A film projectionist longs to be a detective, and puts his meagre skills to work when he is framed by a rival for stealing his girlfriend's father's pocketwatch.
11 Dec Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Creating the Art of Folding
I am an enthusiast of what I call “folding” in film. That’s the collection of techniques that map some awareness or identification of what the film is, to the story within the film. It isn’t just a simple game, but a complex system of juggling representations and reality.
It is not unique to film of course — it has a long literary tradition. But it is one of the few things that characterise film as an agent of our imagination. I have built a database of hundreds of wonderful examples of folded films.
It all starts here. Even today, the medium is still young and quickly evolving. But when this was made, film was still indistinct from its siblings: theater and still photography. Griffith had hampered the evolution by introducing one feature (societal scope — unachievable on stage) by freezing another (ALL of the other conventions of stage).
Keaton’s notion of a film within a film seems ordinary today. Today, we don’t even blink at one of the effects in this film: Keaton (in his film-within persona) is planning an elaborate getaway through a window in a cabin. To see this getaway, you need to see the inside and outside. Since this is explicitly a movie, we see the cabin the way it was built for a movie: with one side missing.
It is, in effect a film within a film within a film. This now common notion all starts here, it seems.
Posted in 2003
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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