Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr, 1924. The story of the film tells the story of a cinema projectionist who dreams of becoming a detective. In order to pursue the girl he likes, the price of a one-dollar gift is changed to four yuan, but the result is self-defeating and he is framed as a thief. Lost, he entered the movie being shown in a dream and transformed into a clever and capable detective "Sherlock Holmes II". All the way, he turned evil into good fortune, solved the case and brought the beauty back. The happy ending of the movie in the dream also heralds the solution of the "real world" problem, the misunderstanding is solved, and the two lovers finally get married.
Thrilling and comical, action and love, Keaton uses visual stunts in line with the film to create the drama that belongs to the film. There are plenty of highlights throughout the story, but the one that caught my attention the most was when Keaton's projectionist tried to break into the film.
Between the protagonist's dream and the film's complete entry into another "movie within a movie" narrative, the director shows a dream about a movie theater.
The special effect of overlapping shadows separates him in the dream from the one in "reality". The characters that appear on the screen of the movie being shown are transformed into characters in "reality". In the dream, he entered the cinema. At first, he was just a viewer in front of the screen. With the radical conflict of the plot and the accumulation of emotions, he got closer to the screen. At first, I sat in the first row, but then I couldn't hold it any longer, I went straight to the stage, and rushed into the screen. The first time was violently pushed out. For the second time, I fell down and made a fool of myself in the scene of the screen conversion. In just four and a half minutes, tired of the jokes, Keaton's brilliant conception and then-mature editing and directing skills were shown.
After being pushed out of the screen for the first time, he faced the audience and pointed one finger at the screen, as if accusing the audience of "turning a blind eye". Attempting to forcibly enter the film as a third party, trying to change the plot is not feasible. The film calls the audience into the story but at the same time must remain "out of sight".
The second time successfully entered the painting, but the situation has changed. The screen began to switch scenes constantly, made up of collages of different landscapes. Seems to mimic the long-form-plus-short screening format of early movie theaters? Although it has been successfully filmed, the transformation of the picture has brought countless frustrations to the protagonist. Frustration is for laughs, but at least here, frustration comes from identification. It is after the host recognizes a complete solidity with the scenes in the film that the film succeeds in betraying him, placing him in the embarrassment of hilarious fall after failure. This effect is achieved by virtue of the delicate relationship between the film's truth and fiction. It is the reality in fiction that provides the possibility of material space for the frustration in the film after identifying with the reality.
The movie is frustrating here. A similar feeling is expressed at the end of the film. When the girl we like comes to our side, our overwhelmed protagonist learns the hero on the screen like a gourd. He held the girl's hand, and he also held the girl's hand; he kissed the girl, and he kissed her hard. The window frame is like a mirror, only the inside and outside of the screen are reversed. Movies are movies, and reality is reality. When the scene in the film changes and the time quickly reaches the time after marriage, people in reality are abandoned in the present, at a loss, scratching their heads.
"Into the Shadow" was attempted three times in total, the first two were obvious but failed, and the third "obscure" but finally succeeded. As a character in the narrative, the projectionist finally swept away the previous haze and successfully incarnated as Sherlock Holmes II. Incarnation is equivalent to identification, and it is the identification between the audience and the character that mainstream narrative films require. And the narrative of mainstream cinema requires the creation of a closed world that provides a completeness. Therefore, before the third filming, the camera moved forward, the audience in the cinema and the building of the cinema were excluded from the camera, and the painting only provided a self-sufficient and independent world.
A portion of the film provides the meta-movie narration here. If it is said that the third filming was not intentional, but the first two filmings are hard to ignore.
Meta-movie generally refers to a movie about a movie, and this movie should refer to the viewing of a movie. In order to establish the independence of film, early film theory emphasized the time-construction of film, the assumption of "naturalism" (as in Henbaum's "The Rhetorical Problem of Film"), and the unreality of reality (Jean Epstein's "The Rhetoric of Film"). Nature"). In the land between the real and the unreal, the film fosters expressiveness with charm and tension. The development of the theory is undoubtedly based on the experience of watching movies. This experience does not belong to the theoreticians alone, but should be regarded as a common feeling. The new visual experience brought by this nascent art is full of charm and confusion. The dislocation of reality and fiction brings novelty and frustration.
It is impossible to know the psychological state of the audience who were sitting in the theater watching this film when they watched the "movement". However, the performance of the theater space in the lens and the audience's entry into the lens, so the possibility of the audience seeing "self" cannot be ruled out. Even if the time has come to 1924, the audience who has long been aware of the falsity of the film may not be able to not be without another "presence" on the screen.
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