Beyond Percept and Affect: Becketts Film and Non-Human Becoming1

Colin Gardner
Abstract

University of California, Santa Barbara

Film, Samuel Becketts 1964 short starring Buster Keaton, dubbed by Deleuze as The Greatest Irish Film, is a seminal text in the latters cinematic canon as it helps us to extrapolate the transition from the Bergson-based movement-image of Cinema 1 to the Nietzschean timeimage of Cinema 2. Film is unique insofar as its narrative traverses and progressively destroys the action-, perception- and affection-images that constitute the movement-image as a whole, using Keatons body, and more importantly his face, as a means of attaining a pure intensity or Entity abstracted from all spatio-temporal coordinates, a condition of exhaustion/saturation that Deleuze and Guattari call, non-human becoming. Becketts lm is predicated on Bishop Berkeleys fundamental philosophical principle, esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) and, using Keaton as its protagonist, raises the question of whether it is possible to escape perception, not only by a third party, but also by oneself. The latter is played by the camera itself, which stalks Keaton from behind, taking great pains not to exceed a 45-degree angle of immunity (lest Buster experience percipi or the anguish of perceivedness) until the lms nal close-up when he comes face to face with his own self-perception and affective annihilation. Films denouement thus deconstructs the very nature of conventional cinematic language, whereby lmic suture the enfolding of character, camera and spectatorial viewing-views into a unied eld of vision gives way to a perspective where, at the very moment that the perceptive/affective

Deleuze Studies 6.4 (2012): 589600 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2012.0085 Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls

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body dies, the work of lmic art gives birth to itself as a being of pure sensation, exceeding lived experience. Keywords: movement-image, perception, suture, interstice, exhaustion, event Film, Samuel Becketts 1964 experimental short starring Buster Keaton, dubbed by Deleuze as The Greatest Irish Film, is a seminal, albeit transitional, text in the latters cinematic taxonomy. Deleuze uses Film as a reverse proof of the three varieties of movement-image through their progressive extinguishing or exhaustion, thereby providing an early case study for his subsequent analysis of Becketts television work in his oftcited essay, The Exhausted. As Deleuze explains his intentions,
We might also retrace the lines of differentiation of these three types of images, and try to rediscover the matrix or the movement-image as it is in itself, in its acentred purity, in its primary regime of variation, in its heat and its light, while it is still untroubled by any centre of indetermination. How can we rid ourselves of ourselves, and demolish ourselves? This is the astonishing attempt made by Beckett in his cinematographic work entitled Film, with Buster Keaton. (Deleuze 1986: 66)

As we shall see, this has far greater theoretical ramications than simply creating a reverse proof of the movement-image, for this demolition of subjectivity creates nothing less than what Deleuze calls an Event, which is simultaneously both an invention and an erasure or, as Tom Conley puts it, a pummelling of space. By unfastening the camera from any centre of motor action, Film surpasses human perception and creates, in effect, a non-human becoming that opens up onto the vastness of space itself. In The Exhausted, Deleuze calls this a manifestation of Language III, which no longer relates to a referent that can be enumerated or combined, or harnessed to specic voices of enunciation (whether Subject or Other), but taking the non-form of hiatuses, holes and tears, it instead looks outside itself as an endless line of ight on a limitless plane of immanence, as an aggregate of images/sounds from which all signifying language acts as a mere subset. Language III does not operate only with images but also with spaces, states Deleuze. And just as the image must attain the indenite, while remaining completely determined, so space must always be an any-space-whatever, disused, unmodied, even though it is entirely determined geometrically (Deleuze 1997a: 160). Beckett, in his 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, offers an almost uncanny presentiment of this analysis when he writes,

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As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it be it something or nothing begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. (Beckett 1983: 172)

