Film (film)
Encyclopedia
Film is a film
written by Samuel Beckett
, his only screenplay
. It was commissioned by Barney Rosset
of Grove Press
. Writing began on 5 April 1963 with a first draft completed within four days. A second draft was produced by 22 May and a forty-leaf shooting script
followed thereafter. It was filmed in New York
in July 1964.
Beckett’s original choice for the lead – referred to only as “O” – was Charlie Chaplin
, but his script never reached him. The director Alan Schneider
was interested in Zero Mostel
but he was unavailable. Beckett was “enthusiastically in favour” of Jack MacGowran
as a replacement but he also became unavailable. James Karen
, who was to have a small part in the film, talked constantly about the 68 year old Buster Keaton
and persuaded Schneider to consider him when MacGowran’s circumstances changed. Schneider credits Beckett himself with the suggestion however.
The filmed version differs from Beckett's original script but with his approval since he was on set all the time, this being his only visit to the United States
. The script printed in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (Faber and Faber, 1984) states:
It was remade by the British Film Institute
(1979, 16 mm, 26 minutes) without Beckett’s supervision, as Film: a screenplay by Samuel Beckett. David Rayner Clark directed Max Wall
.
It first appeared in print in Eh Joe
and Other Writings (Faber and Faber, 1967).
right and up and we realise it is a wall; we are outside a building (an old factory situated in Lower Manhattan
). It is summer though it is hard to tell. The camera’s movement is not smooth. It is as if it is looking for something. Eventually it loses interest and pans left and down back to the wall.
Suddenly the camera (E) shifts violently to the left. A man is hurrying along the wall from left to right. He pauses, hugging the wall and E gets a chance to focus
on him. He has on a long dark overcoat, the collar of which is turned up and his hat is pulled down over his face. He is hanging onto a briefcase with his left hand whilst trying to shield the exposed side of his face with the other. He realises he’s been seen and cowers against the wall; E quickly shifts behind him.
No longer conscious of being observed, O starts off again, knocking over a trestle, stumbling over a railway sleeper, anything to stay as close as possible to the wall. He charges into a man and woman, knocking the man’s hat off.
E looks from the man’s face to the woman’s and back again. The man has a moustache and is wearing a pince-nez
. They have been consulting a newspaper which the woman keeps hold of. They both look appalled at what has happened.
E moves back to a long shot and watches O barge through and on his way. The man replaces his hat, takes off his pince-nez and looks after the fleeing figure. The couple look at each other and the man “opens his mouth to vituperate” but the woman shushes him, uttering the only sound in the whole play. Together they turn to stare directly at E and, as they do, an open-mouthed expression takes over their faces; they can’t bear to look at what they’ve seen and turn their faces away.
The action shifts back to O just as he reaches and turns a corner. He heads off down the street until he realises he is at the right doorway. He enters.
. We are directly behind O. The stairs lead up on the left, but O veers right and pauses, pulling himself together. He takes his pulse
and E moves in. As soon as he becomes aware of E's presence he rushes down a couple of steps and cowers beside the wall until the camera retreats a little. When it does he reverses back up to street-level and then begins up the stairs.
A frail old woman is coming down. The camera gives us a brief close-up. “She carries a tray of flowers slung from her neck by a strap. She descends slowly and with fumbling feet.” O backs up and hurries down the steps to the right again where he sits down on a step and presses his face against the baluster
s. He glances up briefly to see where she is then hides his head from view.
As the woman reaches the bottom of the stairs she looks straight into the lens. The expression on her face changes to the one of wide-eyed horror that we saw displayed on the faces of the man and woman outside. She closes her eyes and collapses. E checks on where the man had been, but O has made his escape. We just catch his coat tails flying up the stairs.
E chases after him and finds him at the top of the first flight. He looks around to see if there is anyone about. Satisfied he turns left and, not without some difficulty, opens the door to a room and enters. E slips in unnoticed as O locks the door behind him and then takes his pulse once more.
and a goldfish
in its bowl sit atop a small table; the walls are bare apart from a mirror and an unframed picture of “the face of God the Father
” pinned to the wall; there is a couch with a pillow, some blankets and a rug on it, a rocking chair
with a “curiously carved headrest” and there is a window with a tattered roller blind with full-length net curtains to either side.
”) are – with some difficulty – ejected from the room and the picture is torn up. Although stated simply the mechanics needed to execute these tasks are laborious, e.g. as he passes the window he hides behind the blanket which he holds in front of himself to cover the mirror and he carries the cat and dog facing away from him as he tries to put them out the door.
