When Samuel Beckett Tried to Capture the Power of the Movies - The New Yorker 3/6/17, 9:01 AM

PAGE-TURNER

WHEN SAMUEL BECKETT

TRIED TO CAPTURE THE
POWER OF THE MOVIES
By Siddhartha Mahanta March 1, 2016

The silent-!lm great Buster Keaton starred in

Film, an avant-garde movie by Samuel
Beckett.

n the summer of 1964, Samuel

I Beckett arrived in New York
City for his !rst and only trip to
the United States, to oversee
production on what would be his
!rst and only !lm. Titled Film,
it was commissioned by the avant-
garde publisher Barney Rosset as
part of a triptych; the other two
pieces were written by Harold
Pinter and Eugne Ionesco (both
of whom, like Beckett, were

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published by Rossets Grove

Press), though Rosset was unable
to bring those to fruition. Beckett,
by the mid-nineteen-sixties, had
cemented his global reputation
with the successes of Waiting for
Godot and Endgame, and he
and Rosset marshalled a
remarkable collection of talent for
their movie: celebrated theater
director Alan Schneider;
cinematographer Boris Kaufman,
who had worked on 12 Angry
Men and On the Waterfront,
among other !lms; and, most
notably, the silent-screen legend
Buster Keaton.

The plot of Film is, not

surprisingly, scarce. O (Keaton) a
dilapidated !gure who wears an
oversized trench coat and a
"attened white Stetson, is pursued
by E (the camera, essentially
and, by proxy, you, the viewer). O
scurries along Pearl Street, in the
bombed-out area beneath the
Manhattan end of the Brooklyn
Bridge. He collides with an old
couple who are dressed in quaint

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Victorian style, and whose

perturbed stares slowly twist into
horror. When E then confronts
them, they shrink in the agony of
perceivedness, according to the
script. A similar encounter in the
stairwell of an apartment building
follows, this time with an old
woman carrying "owers. Becketts
spare text dictates that E can only
approach O from behind and at
an angle not exceeding 45
degrees. This angle of immunity
is the hallmark of Becketts
experiment: once it has been
breached, then our hero, our O,
will know he is perceived; horror
will set in, and all will be lost.

Its really quite a simple thing . . .

Its a movie about the perceiving
eye, about the perceived and the
perceivertwo aspects of the
same man, Schneider explained to
aa writer
writer for The
writer for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
Yorker who
visited the set. The perceiver
desires like mad to perceive, and
the perceived tries desperately to
hide. Then, in the end, one wins.
Simple enough.

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Not!lm, a documentary by !lm

historian Ross Lipman that traces
the production of Film, recently
had its North American premiere
at the Film Society of Lincoln
Center, as part of an annual
festival put on by Film Comment.
(After additional festival
screenings this month, it will have
a limited theatrical release in
April.) Lipman draws on
previously unheard conversations
between Beckett, Schneider, and
Kaufman, plus interviews with
Rosset and the frequent Beckett
collaborator Billie Whitelaw,
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critic Leonard Maltin, who visited
the set of Film as a teenager. 2. Jack Whites In!nite Imagination
Not!lm also features part of a By Alec Wilkinson
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Film, footage that had been 3. Trump Orders All White House
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Not!lm leaves you with the Tweets
unmistakable sense of Film as a By David Remnick and Evan Osnos

failed, fascinating experiment, a

grand harnessing of craft and 5. Trump, Putin, and the New Cold
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creative genius that couldnt gel By Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and
Joshua Yaffa
into coherence. Yet, for all of its
shortcomingsfailures that
Our Thirty Most Popular
Beckett himself eventually
acknowledgedLipman !nds in
Film genuine insights about
Becketts work as a whole, and
even about the nature of the
movies. For Beckett, the cinema
was pregnant with exciting,
terrifying potential: the power to
burn onto celluloid a performers
likeness, his fears, his history, and
make him confront, in a
particularly modern way, his
mortality.

he ideas about perception

T that Beckett explores in
Film are both grandly
philosophical and deeply personal.
Lipman describes the movie as a
tongue-in-cheek but pointed
debate between Beckett and the
Irish enlightenment philosopher
George Berkeleyspeci!cally,
Berkeleys notion that esse est
percipi (To be is to be
perceived).* But Lipman also
notes that the very phenomenon

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of being recorded both repulsed

and resonated deeply with Beckett,
who was famously averse to having
his voice captured on tape. He
felt the cameras eye as a literal
wound, Lipman argues. Cinema
was, for Beckett, something like
the fullest form of perception, with
all the invasiveness and pain that
that entailed.

For the character of O, Beckett at

!rst wanted Zero Mostel or the
Irish actor Jackie MacGowran,
who had played Lucky in
Waiting for Godot. But he had
long
long been
been aa fan
long been fan of
fan of Keaton
Keaton, tooin
of Keaton
fact, Keaton was oered the role of
Lucky in the original American
run of Waiting for Godot, in
1956. (Keaton turned it down.)
The bumbling physical comedy of
Godot owes a great deal to
vaudeville, and Keaton came from
a vaudeville background: he
started performing with his
parents,
long beenas apart
fan of
of The
Keaton
Three
Keatons, when he was three. In
the early sixties, Keaton was still
working, but his heyday was long

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since overand that past-his-

prime quality resonates deeply in
Film. O, as embodied by Keaton,
is a man desperate to escape the
camera and the penetrating eye of
the public.

