When Joseph Keaton was a child, as the story goes, he fell down the stairs, a whirl of flailing arms and legs. The magician Harry Houdini who was visiting at the time is said to have watched Keaton pick himself up and given him the nickname ‘Buster’, which stuck.1 Keaton was born in October 1895 in Kansas, USA, and began performing with his parents in vaudevillian comedy sketches from the age of three. When the era of silent film began to take root, he would go on to act in and direct his own films, achieving success in the 1920s, the so-called golden age of silent film.The 1920s was also a decade of prosperity for America, a decade which became known as the ‘Roaring Twenties’, during which many of (what is now considered) the standard parts of 21st-century American life, including car and film culture, became established. The prosperity was driven by new technology and the automation of production lines; the number of registered cars increased from eight to twenty-six million in the ten years to 1929.2 Mass advertising celebrated the booming consumer culture, helping to popularise the idea of the American Dream — the belief that success was achievable by anyone willing to work towards it. Keaton embraced that dream, making seven films in 1922 alone. In Sherlock Jr. (1924) he is ‘Boy’, a film projectionist and would-be detective besotted with a beautiful girl. Boy falls asleep on the job (17:06), and waking in a dream, wanders through a movie screen in an early example of a ‘film-within-a-film’. He stumbles through precariously shifting scenes, struggling to find his footing, wandering down a bustling street, and almost falling off a cliff. To create the dream sequence, Keaton would film in front of one setting, and the crew would measure his placement ‘to the fraction of an inch’3 before changing backdrops and repeating. Thus a strategically placed chair or tree would disappear at a crucial moment, sending a perplexed Keaton comically tumbling.The fast-paced action of Sherlock Jr., helped along by the fast frame rate of silent film, renders Keaton as a powerless figure subject to the whims of the moving image, buffeted by the vagaries of life. In one episode, Keaton finds himself perched on the handlebars of a runaway motorcycle (36:32), careering out of control.In the real world, life in rapidly modernising cities was becoming increasingly impersonal, and people felt ‘alarmed by the wrenching social upheaval caused by the forces of modernism’.4 Although the average worker enjoyed more disposable income, and goods simultaneously became cheaper, rapid technological change and the cultural turn towards consumerism created a new sense of alienation. Even against the thrill of the Roaring Twenties, the city landscape could feel lonely. People were surrounded at all times, but by anonymous strangers. Keaton captures this sense of alienation in Sherlock Jr.. As we learn from Boy’s experience of his dream sequence, even bustling New York City could feel as isolating and unknown as a barren cliffside. Towards the end of the film, despite his bravado, we witness Boy struggling to connect emotionally with his love. He looks to the film-within-the-film for inspiration, and ends up mechanically copying the debonair actor depicted there to plant a dispassionate kiss on his lover’s lips.When stock prices plummeted in September 1929, the Roaring Twenties gave way to what would become the Great Depression, and Keaton’s own career struggled after he signed a contract with MGM Studios (which he would later describe as ‘the worst mistake’5 he ever made). Keaton, however, remained a favourite of the people. Passing a cinema in Munich in 1962 Keaton turned to a friend and asked, ‘What are they laughing at?’ His friend responded: ‘Your film’.6