After all the above he goes to sit in the chair. There are two holes in the headrest that suggest eyes. He ignores them and sits. O takes the folder from his case and goes to open it but there are “two eyelets, well proportioned”; he turns the folder through 90°
but he’s disturbed by the parrot’s eye and has to get up and cover the cage with his coat.
He sits again, repeats the same process with his folder and then has to get up and cover the goldfish bowl too.
“Beckett initially contemplated setting Film in the evening, but had to decide against it for a practical reason: ‘to remove all possibility of his putting off light in room.’”
He spends twice as long on pictures 5 and 6. After he looks at each one he places them at the back of the pile so the viewing order is reversed. He does not need to do anything with the seventh photograph since it is now on the top of the pile. After a few seconds he rips it up and drops it on the floor and then works his way one after another through the rest of the photos, looking at each one briefly again and then tearing it up. The photograph of him as an infant must be on a tougher mount and he has some difficulty with that one. “[I]n Beckett the distant past is always more tenacious than recent events.” Afterwards he rocks slightly, hands holding the armrests and then checks his pulse once more.
O is now in a similar situation to the man in A Piece of Monologue
who has also destroyed all his old photographs and now stands facing a similarly blank wall.
As O begins to doze off, E begins to move round to his left. Suddenly O realises he is being watched and turns his head violently to the right. E moves behind him again. He resumes rocking and dozes off. This time E whirls round to the right, passing the window, the mirror, the birdcage and fishbowl and finally stops in front of the space on the wall where the picture was.
E turns around and, for the first time, we are face-to-face with O, asleep in his rocking chair. All of a sudden he wakes and stares straight into the camera lens. He looks very much like the man in the seventh photograph only much older. He still has the eye patch.
He half starts from the chair then stiffens. Gradually the horrified look we have seen before on the couple and the old woman’s faces appears on his. He is looking at himself but not the scruffy, wearish man we have been watching, the man before him, standing with a big nail beside his head, has a look of “acute intentness” on his face. O slumps back into the chair and starts rocking. He closes his eye and the expression fades. He covers his face with his hands briefly and then looks again. This time we see the face of E in close-up, just the eyes.
O covers his eyes again, bows his head. The rocking dies down and then stops. The screen goes black. We then see the opening image of the eye, which is frozen, and the credits are presented over it. Once finished, the eye closes and the film is over.
The work is studied by and has been the subject of criticism from both film
and theatre
scholars, with the former tending to study the film as shot, the latter tending to study the script as written. Critical opinion is mixed, but it is generally held in higher regard by film scholars than it is by theatre or Beckett scholars. The views above represent extremes. A ‘middle-ground’ review would probably be “a poor attempt by a genuine writer to move into a medium that he simply hadn’t the flair or understanding of to make a success.” Beckett’s own opinion was that it was an “interesting failure.”
The film opens and closes with close-ups of a sightless eye. This inevitably evokes the notorious opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou
in which a human eye is sliced open with a razor blade. In fact, The Eye was an early title for Film, though admittedly, at that time, he had not thought of the need for the opening close-up. As a student of French literature
, Beckett would have been familiar with Victor Hugo
’s poem La Conscience. ‘Conscience’ in French can mean either ‘conscience’ in the English sense or ‘consciousness’ and the double meaning is important. Hugo's poem concerns a man haunted by an eye that stares at him unceasingly from the sky. He runs away from it, ever further, even to the grave, where, in the tomb, the eye awaits him. The man is Cain
. He has been trying to escape consciousness of himself, the self that killed his brother, but his conscience will not let him rest. The eye/I is always present and, when he can run no further, must be faced in the tomb.”
Film takes its inspiration from the 18th century Idealist Irish philosopher Berkeley. At the beginning of the work, Beckett uses the famous quotation: "esse est percipi" (to be is to be perceived). Notably, Beckett leaves off a portion of Berkeley’s edict, which reads in full: “esse est percipi aut percipere” (to be is to be perceived and to perceive). Beckett was once asked if he could provide an explanation that ‘the man in the street’ could understand:
In between takes on the set near the Brooklyn Bridge
, Keaton told a reporter something similar, summarizing the theme as "a man may keep away from everybody but he can't get away from himself." From this comment it shouldn’t be assumed that he understood the film – there is too much evidence to the contrary – but he got the point.