For Deleuze, Becketts Film is an excellent test case for an examination of the determined subjects relationship to the indenite insofar as it is based on, but also contravenes, the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeleys formula, esse est percipi, or, to be is to be perceived. Directed by Alan Schneider under Becketts personal supervision and lmed on location in New York in the summer of 1964 (the lm was subsequently re-made in London by David Clark in 1978), the 21-minute short is often completely mystifying to audiences unfamiliar with Becketts script and subsequent production notes and letters to Schneider, for as Beckett scholar Ruth Perlmutter rightly points out, The lm needs to be read along with the lmscript, where some details are explained by Beckett. The lm is an allegorical visual representation of its palimpsest, the lmscript. Indeed, the script is essential for clarication (Perlmutter 1977: 83, n.3). Thus, only from studying early manuscripts do we discover that the lm was originally titled The Eye and contained a title page that read, For Eye and Him [later revised to One] who does not wish to [revised to would not] be seen (Gontarski 1985: 105). The protagonist thus began as Him, became One, then Object, then O, a progressive exhaustion of subjectivity and character psychology typical of Becketts work during this period. Moreover, the change of title to Film evoking the selfreexivity of the previous years stage drama, Play also suggests that the project is as much a meta-textual analysis of lmic form in-itself as it is a diegetic exploration of Berkeleyan perceptual ontology. Such a view is reinforced by Films retrogressive adherence to silent lm language (set in 1929, there is no accompanying music nor diegetic sound other than an admonishing Shhh from one of the minor characters) and the use of silent screen icon Buster Keaton (Charlie Chaplin, Becketts original choice, was unavailable), even if we are unable to see his face for the bulk of the lms running time. Again, only from the script do we learn of the Berkeleyan sub-text and that the lm demands that, All extraneous perception suppressed, animal, human, divine, self-perception maintains in being. Search of non-being in ight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception (Beckett 2006: 371). And then, perhaps

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most importantly, No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience (371). This suggests that Beckett conceived the lm structurally and dramatically as a creative work of art rather than scientically or philosophically. Moreover, the lm itself gives us little indication that the protagonist (played by a partially blind Keaton, wearing a dark patch over his left eye) is sundered into object (O) and perceiving eye (E). O is represented onscreen by Keaton himself, who constantly observes and monitors his environment (rendered in the lm as, blurry, soft-focus panning point of view shots, appropriate given the characters partial blindness). E is represented by the sharp focus of the camera itself, manifested through cuts rather than pans. O is always in ight, E forever in pursuit, attempting to keep O constantly in view. Although at no time are O and E shown in the frame at the same time, it is not clear until the end of the lm in the act of what Beckett calls the nal investment of O by E that pursuing perceiver is not extraneous, but self (371). And even here, the confrontation-cum-merger is shown not as a superimposition or crossfade but as a shot-reverse shot, reinforcing the integrity of the divided subject. Beckett himself acknowledged that this split scopic regime expressed two impossible viewing views, that the space in the picture is the function of two perceptions, both of which are diseased . . . [which] enable one to deform normal vision (Gontarski 1985: 187). Thus, although Es image is always sharply dened, it is no less corrupted than Os blurry focalization. The script also insists that, until the end of the lm, O is perceived by E from behind and at an angle not exceeding 45 (Beckett 2006: 372). O enters percipi (i.e. he experiences the anguish of perceivedness) only when this angle is exceeded, which occurs from time to time throughout the lm and causes E to retreat to a safe position. Indeed, in The Greatest Irish Film, Deleuze dwells very little on the philosophical principles behind the scenario, stating Films Problem in simple enough terms. From Berkeleys esse est percipi is it possible to escape perception? How do you become imperceptible? Keatons role is that of Bishop Berkeley, who had enough of being perceived and of perceiving. Or rather, states Deleuze, it is the transition from one Irishman to another, from Berkeley, who perceived and was perceived, to Beckett who had exhausted all the joys of percipere and percipi (Deleuze 1997b: 23). In common with the schematic formalism of his later plays, Beckett divides the script into three unequal parts, namely: 1. The street; 2. The stairs; 3. The room which Deleuze roughly approximates to three perceptual case studies, moving in reverse order from sensory-motor

