What is unique to Buster Keaton is the way in which he raises the burlesque directly to the large form. However, he uses several methods. […] One might be called the machine gag. Keaton’s biographers and commentators have emphasised his liking for machines, and his affinity in this respect with Dadaism rather than Surrealism: the house-machine, the ship-machine, the train-machine, the cinema-machine… […] Keaton makes machines his most precious ally because his character invents them and becomes part of them, machines ‘without a mother’ like those of Picabia. They may get out of control, become absurd, or be absurd from the start, complicate the straightforward, but they never cease to serve a secret higher finality which is at the heart of Keaton’s work. The Scarecrow, where the single-roomed house ‘without a mother’ muddles each potential room with another, each cogwheel with another, stove and gramophone, bath and couch, bed and organ. These are the house-machines which Keaton, the Dadaist architect par excellence, designs.

Gilles Deleuze, The Movement Image, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1986

For the restoration of The Scarecrow, thirteen elements were inspected and analyzed, twelve of those – from the Cohen Film Collection at the Library of Congress and at the Columbus film vaults – were digitized and compared. The two-reel original camera negative was used as the main element for restoration and integrated with other elements for missing sections and heavily decayed portions. In particular, four elements were selected for the quality of their image and for their completeness: a second generation nitrate dupe negative and three first generation safety dupe positives, all held at Cohen’s Columbus film vaults.