In Beckett's original script, the two main characters, the camera and the man it is pursuing are referred to as E (the Eye) and O (the Object). This simplistic division might lead one to assume that the Eye is only interested in the man it is pursuing. This may be true but it does not mean it will not have the same effect on anyone who comes in contact with it. “E is both part of O and not part of O; E is also the camera and, through the camera, the eye of the spectator as well. But E is also self, not merely O’s self but the self of any person or people, specifically that of the other characters — the elderly couple and the flower-lady — who respond to its stare with that look of horror.” E is, so to speak, O’s blind eye. "He has the function of making all with whom he comes into contact self-aware.”
O does everything physically possible to avoid being seen by others but the only thing he can do to avoid perception by an “all seeing god” is to tear up his picture, a symbolic act, as if saying, “If I don’t believe you exist you can’t see me.” There is no one there to see him for what he really is other than himself and so, in this godless world, it is only fitting that E, representing O's self-perception, would appear standing where the picture has been torn from the wall. O also destroys the photographs of his past, his ‘memories’ of who he was. Now all that remains for O is to escape from himself - which he achieves by falling asleep until woken by E's intense gaze. The room is more figurative than literal, like many of Beckett’s rooms, “as much psychological as physical, ‘rooms of the mind,’ as one … actor called them.”
If Beckett were Shakespeare
he might well have written: “To be seen or not to be seen, that is the question.” It is an issue that concerns many of Beckett’s characters. At the end of the first act of Waiting for Godot
, when the boy wants to know what to tell Mr Godot, Vladimir
tells him: “Tell him … (he hesitates) … tell him you saw us. (Pause.) You did see us, didn’t you?” But what happens when you are alone? The narrator of The Unnamable
answers: “They depart, one by one, and the voices go on, it’s not theirs, they were never there, there was never anyone but you, talking to you about you…” The old woman in Rockaby
appears to be the exact opposite of O but although she actively seeks to be seen by someone while O does everything to avoid perceivedness, the irony is that both characters are alone with only themselves for company.
Beckett's script has been interpreted in various ways. R. C. Lamont writes that "Film deals with the apprenticeship to death, the process of detaching oneself from life. Like the Tibet
an Book of the Dead
, it teaches the gradual dissolution of self. The veiling of the windows and mirrors, the covering of the birdcage – the extinction of light, reflection and light – are so many ritualistic steps to be taken before final immobility, the resignation of the end.” At the end of Film, O is seated in his rocker with his face buried in his hands; at the end of Rockaby, the old woman's head inclines forward as if, finally, she had died. The final scene in Film is also comparable to the moment in the library when the old man in That Time sees his own reflection in the glass covering a painting.
It could be tempting to think of O and E as a Beckettian Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – indeed in notes for the first draft Beckett did toy “with the idea of making ‘E tall’ and ‘O short (and) fat’ which corresponds with the dual physique of Jekyll and Hyde” – but Film is not concerned with representations of good and evil, only with the concept of the second self, of pursuer and pursued.”
For Linda Ben-Zvi, “Beckett does not merely reproduce the modernist critique of and anxiety over technology and the reproduction of art; he attaches 'no truth value' to his critique of technology and the reproduction of the gaze. Instead, he creates a dialogue that awakens and revitalises the uncritical perception of his audience... The work not only is predicated on the form but invariably becomes a critique of its form." Having written a play titled Play
and a song called Song, it comes as no surprise that Beckett would entitle his first foray into cinema as Film. The title supports Ben-Zvi's interpretation in that it is a film about cinematic technology: how the movie camera and photographic images are used in Film are essential to understanding it. When he writes, “No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience”, Beckett takes the emphasis away from Berkeley's maxim
thus stressing the dramatic structure of the work. The viewers are being asked to consider the work structurally and dramatically rather than emotionally or philosophically.
playwright Sherry MacDonald.
Beckett had never seen Schneider direct any of his plays and yet continued to entrust him with the work. Why then, for this particular project did he decide to make the trip? Schneider has speculated that it may simply have been the opportunity to work directly with Keaton. “It has even been suggested that the inspiration for Waiting for Godot might have come from a minor Keaton film called The Lovable Cheat in which Keaton plays a man who waits endlessly for the return of his partner - whose name interestingly enough was Godot.”
“When Schneider managed to hunt up Keaton, he found that genius of the silent screen — old, broke, ill, and alone — some $2 million ahead in a four-handed poker game with an imaginary Louis B. Mayer
of MGM
and two other invisible Hollywood moguls.
“‘Yes, I accept the offer,’ were silent Keaton’s unexpected first words to Schneider. Keaton was dying even as they made the film. ‘We didn’t know that,’ Rosset told interviewer Patsy Southgate in 1990, ‘but looking back at it, the signs were there. Couldn’t speak — he was not so much difficult, he just wasn’t there.’ Keaton would in fact die 18 months after the shooting of Film.”