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centredness to an exhausted, acentred spatio-temporal Event. Thus the street and staircase sequences are the province of the action-image; the room is dominated by the perception-image; while the nal sequence of Keaton falling asleep in the rocking chair and succumbing to Es nal investment culminates in a concluding, devastating affect-image. However, these strict demarcations often occlude more than they reveal, in terms of both a greater understanding of Becketts project, and also the creative uidity contained within Deleuzes taxonomy, which offers us far more than what literally meets the eye. First, they ignore an important structural preface and coda to the lm, whereby, because of technical problems encountered during the lming of the initial street sequence, much of the planned footage was scrapped in favour of adding a title sequence featuring Keatons enlarged eye. Thus, as we fade in, the screen is lled by an extreme close-up of his closed eyelid, almost reptilian with its intricate folds and wrinkles. The eye opens to reveal the full pupil, which is in turn superimposed by the rst title: Film by Samuel Beckett. Further credits follow, and as they conclude, the eye closes. The image is in sharp focus, so retroactively we assume that it is shot from the scopic point of view of E, rather than O, suggesting that it is an acute perception of a human apparatus of perception in effect, a metaperception-image. Perhaps more signicant is the rapid fade to black that follows, creating a short interval or interstice, before fading up as the eye opens once again. What has happened in this interval? Is this a simple action-to-action transition, or action-reaction formation typical of the syntagmatic connections forged by conventional montage, or is there something more ominous in that black hole that suggests a different space-time continuum through the tear in the fabric of the screen/scene? As we shall see, the lms coda will provide a more suggestive answer to this question. For now, the eye simply closes, opens, widens, followed by two blinks, before we dissolve to a brick wall and the opening of the initial street sequence. For Deleuze, the lms rst two sequences Keatons itinerary towards the apparent sanctity of his mothers apartment are a clear manifestation of the action-image, albeit one under considerable formal strain. As Martin Schwab notes,
The situation is presented from the point of view of a call for action, for everything we see events, scenes, actions receives its specic meanings from the point of view of Os goals and thus his subtractivity. For O, gazes are threats, his itinerary a path toward nonperceivedness, the room a sanctuary. (Schwab 2000: 122)

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Thus Keaton, head bowed and turned away from the camera, limits the danger of perceivedness by walking quickly and determinedly along a brick wall, thereby cutting off one complete side of possible perception. This is threatened when E initially catches him within the 45-degree angle of immunity, forcing Keaton to stop the action and conceal his face with his hand and handkerchief. The action is further delayed when Keaton bumps headlong into an elderly couple, who stand reading a newspaper, causing him to observe them briey with his out-of-focus stare before rushing on a few steps ahead of the pursuing camera. For Beckett, the couples sole role was to provide a diegetic excuse to introduce Os subjective point of view in preparation for its use in the extended, perceptually oriented apartment scene to follow. However, the couples exchange of glances also helps to ground the action-images formal language within the suturing effect of a shotreverse shot visual economy, which serves to enfold character, camera and spectatorial viewing-views into a unied eld of vision. Not surprisingly, because of the experimental nature of Films split subject, where the camera plays a multiplicity of different roles, this suturing effect is unravelled, further undermining the conviction of the nal suturing of E and O in the lms culminating investment sequence. As Graley Herren points out,
If E is supposed to represent the protagonists subject-status through camera perspective, and O is supposed to represent the protagonists object-status as screen-image, then where exactly do Os POV shots t in? They are neither E as subject nor O as object. (Herren 2007: 42)

For Herren, we end up with at least three divisions: E as camera eye; O1 as Keaton/object; O2 as a second camera eye, expressing Os direct point of view. To make matters more complex, there are also brief moments for example, during the agony of perceivedness of the elderly couple and the ower seller in the vestibule when Keaton-asO is not on-screen at all. Where is O during these interludes? These are moments when he avoids the threat of self-perception because he is not being perceived by E at all. Es attention is literally elsewhere. By both Berkeley and Becketts ontological logic, O thus achieves (at least cinematically) a state of non-being at these moments. Also, why would these extraneous characters be alarmed by E, who represents and produces Os agony of perceivedness rather than their own? E must clearly function as a multiple subject the I as Os double; the camera Eye recording O trying to escape being recorded; the eye of the spectator

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watching the camera recording O; as well as a role outside of the above, what one might call an any-self-perception-whatever, a contagious horror felt by whoever might encounter the cameras abnormally intense gaze and be affected by its deformed, piercing look. This aporia of viewing views is reiterated in the subsequent scene when Keaton cuts into the vestibule of his mothers apartment building. Here, the danger is increased because of the unprotected nature of the space Keaton is vulnerable to Es gaze from either side of the staircase as well as the presence of the elderly ower vendor, who descends the stairs with her tray and threatens to confront Keaton with her own subjective look. However, the roles are temporarily reversed as the woman herself also falls victim to Keatons dual perceptions. First, she is unrufed as she is observed by Os subjectively blurred gaze as she descends the stairs, but is then confronted by the camera, E. Her face contorts in horror as she too suffers the agony of perceivedness a dress rehearsal for Keatons own expression at the lms end before collapsing to the oor, just as O makes his escape up the ight of stairs. The long sequence that follows takes place in the seeming sanctuary of a run-down apartment. As Beckett himself states in his notes,
This obviously cannot be Os room. It may be supposed it is his mothers room, which he has not visited for many years and is now to occupy momentarily, to look after the pets, until she comes out of hospital. This has no bearing on the lm and need not be elucidated. (Beckett 2006: 380)

