Buster Keaton Double Bill
CINEMA

Silent Film with live piano accompaniment by John Sweeney.

Hilarious sight gags and jaw-dropping stunt work, in a double-bill of Buster Keaton comedies, screened with live piano from John Sweeney.

Though clocking in at under an hour, Sherlock Jr (1924) is the match of any of Keaton’s feature-length films, with an ingenious central conceit that doubles as a reflection on cinema itself. In it, he plays a dreamy projectionist who one day falls asleep on the job, leaves his body, and walks into the screen and into the film he is projecting.

Rhyming the surreal with the Kafkaesque, we screen Sherlock Jr with the earlier Cops (1922) in which Keaton, mistaken for a bomb-throwing anarchist, is chased across LA by hordes of police officers – the very image of an unfairly pursued hero vs. the implacable faceless forces of authority.

US 1924 Dir Buster Keaton 45 min Digital projection

US 1922 Dirs Eddie Cline, Buster Keaton 20 min Digital projection