From this one might think that Keaton jumped at the chance but this is not the case. James Karen remembers:
Beckett had wanted to work with Keaton several years earlier, when he offered him the role of Lucky in the American stage premiere of "Waiting for Godot," but Buster turned it down. It's said that Buster didn't understand Godot and had misgivings about this script as well. Presumably this went a long way to make him think twice about this new project.
During a meeting with documentary filmmaker, Kevin Brownlow, Beckett was quite forthcoming:
Scheneider’s recollection of that awkward first meeting confirms all of this and more: “They simply had nothing to say to each other, no worlds of any kind to share. And all of Sam's good will and my own flailing efforts to get something started failed to bring them together on any level. It was a disaster.”
But not entirely. Although the role called for Beckett’s seemingly ubiquitous bowler hat, Keaton had brought along some of his trademark flattened-down Stetson
s and it was quickly agreed that he should wear one of those. On the Monday morning they “traipsed down in Joe Coffey's ancient Morgan
to just beneath the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge and began the shooting.” Beckett continues:
Both Beckett and Schneider were novices, Keaton a seasoned veteran. That said, “Keaton's behaviour on the set was … steady and cooperative … He was indefatigable if not exactly loquacious. To all intents and purposes, we were shooting a silent film, and he was in his best form. He encouraged [Schneider] to give him vocal directions during the shot, sometimes starting over again without stopping the camera if he felt he hadn't done something well the first time. (Nor did he believe much in rehearsal, preferring the spontaneity of performance.) Often when [the crew was] stumped over a technical problem with the camera, he came through with suggestions, inevitably prefacing his comments by explaining that he had solved such problems many times at the Keaton Studios back in 1927.”
Both Beckett and Schneider pronounced themselves more than pleased with Keaton's performance; the latter called him "magnificent."
Keaton’s negative comments about the film are often reported but this final recollection by Schneider may redress the balance: “[W]hatever he may have subsequently said to interviewers or reporters about not understanding a moment of what he was doing or what the film was about, what I remember best of our final farewell on the set was that he smiled and half-admitted those six pages were worth doing after all.”
In February 1965, when on a trip to West Berlin
, “in deference to his recent work with Buster Keaton, he went to see Keaton again in his 1927 film The General
, finding it, however, disappointing.”
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
written by Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, his only screenplay
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
. It was commissioned by Barney Rosset
Barney Rosset
Barnet Lee Rosset, Jr. is the former owner of the publishing house Grove Press, and publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Evergreen Review. He led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and later was the American...
of Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
. Writing began on 5 April 1963 with a first draft completed within four days. A second draft was produced by 22 May and a forty-leaf shooting script
Shooting script
A shooting script is the version of a screenplay used during the production of a motion picture. Shooting scripts are distinct from spec scripts in that they make use of scene numbers , and they follow a well defined set of procedures specifying how script revisions should be implemented and...
followed thereafter. It was filmed in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
in July 1964.
Beckett’s original choice for the lead – referred to only as “O” – was Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
, but his script never reached him. The director Alan Schneider
Alan Schneider
Alan Schneider was an American theatre director and mentor responsible for more than 100 theatre productions. In 1984 he was honored with a Drama Desk Special Award for serving a wide range of playwrights...
was interested in Zero Mostel
Zero Mostel
Samuel Joel “Zero” Mostel was an American actor of stage and screen, best known for his portrayal of comic characters such as Tevye on stage in Fiddler on the Roof, Pseudolus on stage and on screen in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Max Bialystock in the original film version...
but he was unavailable. Beckett was “enthusiastically in favour” of Jack MacGowran
Jack MacGowran
John Joseph "Jack" MacGowran was an Irish character actor, whose last film role was as the alcoholic director Burke Dennings in The Exorcist. He was probably best known for his work with Samuel Beckett.-Stage career:...
as a replacement but he also became unavailable. James Karen
James Karen
James Karen is an American character actor of Broadway, film and television.-Life and career:Karen was born Jacob Karnofsky in Wilkes-Barre, in northeastern Pennsylvania, the son of Russian-born Jewish immigrants Mae and Joseph H. Karnofsky, a produce dealer. As a young man, Karen was encouraged...
, who was to have a small part in the film, talked constantly about the 68 year old Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer. He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".Keaton was recognized as the...
and persuaded Schneider to consider him when MacGowran’s circumstances changed. Schneider credits Beckett himself with the suggestion however.