Well, actually, it has every bearing on the lm because it helps to explain why Beckett also breaks the sequence into three separate parts. First, because the room is not Os usual residence, it must be prepared to suit his own, non-scopic needs. No longer shielded by the wall, the angle of immunity is doubled as there is now 45 degrees on each side of O. Keaton may be observed by extraneous sets of eyes from all directions, including his own. Thus he takes great pains to cover the window, a mirror, the staring eyes of a parrot and goldsh and eject his mothers dog and cat. He also destroys an image of Berkeleys allperceiving God-the-Father, in this case a reproduction of a Sumerian head of the god Abu in the museum in Baghdad (Knowlson 1996: 465), whose bulbous eyes stare at O with severe insistence. Up to this point, the camera perceived Keaton alone, who seemed to have a blind perception limited only to his own intentionality. Now, E perceives him in the room in sharp focus as O, with his blurred vision, perceives

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the room itself thereby creating a double register of perception. Now, the character perceives for himself, says Deleuze,
his perceptions become things that in turn perceive him: not only animals, mirrors, a lithograph of the good Lord, photos, but even utensils (as Eisenstein said after Dickens: the kettle is looking at me . . . ). In this regard, things are more dangerous than human beings: I do not perceive them without their perceiving me, all perception as such being the perception of perception. (Deleuze 1997b: 245)

Once the present has been hermetically sealed off from outside observation, all that remains is to destroy past memories. This takes the form of a poignant sequence where, with E observing intently over his right shoulder, Keaton examines seven photographs, each marking a different age in his development, from his earliest baby picture in his mothers arms, kneeling in prayer at age four, through his schooldays, graduation, engagement, army enlistment, to a more recent picture of the aged Keaton wearing an eye patch. This is our rst glimpse of his face, signicantly mediated in reproduction via a surrogate photographic apparatus. In all cases, Keaton is shown to be happily within a condition of perceivedness, although his engagement and enlistment warrant a longer, more sustained look, perhaps because the war was responsible for the loss of his eye and family, while the engagement picture also features a photographer taking an ofcial snapshot, another surrogate for E. The result is a convoluted metatext by which E (and we, the audience) observe O looking at a picture of another camera observing O within the frame of the photograph. Keaton responds by tearing the photographs into four pieces in reverse chronological order, thus initiating his reductive path towards a zerodegree perception culminating in a condition of pure affect. All that remains is his mothers rocking chair, which suspends us in the middle of nothingness a typical Beckett trope of to-ing and fro-ing, which sends Keaton off to sleep once his perceptions are extinguished. Unfortunately, the greatest danger is now revealed the extinction of subjective perception frees the camera of the 45-degree restriction. Moreover, as Deleuze points out, the chair opens up other avenues of perception front, back and sides and the camera is quick to take advantage. After a false start, where Keaton wakes up just in time to forestall encroachment, the camera ultimately crosses the 45-degree angle and faces Keaton frontally for the rst time. The character O is thus now seen from the front, at the same time as the new and last convention is revealed, says Deleuze.

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The camera OE is the double of O, the same face, a patch over one eye (monocular vision), with the single difference that O has an anguished expression and OE has an attentive expression: the impotent motor effort of the one, the sensitive surface of the other. (Deleuze 1986: 67) It then reveals what it is: the perception of affection, that is, the perception of the self by itself, or pure Affect. It is the reexive double of the convulsive man in the rocking chair. It is the one-eyed person who looks at the oneeyed character. It was waiting for the right moment. This, then, is what was so terrifying: that perception was the perception of the self by itself, insuppressible in this sense. (Deleuze 1997b: 25)

In theory, this affect curved in on itself can only be extinguished when the chair stops rocking and the character dies. In short, in order to become imperceptible, you must cease to be and the lm perceptions mechanical correlate must end. But as everyone knows, nothing ever dies in Beckett, for his characters must continue to strive, continue to fail, continue to create something from the abyss of nothing. Keaton may die as a manifestation of the sensory-motor movement-image, but he must remain as part of a more profound cosmology that is very much alive: It is a question of attaining once more the world before man, says Deleuze,
before our own dawn, the position where movement was, on the contrary, under the rgime of universal variation, and where light, always propagating itself, had no need to be revealed. Proceeding in this way to the extinction of action-images, perception-images and affection-images, Beckett ascends once more towards the luminous plane of immanence, the plane of matter and its cosmic eddying of movement-images. He traces the three varieties of image back to the mother movement-image. (Deleuze 1986: 68)

