The First Film to Break the Fourth Wall
100 years ago, Buster Keaton released a singular metatextual masterpiece
It’s been exactly a century since the April 21st, 1924 release of Buster Keaton’s silent comedy Sherlock Jr. The film is still ahead of its time.
It’s unclear if Keaton was aware of the experimental artistic explorations of his contemporaries like James Joyce and Luigi Pirandello and Luis Buñuel. But his metatextual masterpiece was one of the most impressive demonstrations of stream of consciousness, surreal dream logic, and self-aware fourth-wall-breaking of the 1920s. And it can still inspire awe today. It’s worth watching the 45-minute film in full, but I wanted to pluck out a few highlights.
On the surface, Sherlock Jr. is a typical Walter Mitty tale (filmed 15 years before that Thurber short story first appeared). It centers on a hapless movie projectionist, framed by a romantic rival for a theft he didn’t commit, who fantasizes about becoming a brilliant detective and clearing his name. The film is filled with Keaton’s delightful visual wit and signature acrobatic stunts, as you can see in the following sequence.
Keaton literally broke his neck at the end of this train-top sequence—the force of the water pouring out of the railway tank smashed his head against the rails. Another daring filmmaker who regularly risked life and limb to entertain the audience, Jackie Chan, has repeatedly cited Keaton as a major inspiration.
But Sherlock Jr. really gets interesting when the projectionist falls asleep while screening a drawing-room mystery. His dream-self rises, and imagines that the movie characters are replaced by his sweetheart and the romantic rival. Achieving this doubling effect required winding the film backwards and double-exposing the footage, while ensuring that Keaton’s body position was perfectly matched in both takes.
Entranced by the onscreen action, the dream-version of the projectionist grabs the dream-version of his signature pork pie hat, then walks up the aisle as he watches the on-screen action. When the villain makes a pass at his sweetie, the projectionist literally climbs into the screen to confront him. His nemesis picks him up and literally throws him out of the film and back into the audience. (To achieve this effect, Keaton built a carefully lit set within a set.)
As the projectionist’s dream-self is ejected from the film-within-the film, we see his snoozing body twitch.
The projectionist tries to cross over into the film again, and this time the film medium itself attempts to shake him off through a series of malicious quick cuts. The drawing room becomes the front stairs, shutting him out of the house. As he descends, the steps become a garden bench, causing him to take a nosedive. And so on—diving off a wave-battered rock, he lands in a snowbank. By precisely matching posture and camera angle from scene to scene, Keaton made it look like reality was shifting around him.
Half a century before Christopher Nolan was born, and long before CGI, Keaton created a vivid world with its own laws and internally consistent logic. Call it the inception of Inception—it probably left just as many folks scratching their heads on the way out.
A shorter version of this article initially appeared in Wired magazine.