Becketts use of Keaton is

knowingly perverse: since the
script requires the camera to stay
behind O until the end of the !lm,
it deprives the viewer almost
entirely of Keatons famous face.
On set, Becketts regimen was
punishing: he and Schneider
insisted on take after take in
hundred-degree weather. As
Lipman notes, such demands were
typical of Beckett, who often put
his performers in gruelling
situations: con!ning the actors in
Play in urns, forcing the hobbled
heroes of Endgame into
uncomfortable physical
contortions, or reducing the actress
of Not I to a shrieking mouth. In
that 1972 play, the star, Billie
Whitelaw, had to be totally
immobilized in black . . .
everything black and tight,

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preventing her from moving any

muscle at all, save for her mouth.
It was an exercise in sensorial
reduction, to reveal the pain of
life itself.

According to Schneider, though,

Keaton was a regular gentleman
on set, indefatigable if not exactly
loquacious. And his bumbling
physicality made him the ideal
choice for Film. In the movies
climax, set in a sparsely furnished
room that belongs to Os mother,
O wages his !nal bid against
perceptionfacing o, so to
speak, with a parrot, a gold!sh, a
dog, a cat, and a rocking chair with
a headrest cut into a shape that
resembles a pair of eyes. In the
scenes closing moments, O tears
apart a print that depicts the
Sumerian god Abu, and a series of
pictures that stand in for the
stages of life. Thinking his work
done and perception vanquished,
he rests. O, or maybe Keaton, can
!nally unburden himself of his
profoundly heavy cinematic
baggage, escape our perception,

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and drift into memory.

Or so it seems for a moment. Es

gaze pierces the sleep . . . O half
starts from chair, then stiens, the
script reads. Keaton, wearing an
eye patch, !nally faces the camera,
looking startled and wary. He
grips the chairs armrests. It is Os
face . . . but with [a] very dierent
expression, impossible to describe,
neither severity nor benignity, but
rather acute intentness, the script
instructs. O falls back into his
chair. He sits, bowed forward, his
head in his hands, gently rocking.
The end.

he shoot lasted for three

T weeks, with Schneider, as he
recalled in an essay about directing
Film, following Keatons every
shambling gait, shooting more
180-degree and 360-degree pans
than in a dozen Westerns. The
veteran Keaton found the
!lmmaking practices of Schneider
and Beckett, both cinematic
novices, curious, and the
production of Film suered from

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amateurish scheduling and casting

mix-ups. (An entire opening
sequence, featuring pedestrians
strolling under the Brooklyn
Bridge, apparently drowning in
self-perception, was ultimately
rendered unusable, thanks to
camera problems.) Beckett,
Schneider, and Kaufman,
meanwhile, could never quite
settle on the proper visual
signatures to distinguish O and Es
perspectives. The idea of the
movie was obscured by technical Do you have a tip for The New
incompetence. Yorker that requires anonymity and
security?
Film is the sort of thing that,
Send it via Strongbox.
when, youve done your
experiment with the audience and
you tell them [what its about],
theyll all go, Ahhh, the scholar
Kevin Brownlow tells Lipman in
Not!lm. But without that kind
of critical direction, its meanings
can be dicult to discern. Beckett,
in a letter to Schneider, wrote that
there had been a failure to
communicate by purely visual
means the works basic
intention. But he thought that

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Film was a success in other ways.

What came about from Film is
that Samuel Beckett realized that
he still loved cinema, but that
motion-picture !lm wasnt his
medium, Lipman told me.
television
Beckett would turn to television
television,
writing Eh Joe, in 1966, and, a
decade later, Ghost Trio and . . .
but the clouds . . . The !rst of
these, Lipman pointed out, seems
to pick up right where Film ends,
with a long, slow zoom into a
face. And all of the TV
productions reprise the themes of
Filmthe threat of perception,
diminished physical spaces,
television
spiritually collapsed menwhile
adding something that Beckett
willfully deprived himself of when
making Film: spoken words,
speci!cally the spare, haunting
kind, married to precise stage
directions, of the sort that he had
mastered in his plays. Film was
only the beginning of an eort
both to investigate and to portray
the power of the camera.

Film premiered on September 4,

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1965, the third-to-last night of

that years Venice Film Festival.
Rex Reed, in the New York Times,
described the scene
scene: several
hundred bikini-clad starlets
surrounding the likes of Luchino
Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni,
and Jean-Luc Godard, and then
Keaton, looking for all the world
like the kind of man dogs kick,
with his pants a little baggy and
his hat a bit crushed. Keaton said
it was the !rst time hed ever been
invited to athe
described !lm festival. Critics
scene
mostly panned the moviebut
then Keaton hadnt given them
much to go on. Heck, Id be the
last one in the world to comment,
he told Reed, because I didnt
know what those guys were doing
half the time.

* This post has been updated to

correct the nationality of George
Berkeley and the translation of his
philosophical proposition.

Siddhartha Mahanta is an assistant editor

at Foreign Policy.

MORE: THEATRE DOCUMENTARIES FILM

SAMUEL BECKETT

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