One could argue that this is a key characteristic of all avant-garde cinema to recreate the acentred plane of pure-movement-images and establish an inhuman presence there. But is this really what happens at the end of Film? Do we really return to the immanent plane of movement, or is something more profound going on here? First, as we have already noted, the investment proper the confrontation of E and O as a sequence of cross-cut myopic close-ups dees the possibility of a unifying suturing effect. Here, suture is used not to bind the spectator into a misrecognised plenitude with a unied, centred screen subject, but to instead recruit our active agency in producing a split, acentred subject in the form of a temporal multiplicity. Second, it is signicant that the lm does not end with the investment

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proper but rather with an exact reprise of the opening title sequence featuring the extreme close-up of Keatons eye, complete with that bafing fade to black as a disruptive interval between blinks. In this respect, the eye echoing Films original title acts as both a spatial and temporal frame, as if the entire exhaustion of movement-images, from action, through perception to affection, had occurred literally within the blink of an eye, thereby folding Deleuzes taxonomy of intervals within an even larger interval, an interval on the verge of creating a direct timeimage. On the verge . . . but not quite. Which is perhaps where that momentary fade to black comes back into play: in particular its role within a larger economy of images. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari draw a clear distinction between percepts and perceptions:
Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived [experience]. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164)

In short, they exist in the absence of man as a controlling mechanism as he is himself a compound of percepts and affects: The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164), composed of independent elements such as colour, line, shadow and light. Thus Keatons O may metaphorically die at Films end because he has nally exhausted his sensory-motor connection to the movement-image, but he lives on in the work of lmic art that gives birth to itself as a being of pure sensation, exceeding lived experience. Given this distinction, this icker of blackness is less part of a conventional edit but a crack in the surface of the screen and the scene/seen that allows a brief glimpse into an immanent cosmos ready to give birth to something incommensurable: namely a direct time-image. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, The affect goes beyond affections no less than the percept goes beyond perceptions. The affect is not the passage from one lived state to another but mans nonhuman becoming (1994: 164). The vehicle for this genesis is not the interval the builtin delay that allows the action hero to bide his time within the continuum of the sensory-motor regime, ultimately using the delay to his advantage but the interstice, the false-movement or ssure through which the time-image becomes manifest. As Tom Conley explains,

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The interstice is the interval turned into something infraliminary in a continuum in which an event can no longer be awarded the stability of a place in the space of the image. The interstice becomes what exhausts and thereby creates whatever space remains of the image in the sensory-motor tradition. It supersedes the interval and, by doing so, multiplies the happenings of events. (Conley 2000: 320)

It is less a process of association than of differentiation. A potential is given, another must be chosen so that a third, new image is produced as a creative event. The advent of the time-image is this very proliferation of events, so that the world is now reinvented in each shot/instance via the Event of the interstice. In Film, the interval turns out to be unbridgeable via the movement-images conventional resort to causal montage and instead gives rise to the interstice as the incommensurability of immanent time, literally a space time captured but then lost in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately for us, Film ends at the very moment of its birth, leaving us with an any-space-whatever as the site of an event that is in the process of becoming what Deleuze calls a prenom taking place before it is named in language. It will be left up to Becketts subsequent television work most notably Eh Joe, Ghost Trio and Quad to make this incommensurable language (Deleuzes Language III) truly manifest.

Note
1. Part of this article is adapted from chapter 2 of Colin Gardner, Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art, 2012, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

References
Beckett, Samuel (1983) German Letter of 1937, in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, trans. Martin Esslin, ed. Ruby Cohn, London: John Calder. Beckett, Samuel Beckett (2006) Film, in The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol. III: Dramatic Works, New York: Grove Press. Conley, Tom (2000) The Film Event: From Interval to Interstice, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1997a) The Exhausted, trans. Anthony Uhlmann, in Essays Critical and Clinical, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1997b) The Greatest Irish Film (Becketts Film), trans. Michael A. Greco, in Essays Critical and Clinical, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1994) What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Gontarski, S. E. (1985) The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Becketts Dramatic Texts, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herren, Graley (2007) Samuel Becketts Plays on Film and Television, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Knowlson, James (1996) Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York: Simon and Schuster. Perlmutter, Ruth (1977) Becketts Film and Beckett and Film, Journal of Modern Literature, 6:1, pp. 8394. Schwab, Martin (2000) Escape from the Image: Deleuzes Image-Ontology, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.