The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Buster Keaton · a film · 1924 · five reels, about 45 minutes · silent, with English intertitles
Mode
Silent feature comedy of real stunts and real space, turned on itself: a waking frame, a dream, and a film within the film
Mythos
The crossing of a threshold into the other world, the refusal and the second crossing, the double and the wished self, the hero made in the dream
Phase
One day and one night in a small town: a theatre swept, a courtship, a theft and a framing; a dream in a projection booth; a waking
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, five reels, about 45 minutes depending on the speed of projection, with English intertitles; stunts held in long shot without a cut
Register
From a boy too shy to hold a girl’s hand to a man on the handlebars of a motorcycle no one is driving; delight and astonishment, under a face that does not move
Scale
A projectionist, a girl, a rival, her father, one screen
Governing Proposition
A projectionist who studies to be a detective is framed for a theft by his rival, falls asleep in the booth, and walks into the screen, where he becomes the detective he wished to be. The wager of the film is that a comedy can take the cinema itself for its subject, make the cut a force that acts on a body, and show, in its last shot, what the pictures can teach a man and what they skip.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in a picture palace. A projectionist sweeps the theatre, and between sweepings he studies a manual on how to be a detective. He has no money and a girl to court. He buys her a box of candy and changes the price on it from one dollar to four. A dollar lost in the sweepings is the first test of him, and he passes it: the honesty of the poor boy is set out before anything is stolen.
Buster Keaton directed the film and plays the projectionist. It was made by Buster Keaton Productions for Joseph M. Schenck and released by Metro Pictures in April 1924. The scenario is by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell, the photography by Elgin Lessley and Byron Houck, the technical direction and sets by Fred Gabourie. Kathryn McGuire plays the girl, Ward Crane the rival, Joe Keaton her father, and Erwin Connelly appears with them. It is the shortest of Keaton’s independent features.
The work judged here is the film as released, five reels, about 45 minutes; the running time moves with the speed of projection, and restorations run about 44 to 46. The complete release survives, and no altered or shortened version competes with it. The film had no fixed score, and the accompaniment, which differs from one restoration to the next, is not part of the work. The intertitles are. One of them is the manual’s rule, and the film takes it at its word: “Shadow your man closely”.
Movement II
The girl’s father’s watch is stolen, and the rival, who took it, frames the projectionist with a planted pawn ticket. The detective in training is found holding the proof of a theft he did not commit, and he is sent from the house. The social world defeats him by its mechanism: a ticket in a pocket, and the price of a box of candy.
He does what the manual says. He shadows the rival, step for step, so closely that the rule becomes a gag, and he loses him. The waking frame takes about the first third of the film, and it is drawn small and level: a parlour, a street, a boy too shy to hold the girl’s hand. Its courtship is lit and staged flatly, and its supporting players are types.
Every element of it is spent later. The candy box and its altered price are the measure of the boy’s poverty; the dollar in the sweepings has set his honesty against the rival’s theft; the rule he fails by in waking life he will keep in the dream. And the screen he works behind in the first reel is about to become a door.
Movement III
Back in the booth, he falls asleep while the picture runs. His double rises from the sleeping body, walks down the aisle and steps into the lit screen. He is thrown out. He goes in again. The crossing into the other world is refused once and made the second time, and without it there is no film.
Inside the screen he is at the mercy of the cut. He sits on a bench, and the cut takes the bench away, and he falls into traffic. He stands still and is thrown from street to cliff to desert to sea by editing alone, each change made in the camera by matching his position across separate setups so that the cut changes the world and not the man. It is a lesson in editing given by edits, and it is felt as vertigo: the man suffers the cuts.
Then the picture on the screen becomes “Hearts and Pearls”, and he is in it as Sherlock Jr., the world’s greatest detective, immaculate in a top hat. The rival and the girl’s father reappear in the film within, recast as the villain and as the father of its heroine. The dream is shaped like the pictures he projects, and the detective he wished to be has the competence only a cut can give.
Movement IV
The pearls have been stolen, and the detective is set to recover them. At the billiard table one ball has been loaded to explode, and he plays the game through, every shot missing it by an impossible margin. He escapes through a window in a dive that leaves him dressed and gone. The plot of the pearls is perfunctory, by design; the gags are the matter.
The chase takes the dream’s second half. He rides the handlebars of a motorcycle with no one driving it, across a gap bridged by two passing trucks, through a road crew and a tug of war, the frame holding him small and fast in open country. Each catastrophe arrives just as it is needed. The stunts are seen whole, in long shot and unbroken, which is the condition of their truth: a body really did these things.
The ride ends with a car in a lake. Here the film is at its most additive. Each stunt is a fresh astonishment rather than a step the story needs, and two or three could go without loss of meaning; the law of the dream loosens, and any impossibility is permitted. Through all of it Keaton’s face does not move, and the stillness makes the wonder colder and larger, since nothing in the figure registers what the world is doing to it.
Movement V
While he dreams, the girl solves the case. She goes to the pawnshop and clears him herself. Then she comes to the booth. Her competence is noted and not pursued, and her detection sits outside the film’s law, a convenience of plot, but it is the waking world’s one decisive act, and it is not his.
