A Real Sherlock
In an essay on movies about moviegoing, Keith Phipps writes about Buster Keaton's classic Sherlock Jr.:
After Keaton dozes off, his spirit walks to the front of an auditorium playing Hearts & Pearls, by all appearances a cookie-cutter silent-era melodrama that his mind has recast with the people from his own troubles. After pausing in a seat by the screen, he steps into the film itself. At this point, the film-within-the-film loses coherence and Keaton becomes a puppet of a movie that appears to be edited by a madman. As the film switches abruptly from a stately manor to a city street to the edge of a cliff to a forest scene with a pair of lions and so on, Keaton moves with it, all without any visible edits to his own action. I have some idea how he pulled this off by combining rear projection with his own masterful combination of timing and stunt choreography. But that’s really all I want to know. It’s close to magic, and I’m happy to keep it that way.
The film is from 1924, and Keaton's stunts and effects have the power to astonish to this day. Still, I'm a bit surprised at Phipps' ignorance. Even if he chooses not to know, I'm surprised at his guess as to how Keaton did this famous sequence (from about 1:00 to 4:00):
No rear projection here. Buster did use camera tricks when called for, but this is the real thing. He and his crew went from one location to the next, matching his figure in the last shot of the previous scene to the first shot of the new one, so Keaton's wouldn't change while everything else did.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:03 AM
3 Comments:
Phipps' theory is hilarious. (And so is the actual Keaton movie.)
I have one slight addendum which I would propose to your explanation. The very first scene in the movie-inside-the-movie -- the bedroom scene from 0:57 to 1:37 -- is completely real; they simply built a bedroom set on top of the stage set. Thus when Keaton jumps from the bedroom to the top of the piano, he's doing exactly what it looks like.
If this is correct, I would further propose that the second set (the front door) is done the same way from 1:37 to I see no other way to account for his leap at 1:38 which encompasses both the cinema and the front door set. Then beginning at either 1:47 (when the scene zooms in) or at 2:00 (when the door set vanishes) they begin using the location shoots you described.
You make me wonder two things.
First, it wouldn't surprise me if there are perspective and lighting phenomena that make doing this extremely difficult. (A variation that works the other way is when false images are created on surface that are being filmed, because the real image is not captured by the film.)
The other is, since they obviously developed the editing expertise to do this much, why wouldn't they simply use that expertise one or two additional times, rather than go to the trouble of building a hyper-precise set? Supposing they could make a stage within a stage, why bother? Having done 10 external shots, why not do 12?
The bit where Keaton jumps into the stage set is real, and has to be done separately from all the editing bits (which is why they're separated by different shots, even of the staircase). The lighting of the movie on the stage he jumps into is intentionally flat looking so it appears to be a movie screen image.
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