Buster, a street photographer, falls in love with a girl he has captured on film, then must run around asking all he meets if they know the beautiful girl he has photographed. He becomes a newsreel cameraman in order to capture the real (not the reel) gal. "A newsreel by Buster Keaton of a newsreel by Buster Keaton. With Sherlock, Jr., The Cameraman is his most self-reflexive film. Trying to "make it" in the Hearst Newsreel Company, Citizen Keaton finally photographs a Tong War in Chinatown and a boating accident, and astonishingly forecasts the issues of contemporary documentary theory. Along the way we are treated to sublime Buster Bits: a one-man baseball game, acrobatic competitions with mass transportation, and a change into a bathing suit in, to say the least, straitened circumstances." (William Nestrick)