Sherlock Jr. (1924) (with Peter Adamson)

Episode 59 heralds Chris and Alex’s first foray into silent film comedy via the work of performer Buster Keaton, looking at his feature Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924) that celebrates the dreams and psychology of a movie theatre projectionist. Joining them as the lights go down is Peter Adamson, Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Münich and King's College London, and host of the successful History of Philosophy without any gaps podcast that examines the “ideas, lives and historical context” of both major philosophers and more lesser-known figures. From Buster Keaton’s gag structures to the unruliness and absurdity of early nickelodeon audiences, this episode of the Fantasy/Animation podcast covers distinctions between theatrical vaudeville performance and the ‘staging’ of action afforded by the film medium; how Sherlock Jr. relates to classical film theory’s post-romantic emphasis on dreams and psychology to explain the emotion and aesthetic experience of moviegoing; experiments with editing and the power of the ’cut’ in Keaton’s comedy; the cyclical arrangement of comic narrative structures; Keaton’s expressive relationship to both silent-era animation stars (such as Felix the Cat) and the sentimentality of contemporaries like Charlie Chaplin; and how Sherlock Jr. offers the potential to think through the division between ‘film philosophy’ and ‘philosophical cinema.’