Gandhi 1

Jivan Gandhi

Film and the Moving Image

Mr. Matt Hubbell

10 November 2015

The Perception of Movement in Sherlock, Jr.

In Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr., the movements of the main character, Sherlock, and of

the setting itself help to illustrate the central tenets of film and cinema. These tenets are

partially elucidated in Maxim Gorky’s essay on the films of the Lumière brothers; the

relationship between Gorky’s essay and Keaton’s film is the focus of this paper.

About halfway through the film, there is a scene that begins with Keaton jumping into

the frame of the film that his character is projecting. This film-within-a-film sequence is the

section of the scene that I would like to analyze. It begins from about 20 minutes into the film;

in the shot, Sherlock (Keaton’s character) is stepping forward off of the stoop of a mansion

when the setting suddenly changes; instead of landing on the sidewalk, he falls off of a small

park bench, flipping end for end. The new set is a small garden, with a few trees, a large, brick

wall, and the bench. Sherlock, completely taken aback, gets up and looks around confusedly,

startled by the sudden change. After a moment he resigns himself to it, but just as he goes to

sit on the bench, the setting changes again.

This time, he is in the middle of a busy road, with cars passing through the frame from

left and right. Sherlock falls flat on his back. He again rolls over and jumps up, this time to be

rustled by two pedestrians trying to avoid him and his baffled antics. He again takes a moment

to situate himself and observe the street; just as he begins to move across the frame, the

setting again changes. It is a cliff-face, which he almost walks off. There are taller mountains in
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the distance, and Sherlock dangles precariously over the edge before falling back, again on his

face. He holds on and scrambles up from the brink; he looks outraged at the change. He once

more looks around, moving only slightly, as he must avoid the steep drop. As he inches

forward to peer down over the edge, there is another set change.

Sherlock doesn’t move for a moment. What was just the empty air off the side of a

mountain is now a lion that is lounging in the shade of a tree. Another lion is lying on

Sherlock’s other side. Both of them are gazing aimlessly around. Sherlock slowly straightens

up. His movement is minimal. He looks directly at the camera, and appears completely

helpless, standing between the two lions. He looks at each of them, does an about face, and

slowly begins to walk away. Suddenly, one of the lions sees him, and jumps forward to where

he was just standing. Sherlock jumps back, startled, and walks away more quickly, when the

scene changes again.

Now he’s in the middle of the desert, in a ditch. He for the fourth time falls over, but

quickly jumps up and bitterly makes his way out of the ditch. But just as he takes a moment to

look around, he jumps out of the way of a train, which blows through the frame. He sits and

watches it, until he gets fed up with laying in the sand and goes to sit on a dune.

The setting changes twice more, first to Sherlock sitting on a boulder in the middle of

the ocean, and a second time, to Sherlock nose-diving off of a mountain of snow and getting

stuck at the bottom. Finally, as Sherlock goes to lean against a tree in a winter wonderland, the

setting shifts one last time, back to the garden with small park bench, over which he falls once

again.

The actions in Sherlock, Jr. are significant in that the characters and settings are in

constant motion on screen, and this is central and exclusive to the medium of film. Maxim
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Gorky, who wrote a newspaper review of some of the first films of the Lumière brothers,

elucidates this clearly: “Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture

are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people

appear and loom larger as they come closer to you; in the foreground children are playing

with a dog, bicyclists tear along, and pedestrians cross the street picking their way among the

carriages” (5). To Gorky, seeing a motion picture for the first time, his main focus is on the

movement of the various objects within the frame. His description, of carriages, people,

children, and bicyclists focuses on how life-like all of the individuals are. He also says, “All this

moves, teems with life and, upon approaching the edge of the screen, vanishes somewhere

beyond it” (5). Here, he is hitting on the limitation of the frame in film, and how the audience

can only see so much at a single time. All that is within the frame “teems with life” and draws

attention, but will invariably disappear upon “approaching the edge of the screen.”

Gorky’s comments and observations are reflected in Sherlock, Jr. in the montage

described above; in said montage, Sherlock is constantly in motion. He is constantly observing

his surroundings, and as such the audience also observes his surroundings. What might best

correlate with Gorky’s statements is the shot of Sherlock in the busy street. Cars drive along,

pedestrians cross, people stand waiting for taxis. Sherlock’s movement is in this case almost

secondary to the movement of the setting, the complete immersion into a busy world. Also

expressed in this shot is Gorky’s statement about the frame; the cars driving, the pedestrians

walking all vanish as soon as they leave the frame, and this is reinforced for the audience by

the film-within-a-film set up, because the audience can completely see all that is around the

screen.
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Interestingly, Sherlock, Jr. also utilizes motion and movement to express static

concepts. That is, every time the setting changes, Sherlock is in the same position as he was

before. While it seems to the audience that Sherlock is the object onscreen moving most, in the

broader montage sense, he does not move at all, and is only the thread that binds the other

shots together. Gorky hints at this influence of montage where he writes, “Suddenly something

clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen” (5). From the audience

perspective in Sherlock, Jr., one almost hears the “click” of the projector shifting, and suddenly

there is a new scenario for Sherlock to uncover.

Sherlock, Jr. is an excellent example of the expression of movement and non-movement

in film. Maxim Gorky’s observations about the medium, in that the motion of a film is what is

most noticeable about it, and that said motion stops as soon as the object moves out of frame,

are reflected throughout Sherlock, Jr. as well as throughout cinema itself. These observations

are observations of the central tenets of film, and understanding their importance can lead us

as viewers to reach a deeper, more complete understanding of what makes up cinema.

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Works Cited

Gorky, Maxim. “The First Sight.” In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema. Ed.

Colin Harding and Simon Popple. London: Cygnus Arts, 1996. Print.