol” crew, and his beef with President Bush I (1988-1992) could easily be applied to Bush II. Even a story about taking drugs turns into a discourse about legalization. Unfortunately, Hicks’ career never rose much above a small cult following and he died of cancer in his prime. But like James Dean and Sid Vicious, he continues to fascinate fans, and his star continues to rise. Maybe someday, people will listen.

Saturday Matinee: Stick Around

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Andy Kaufman played an android butler in the little-known 1977 sci-fi sitcom pilot, ‘Stick Around’

By Bart Bealmear

Source: Dangerous Minds

On May 30th, 1977, ABC aired the pilot for a sci-fi sitcom called Stick Around. The program starred Andy Kaufman as “Andy,” an android servant that had seen better days. ABC decided to pass on Stick Around, so the pilot is the only episode that was produced. It’s been on YouTube for years, with a relatively low number of views. Kaufman’s cult is big, yet somehow Stick Around has flown under the radar. It’s not only worth a look as a Kaufman curio; watching it 40 years later, it’s clear the show had potential.

Set in 2055, Stick Around revolves around a married couple who live with their android butler. “Andy” is an older model that is a bit worn down, thus in need of constant maintenance. The droid’s also prone to erratic behavior—comic gold for an unpredictable sort like Kaufman. His portrayal of “Andy” will be instantly recognizably to Kaufman fans, as it’s very similar to both his “Foreign Man” character, and “Latka Gravas,” his role on Taxi, the successful series that premiered a year after Stick Around failed to impress executives at ABC.

I think our readers will dig the Stick Around pilot. The episode uses the sitcom format and the sci-fi subgenre, social science fiction, to explore social commentary in a way that’s a heck of lot more meaningful and interesting than the average silly sitcom that made it onto network television—then and now. Perhaps that’s what scared off the suits!

The upload of the Stick Around pilot that’s been on YouTube was broken up into four parts, making for a less than ideal viewing experience. An uninterrupted version was recently added to the platform: