Sherlock Jr. marked the beginning of a heated debate about a pervasive sur­realism in Buster Keaton’s works, which engaged filmmakers, philosophers and playwrights to these days.
In 1924, when the film was released, René Clair suggested that the film could be a model for “surrealist spectators” comparable to the one supplied for the theatre by Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Keaton’s use of dream as well as graph­ic-match montage – something he was very proud of to the end of his days – was hailed as revolutionary by the likes of Antonin Artaud and Robert Aron, who, in his 1929 essay Films de révolte stressed how Keaton’s surrealism was “su­perior” than Man Ray’s or Luis Buñuel’s, in that Keaton had been able to achieve expressive freedom while observing the rules of narrative filmmaking. Buñuel was himself a devotee of Keaton’s lack of sentimentality, of his transformative work with objects and use of dreams and programmed his films at the Cineclub Español in Madrid starting from the be­ginning of 1930.
In the 1960s, following the re-release of Keaton’s films, a new critical assessment of Keaton’s surrealist qualities took place, and while Greek filmmaker Ado Kyrou described Sherlock Jr. as “one of the most beautiful dreams in the history of cin­ema”, it was surrealist critic, playwright and filmmaker Robert Benayoun who probably went further than any other critic in drawing parallels between the work of Keaton and the surrealists. In the two articles he published for “Positif” in 1966, Benayoun suggests some of the aes­thetic concerns that Keaton shares with the work of surrealist visual artists such as René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, the films of Luis Buñuel, as well as the paint­ings and sculptures of Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico and Francis Picabia. Benayoun contends that Keaton is un­consciously linked with these artists by his fascination with the mechanical and his imperturbable balance between “the seri­ous and the ludicrous”.
When interviewed, Keaton of course protested that he was “just trying to get laughs”, but as Walter Kerr argues, this does not make him a less brilliant analyst of film, especially when it comes to Sherlock Jr.: “in his dazzling film-within-a-film he illustrates basic theories of continuity and cutting more vividly and with greater precision than theorists themselves have ever been able to do. But the analysis is not in Keaton’s head. It is in the film, he worked only with the thing itself, creating what amounts to theory out of his body, his camera, his fingers, a pair of scissors”.

Cecilia Cenciarelli

Scoring For Buster Keaton

Writing for Keaton is unique. In my 20 years of writing orchestral scores for silent film, somehow what comes out in my writing for him is both personal and potentially chaotic. And in Sherlock Jr., Keaton’s display of genius and acrobatic melancholy provided no exception.
As this is my fourth Keaton film I have composed for, I have learned a couple things. For instance one must understate the situation in a big way. As much as a composer wants to be funny too, he cannot, for it simply kills the image in the classic case of ‘too many cooks’. Instead, the music should have, at least on the surface, the appearance of simplicity with the occasional outburst of complexity and force. Certainly the latter comes to the forefront in the motor-bike chase sequence, as the tempo hastens to a pace of nearly un-playable proportions.
Cleverness is not enough when writing for Keaton, one also must know how to simply laugh, really hard. However, with one sequence in particular, I could not shake my incessant giggles spewing forth each time I viewed it. Only after dozens of passes was I able to pull myself together enough in order to write for it objectively. It takes a clear head to write for comedy, a head I clearly do not always want to have, instead sometimes just wanting to enjoy myself in the spectacle. The story has it that Dmitrij Sostakovic – who has also been an extraordinary composer for silent film – was once, as a cinema pianist in 1926, found laughing so hard during a Chaplin film, that he simply stopped playing and was fired by the theatre manager.
Mind you, there is not much of this score that is not intricately, and delicately worked out, in both its structure and timing. Despite the forces of nearly 50 musicians, I wanted the score to be streamline and fluid. For my part as a conductor, I have once again painted myself into a tightly synchronised corner. In order for the score to be at its most effective I have a ¼ second margin of flexibility in synchronization, and in some scenes, less.

Timothy Brock