He wakes and does not know what to do. He looks through the port at the screen, where a lover is courting, and copies him gesture by gesture: he takes her hand, and he kisses her. The screen teaches him each move in turn. Then it cuts past what it cannot teach, from the kiss to the couple with babies, and the projectionist, holding the girl’s hand, scratches his head.
The last shot closes the form on itself. The boy who walked into the screen to become a better self has learned from it the gesture and not the life, and the ellipsis that the cut makes without effort is the one thing he cannot follow. The film was not widely shown through the 1930s and 1940s, and its standing was made by the revival from the 1950s; it was named to the National Film Registry in 1991. What has lasted is a shape: a man asleep in a booth, a screen he can walk into, and a cut that carries him everywhere but home.
Act III · The Twelve
The economy is severe, and almost every element pays twice. The candy box with its price changed from one dollar to four comes back beside the rival’s gift as the measure of the boy’s poverty; the dollar in the sweepings sets his honesty against the rival’s theft before the watch is touched; the manual’s rule is played literally in the waking frame and redeemed in the dream; the screen he works behind in the first reel is the door he walks through in the second. The frame requires the dream, and the dream the last shot. What gives is the dream’s second half: the motorcycle ride and the car in the lake extend a chase whose stunts are additive, each a fresh astonishment rather than a needed step, and two or three could go without loss of meaning.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated. A spectator lives in the pictures as a better self, and the pictures cannot teach him how to live: the screen gives the gesture and skips the life, which the last shot shows by jumping from a kiss to a couple with babies while the projectionist, holding the girl’s hand, scratches his head. The second disclosure is about the medium: cinema’s space is made by the cut, and a man standing still can be thrown from street to cliff to desert to sea by editing alone, shown by making the man suffer the cuts. Both hold. What keeps the figure below the bar is weight: the waking world is a sketch, the girl’s competence is noted and not pursued, and the gap between wish and act is seen as comedy and not entered.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation here is astonishment, and it rises often. The double rising from the sleeping body and walking down the aisle into the light; the first cuts of the montage, when the bench he sits on vanishes and he falls into traffic, a moment of real vertigo in the form; the billiard game in which every shot misses the explosive ball by impossible margins; the dive through the window that leaves him dressed and gone; the motorcycle ride with no driver, across a gap bridged by two passing trucks, the frame holding him small and fast in open country. Keaton’s unchanging face makes the wonder colder and larger. What holds the figure is its kind: delight and amazement, seldom terror or grandeur, and the waking frame is level and small.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The myth is built on a threshold. The dreamer leaves his body, crosses into the other world through a lit surface, is refused, crosses again, and is made a hero there before he wakes; the screen is the looking glass and the bright counterpart of the land of the dead at once, and the structure bears it, since without the crossing there is no film. The double is built too: the shabby projectionist and the immaculate detective in top hat, the waking self and the wished self, the rival and the father recast in the film within. The particular stays particular: a pawn ticket, a box of candy, a dollar. What holds it below the gate is depth: the pattern is played for its mechanism and its comedy, the crossing changes the man only in a joke, and the archetype is clear rather than deep.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the slapstick feature and the dream frame, a proven device, and the confusion of a spectator by the screen had been played before. The departure is of a different order: a commercial comedy whose subject is the apparatus itself, the projection booth, the screen and the cut, and which makes the cut a force acting on a body inside the fiction. The screen entry, done in the camera by matching the actor’s position across separate setups, and the billiard and window gags break the realism on which Keaton’s own comedy of real stunts and real space depended, and break it knowingly. The stake: Keaton’s independent unit answered to Schenck and Metro for profit, and a short, strange, reflexive picture was a risk. Held below the top because the frame was proven and the risk a five-reel one.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Told without the screen, the story is a boy cleared of a theft and given the girl; told through the screen, it is about what the pictures do to the boy. The film within the film is the instrument: the dream is shaped like the pictures he projects, the rival and the father reappear in its roles, and the detective’s competence is the competence only a cut can give. The montage is a lesson in editing given by edits, a statement made in the only form that could make it. The ending closes the form on itself: the boy at the port copies the screen gesture by gesture, and the form shows the ellipsis that defeats him. Held a step from the top because the chase in the dream’s second half works as pure set piece, where the form contains stunts rather than knowing through them.
