I was able to get to the Old Town Music Hall for a recent showing, with live organ accompaniment, of Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.” It’s public domain now, so watch without guilt. Keaton would surely be pleased. If you’re in Southern California, even if you’re not particularly near El Segundo, take a look at the Old Town Music Hall’s schedule. It’s a true blessing to have around and every showing has a performance on the Mighty Wurlitzer, which is a musical experience unlike any other.
Music was always my first love and some of my earliest great memories are of playing my mom’s copies of “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on my little kid record player, damaging the records in the process to be sure but without diminishing the joy the music brought me. “Star Wars” was a bit later, on my eighth birthday at, if I’m right, the Cinema 21 in San Diego. I was hooked on film from then on, and was completely put out when “Star Wars” lost the Best Picture Oscar to “Annie Hall” some months later.
Interestingly, it was as a young adolescent that my dad took me and a friend of mine to see a Woody Allen double feature. I can’t remember precisely what we saw, but quickly, and probably because Allen did comedy, his work was my in, so to speak, to film as art.
I mention all this because it led me to Keaton. In tenth grade, I think, I read something that unfavorably compared the last moments of “Manhattan,” so thoroughly messed up we know now, with the end of Chaplin’s “City Lights.” New to all this, I somewhat skeptically watched the Chaplin film once I found a VHS copy, and to my surprise I became a Chaplin fanatic. Indeed, “City Lights” trounces “Manhattan,” and not only in its ending. Chaplin in his turn led me to Keaton.
If I had to pick a favorite filmmaker, I probably would pick Keaton. I don’t say “best.” “Favorite” is a different matter. Keaton’s work, ranging from great to really great throughout his career working independently, is an almost perfect match for what I value in art: simultaneously light and substantial. The closest cousin to Keaton’s work in this sense for me is the first Basie band, the one with Herschel Evans and Lester Young.
Much is made of Keaton’s technical innovations in “Sherlock, Jr.” for good reason, and the point is often made that what raises Keaton’s work to the highest level is that while he was as technical a filmmaker as any there’s been, the technique is not at all the point. Everything produced laughs, and this gets to the quality of lightness in his work that I value so deeply and which for me is the primary function of art. My feeling is that all of us who love art in any form have experienced it: we watch, we listen, and when our guard is down we’re somehow lifted, clearly felt but with no precise sense of any place we’re rising toward or even a direction. It’s just light.
The famous scene in which Keaton uses a vaudeville trick and disappears through a fence with his assistant’s help is as good an example of this as I know. There’s plenty of technical discussion to be had about how Keaton filmed something that we, watching it, know is impossible and yet know equally well that what we saw wasn’t fake. But the real point is that Keaton puts the viewer in position of deep unknowing, stunned in a good way.
I’ve read and, in 2025, seen/heard commentary about Keaton’s work, in “Sherlock, Jr.” particularly, that the response is “how did he do that?” But that’s not the actual response at all of a person watching the picture. It’s the response of someone who has already finished watching the picture. In the moment, the feeling is completely inexplicable without an impulse to explain: it’s just an experience. For me, this is the goal and also the function of all art, and whatever technical questions there need to be revolve around how to produce moments like that.
This gets to the matter of substance. Keaton’s work is light, but it’s absolutely substantial. He is definitely doing particular things to produce particular responses in people, and he used or developed new methods because the old ones, not very old in 1924, for sure, wouldn’t produce the desired result. Orson Welles, particularly in “F for Fake” but across his work generally, emphasized the artificiality of art as a process, and though we definitely can appreciate how Keaton did his own stunts, there’s no filmmaker whose work is more artificial than Keaton’s. Everything we see on the screen is concrete, produced, developed, and all very intentionally. But when it builds and then hits us, in the audience, the experience is like nothing is there. That’s the trick.
I saw “Hamnet” a couple days ago, and it seems to me that while the film is about a lot of things, the last stretch of it is basically about the above. I’m not one of those people who goes on about the classics or whatever, and with the grave authority of a history major I can guarantee that concept of “Western Civilization” are not useful for understanding the Greeks, the Romans, and either Medieval or Renaissance (whatever we take those terms to mean) Europeans, but it definitely can help explain why 19th century imperialists were willing to slaughter so many people around the world. This is to say that I have no interest in Shakespeare as canon, but I definitely will say that the man knew how to write and more specifically knew how to put together a play, to be performed, in front of an audience. The film really nails how art hits an audience, and if you can manage to see it in a theater it’s worth it.