Film-scenes with glass—and some of the greatest can be found in Asghar Farhadi’s shattering domestic-drama A Separation (2011)—can vibrate with a private thrill because motion-pictures, for so long, appeared through glass. Celluloid steadily fluttered along, held just-so among the sprockets

and gears so it moved smoothly between the plates in that tiny aperture where the light shines through each frame, out into the darkness. The beam of the projector, its reels lit up from behind to pass through a lens, passed through swirling dust-motes and then, often, through another pane of glass—in the projectionist’s booth—before landing on the big screen.

The psychologist’s sense of “projection” as the “unconscious transfer of one’s desires or emotions to another person or some external object” first appeared in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1909 (via Jung). Filmmaking was on the cusp of becoming a full-fledged industry in the United States. This movie universe, without big-name celebrities, seems unthinkable now but, pre-1910, motion-pictures relied on company names, not star power. Directors and actors weren’t credited (partly to prevent demands for higher wages). Longer contracts meant more screen-time for some, though; soon, viewers were requesting names or photos. Reviewers joined in, lobby picture-posters followed, and the first fan magazine popped up in 1911. The star system had landed just as studios crossed the continent to a place dubbed Hollywood.

Flash-forward to today, when stars have agents and negotiate salaries or gross-percentages before signing on to a picture, and the result’s a dazzling mirage, celebrity-aura blurring with name-brand marketing as the actual movie trails behind. The star system’s so accepted that it’s tainted reviews—some critics waste lines on assessing an actor or on their sense of that actor based on her/his celebrity persona. Acting’s just one mise-en-scène element, but it’s been vaulted into the stratosphere (helped by the close-up, dominating films since the small screen’s rise, starting in the ’50s with TV). The fame-game’s glare has warped many a viewer’s perception of and interest in a film, too.

It’s become tough to tell if a role’s canny persona-playing or movie-marketing. A-list actors deemed to be dramatically not playing themselves often get the spotlight come awards-time. And the system tends to chew up and spit out actresses, so reduced to their image that their marquee-glow has a shorter light-span. Male stars seem more durable and bankable because of the industry’s sexism—more starring, complex roles for men—while some starlets get more tarred by tabloid-ish coverage: as spurned or betraying or sluttish or washed-up wreck. There’s also the Complex Leading Man stereotype—from Brando on through De Niro, Pacino, Depp, and Day-Lewis, it’s male stars, supposedly, who best become their roles, finding more method-acting in their talent-madness. (Most of these stars are white; Will Smith and Denzel Washington are recent exceptions proving the rule, since they usually play characters palatable to white audiences).

But perhaps many of us are content to have celebrity-actor personas to be irritated or beguiled or fascinated or reviled by, and we see a movie because it’s like watching someone we sort of think we know act a little bit like what we expect—a comfortably false front in an already untrue tale that only helps us escape our too-real lives that little bit better. That’s the self-editing motive behind a meta-cinema comedy that came out just fifteen years after “projection” was coined and star power’s wattage was amped up.

In the 1920s, as celebrity-power exploded—Houdini was followed by Chaplin as one of the few internationally-recognized sensations—actors’ gestures and body-language took centre-stage in silent comedy. Joseph Frank “Buster” (the name given to him by Houdini after he saw the boy tumble down stairs at six months, unharmed) Keaton did his own stunts, even fracturing his neck, he discovered years later, in the making of Sherlock Jr. (1924). The film was, reputedly, in part co-directed by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, whose court case—he was falsely accused of rape—was one of the first great Hollywood scandals (it, in part, led to the Hays Code, adopted in 1930 and stringently enforced from 1934 until the 1950s).

The two movie-making Keatons—actor and director—become two movie-influenced characters: a small-town projectionist, aspiring to private-eye-hood, falls asleep at the spinning reel-wheel and dreamily astral-projects himself onto the screen as a super-sleuth. We first see the fellow sitting in the cinema, reading the instruction-guide How To Be A Detective, but we’re

asked to play detective, too—to observe the ironic echoes of the projectionist’s real-life story in his dream-film plot (including his fantasy-demotion of his boss to his sidekick, Gillette—the surname of the first stage-actor to famously play Sherlock Holmes). And Keaton’s famously stone-faced look leads us to project emotion onto him or try, like plush-seated shamuses, to deduce what he’s feeling.

The projectionist’s film-fantasy is an American Dream—the hapless working stiff in life quick-changes into a too-cool, even cocky, dapper detective in his movie. But the title-card introducing the object of his affection, “[t]he girl in the case”, glass-smears fantasy and reality too by stating the actress’ name, Kathryn McGuire, beneath her character. In the movie of his mind, the

woman has no power—she’s a defenceless plaything, kidnapped by dastardly do-badders and sneeringly threatened with rape—but in reality she’s the best detective around, discovering that it was the projectionist’s rival who stole and pawned her father’s watch (that father? played by Keaton’s father). His dream’s an unspooling of his power-fantasy, where he rescues the girl, while in reality he’s unlucky and hapless until she exonerates him, even coming to him in the projection-booth to tell him so.