Score: 8.8 / 10
A century of return, and the yield is chiefly formal. The film has been read again and again as the founding text of reflexive cinema, as a theory of spectatorship before the theory, as a demonstration of editing set beside the Soviet experiments of the same years, as a dream work in the Freudian sense, and as the place where Keaton’s realist physics meets its own undoing; it is a fixed point in teaching on film form, and the screen-entry montage and its technique are studied without end. The semantic return is smaller. Once the threshold and the double are seen, the meaning is open and holds, and return finds more of the making, how the shots were matched and the stunts done, than of the sense: a deep well of form, a shallow one of meaning.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 1924, into the cinema of the 1920s, the decade of Murnau, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Lang and Keaton’s own The General (8.5). The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the first feature to take the screen and the spectator as its plot and to make the cut visible as a physical force; with Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929, 8.6) it is the decade’s great film about film, and it came first. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is delayed and discounted. Keaton fell from view in the sound era, and the film’s standing was made by revival from the 1950s and 1960s. The descent is then plain: Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) takes the crossing of the screen whole, and Jackie Chan’s stunt comedy acknowledges Keaton. The reach was more admired than followed.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across 102 years. The form survives whole, in its one five-reel version; restorations are repair, and the accompaniment, never fixed, takes nothing from it. Presence is real but not continuous: the film was not widely shown through the 1930s and 1940s, and its exhibition rests on the revival that began in the 1950s; since then it has been continuously present in repertory, teaching, festivals and every home format, and named to the National Film Registry in 1991, while its public is narrower than a sound classic’s, as a silent comedy’s must be. That charge sets the figure a step below the usual for its span. The fabric is nitrate grain and wear in surviving elements, the smallest charge, and the surface of 1924 ages as period. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. The screen-entry montage needs the actor placed to the inch across setups so that the cut changes the world and not the man, and it holds. The billiard shots, the dive through the window, the motorcycle ride and the fall from the train roof by the water tower are timed and framed so that the stunt is seen whole, in long shot and unbroken, which is the condition of their truth. Keaton’s performance is exact: a still face, an eloquent body, a gag built in three beats and resolved in one, and forty-five minutes paced near flawlessly. The costs: the waking courtship is lit and staged flatly, the supporting players are types, and the plot of the pearls is perfunctory.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the boy in the parlour, too shy to hold the girl’s hand, and the detective on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle crossing open country. One law governs both: a man whose wishes outrun his competence, in a world indifferent to him, survives by exact adjustment to its mechanics. The waking boy is defeated by social mechanism, the planted ticket and the price of candy; the dream detective is saved by physical mechanism, each catastrophe arriving just as it is needed. The last shot joins the two laws: the screen’s mechanism of romance meets a man who cannot follow the cut. The range is wide for a comedy of 45 minutes. The strain: the dream’s middle runs on a looser law, where any impossibility is permitted, and the girl’s waking detection sits outside both laws, a convenience of plot.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 45 minutes holds. Consciousness is held in a form: the dream is the film’s real subject, and the wished self against the waking self is integrated with everything else. Courtship and the family enter through the girl’s father and his watch; money through a dollar, a pawn ticket and the price of candy; the institution of cinema, its booth, its screen and its audience, is held fully; the law is a detective manual and a parody of the detective picture. What holds the figure lowest, below its own floor, is extent: labour is a sweeping boy and a projectionist’s job, the state and history are absent, the sacred and the natural order appear only as backdrops in the montage, and every order is seen through one boy’s wish. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 5.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.9, then The Living Form at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.7. A making in which an actor is placed to the inch across setups and the stunts are held whole in long shot; a form in which the screen, the film within and the montage are what the film knows, closed by a last shot that shows the ellipsis it cannot teach; and a turn that made the apparatus of cinema the subject of a commercial comedy and the cut a force acting on a body.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 5.8: consciousness, courtship, money and the institution of cinema are held, but labour is a sweeping boy, the state, history and the sacred are absent, and every order is seen through one boy’s wish. Above it, The Unconcealment at 7.7: two disclosures that hold, about the gesture and the life and about space made by the cut, with the waking world a sketch. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.8, a threshold and a double built clear rather than deep, and The Sublime at 7.9, astonishment and delight more than terror or grandeur.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8 and The Unconcealment at 7.7 fall short of it: a reach delayed by three decades, a myth clear rather than deep, and a disclosure kept light. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.7, against 7.5. The Megethos Floor is unmet: The Encompassed at 5.8 falls short of its own floor of 6.0 by two tenths, the measure of what a film of 45 minutes can hold. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate, by the Megethos Floor and by the aggregate, 8.1 from a sum of 97.4, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Sherlock Jr. as released in 1924, five reels, about 45 minutes depending on the speed of projection (restorations run about 44 to 46), silent, in black and white, with English intertitles, from the projectionist sweeping the theatre to the last shot in the booth: directed by Buster Keaton, who plays the projectionist, made by Buster Keaton Productions for Joseph M. Schenck and released by Metro Pictures in April 1924, with a scenario by Clyde Bruckman, Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell, photography by Elgin Lessley and Byron Houck, and technical direction and sets by Fred Gabourie, with Kathryn McGuire, Ward Crane, Joe Keaton and Erwin Connelly. The complete release survives in one version, and no cut is in question; restorations are repair. The film had no fixed score, and the accompaniments of later restorations are not the object and are neither credited nor charged. No print, script or title list was consulted. Intertitles are quoted only where their words are certain; the manual’s rule is the one quoted. Claims that could not be verified, among them the exact day of release, the part another director is reported to have had in the early direction, particular earlier films on a spectator confused by the screen, the film’s business at release and any cutting after previews, an injury on the set, the number and order of the places in the screen-entry montage, the order of some shots within the chase, and the counts of shots and titles, are not given.