At the surreal start of it all, though, when his dream-self double leaves him, stands by the other projector, looks at the screen, and transforms the characters there into his real-life rival and his love-interest, this machine-

operator rises up to become both director of the story and projectionist-editor, splicing his real-life and reel-life together. (That other famous projectionist-film, Cinema Paradiso, ends with a reel of spliced-together romance-scenes which the town’s diocese had demanded the film-operator cut from the original screenings). To marry projectionist and projection, he walks down the aisle through the packed house; the projectionist’s projected self scampers on-stage and enters the screen-space. He’s tossed

out by his rival, “the sheik”, but leaps back in. Now, in frames within frames—he faces a mansion’s front door-frame, within the movie-frame, within the frame for Sherlock Jr.—and in frame after frame, the projectionist finds himself dreamily lurching, in cut after cut, from one fictional setting or set to another: that mansion, then a walled garden, a street, a cliffside, a jungle with lions, a desert, an ocean, a snowy mountainside, and then back to that walled garden (reminiscent of the Capulets’ estate; the melodrama within the romantic-comedy here, Hearts and Pearls, is a “Veronal Film Co.” picture, and Veronal was also the name of a sleeping barbiturate).

In this absurd interlude, film’s the stuff of dreams (what theorists call “oneiric”) but, when the projectionist crosses into the screen, he’s crossing not only into the dream-world but crossing from stage to screen, moving from theatre (and the world of vaudeville, with its previous generation of stars) to a comedy that can only be told, so amusingly, by film techniques. Most of the jokes depend on camera angles, cinematography, sets, props, and costumes. And it’s as if there’s a prankster god-in-the-machine cutting from one scene to another when the projectionist is in the film, causing him, for instance, to dive from that rock in the ocean into the snow on that mountainside. The cuts serve only to frustrate and bamboozle the projectionist, making him a plaything of cinematic fate. He’s controlled by the scene—made a foolish prop in someone else’s show. (And when we laugh at his tripping trials, does it mean that, in some small way, we’re happy to see this wanna-be bumbling and stumbling through the spotlight?) In a film, and a film-within-a-film, which often seems predictable, decorous, and bound by the conventions of melodrama, this flurry of metafilmic mayhem surges with surrealism, dislocation, and anarchy, turning comedy into an anti-heroic spectacle, stripping the would-be star of self-will. He can’t yet find any fixed position or safe place—there’s no secure spot for him yet in society. The projector (the dreamer) and the projected (the dream-vision) soon become inextricably linked, the fantasist head-over-heels in thrall to his fantasies. And while the dream gradually reveals that its dreamer doesn’t believe much in himself, it also helps him, through imitation and role-play, grow determined and act out a sense of authority and mastery. But with that initial trespass, that fourth wall-break-in—more slap-shot than slapstick—for a few wild, glorious moments, cinema seems a world without rules; it’s free-fall, chaotic, and full of surprise.

As the film-within-a-film plays on, though, the man whom Houdini nicknamed Buster exposes what cinema is—optical illusion. Keaton deconstructs movie-magic (a house-front’s shown in cross-section, exposing the ways sets were built with false fronts), adds up mathematics and angles to equal comedy (surveying equipment was used to set up the exact angles, depths, and positions for that shot-jolting sequence), and even inside-puns on the real-life crime (the villainous rival steals a watch, i.e., plays fast and loose with time, and the film’s comic cuts do the same). But while film’s fleetingly exposed, through the projectionist’s wonky looking-glass, as a medium capable of sudden, uproarious shifts in time and space, it’s also a class-machine, turning a near-nobody relegated to mechanical work in a backroom into a debonair star front-and-centre on the screen, surrounded by nice cars and high-class people, sporting expensive clothes, and searching for a pearl necklace. (Gender can camp and decamp, too: the detective dons an old lady costume for a getaway; his assistant dresses up as a frocked tie-peddler to help him escape.) The greatest trick of all may be the projectionist’s rise in class, but his American Dream, just like his screen-dream, bursts when he’s awoken. Then he’s no longer at the centre of his own idealized world, the star of his dream-script. He can’t turn to the screen as a wonderland to escape into or a mirror-land of model behaviour to be imitated. In the end, the projectionist, in the dark about romance, follows the movie hero’s moves by kissing the girl’s hand, then putting a ring on her finger, and next pecking her on the lips . . . only to be befuddled by the cut to the next scene, where husband and wife are raising newborns. The last we see of the projectionist is him, framed by the little window into his projection-room, scratching his head in confusion, as if bewildered by the world, imitating adult (e)motions but not yet ready to truly star in his

own everyday life. Projecting yourself—your voice, your image, your desires—can only stretch you so far, Sherlock Jr. suggests. Soon enough, the lights come up and you’re back in the un-reel world.

Works Cited

“Projection, n. 6. c.” Oxford English Dictionary, June 2007, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/152272.

A Separation. Directed by Asghar Farhadi. Sony, 2011.

Sherlock Jr. Directed by Buster Keaton [and Roscoe Arbuckle]. Metro-Goldwyn, 1924.

The author, a professor of film studies, has written and published this blog post for educational, critical, and analytical purposes. All film stills are included only to bolster the post’s argument and to further its educational purpose.