The filmed version differs from Beckett's original script but with his approval since he was on set all the time, this being his only visit to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. The script printed in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (Faber and Faber, 1984) states:
- “This is the original film project for Film. No attempt has been made to bring it into line with the finished work. The one considerable departure from what was imagined concerns the opening sequence in the street. This was first shot as given, then replaced by a simplified version in which only the indispensable couple is retained. For the rest the shooting script followed closely the indications in the script.”
It was remade by the British Film Institute
British Film Institute
The British Film Institute is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:-Cinemas:The BFI runs the BFI Southbank and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London...
(1979, 16 mm, 26 minutes) without Beckett’s supervision, as Film: a screenplay by Samuel Beckett. David Rayner Clark directed Max Wall
Max Wall
Max Wall , was an English comedian and actor, whose performing career covered music hall, theatre, films and television.-Early years:...
.
It first appeared in print in Eh Joe
Eh Joe
Eh Joe is a piece for television, written in English by Samuel Beckett, his first work for the medium. It was begun on the author’s fifty-ninth birthday, 13 April 1965, and completed by 1 May...
and Other Writings (Faber and Faber, 1967).
Synopsis
Throughout the first two parts almost everything we see is through the eye of the camera (designated in the script as E), although there are occasional moments when we see O's perception. In the third part we get much more of O’s perception of the room and its contents. In order to distinguish between the two perceptions, objects seen by O were shot through a lens-gauze, blurring his perception while E's perception was shot without gauze or filters, keeping the images sharp.The street
The film opens onto a rippled image that fills the entire screen. Without colour it is hard at first to tell what we’re looking at but it is alive. As it moves we realise it is an extreme close-up of an eyelid; it fills the entire screen. The eye opens, slowly, closes, opens again, blinks and then fades into a different rippled image, still somewhat organic but changed, still. As the camera begins to panPanning (camera)
In photography, panning refers to the horizontal movement or rotation of a still or video camera, or the scanning of a subject horizontally on video or a display device...
right and up and we realise it is a wall; we are outside a building (an old factory situated in Lower Manhattan
Lower Manhattan
Lower Manhattan is the southernmost part of the island of Manhattan, the main island and center of business and government of the City of New York...
). It is summer though it is hard to tell. The camera’s movement is not smooth. It is as if it is looking for something. Eventually it loses interest and pans left and down back to the wall.
Suddenly the camera (E) shifts violently to the left. A man is hurrying along the wall from left to right. He pauses, hugging the wall and E gets a chance to focus
Focus (optics)
In geometrical optics, a focus, also called an image point, is the point where light rays originating from a point on the object converge. Although the focus is conceptually a point, physically the focus has a spatial extent, called the blur circle. This non-ideal focusing may be caused by...
on him. He has on a long dark overcoat, the collar of which is turned up and his hat is pulled down over his face. He is hanging onto a briefcase with his left hand whilst trying to shield the exposed side of his face with the other. He realises he’s been seen and cowers against the wall; E quickly shifts behind him.
No longer conscious of being observed, O starts off again, knocking over a trestle, stumbling over a railway sleeper, anything to stay as close as possible to the wall. He charges into a man and woman, knocking the man’s hat off.
E looks from the man’s face to the woman’s and back again. The man has a moustache and is wearing a pince-nez
Pince-nez
Pince-nez are a style of spectacles, popular in the 19th century, which are supported without earpieces, by pinching the bridge of the nose. The name comes from French pincer, to pinch, and nez, nose....
. They have been consulting a newspaper which the woman keeps hold of. They both look appalled at what has happened.
E moves back to a long shot and watches O barge through and on his way. The man replaces his hat, takes off his pince-nez and looks after the fleeing figure. The couple look at each other and the man “opens his mouth to vituperate” but the woman shushes him, uttering the only sound in the whole play. Together they turn to stare directly at E and, as they do, an open-mouthed expression takes over their faces; they can’t bear to look at what they’ve seen and turn their faces away.
The action shifts back to O just as he reaches and turns a corner. He heads off down the street until he realises he is at the right doorway. He enters.
Stairs
The camera cuts to the vestibuleVestibule (architecture)
A vestibule is a lobby, entrance hall, or passage between the entrance and the interior of a building.The same term can apply to structures in modern or ancient roman architecture. In modern architecture vestibule typically refers to a small room or hall between an entrance and the interior of...
. We are directly behind O. The stairs lead up on the left, but O veers right and pauses, pulling himself together. He takes his pulse
Pulse
In medicine, one's pulse represents the tactile arterial palpation of the heartbeat by trained fingertips. The pulse may be palpated in any place that allows an artery to be compressed against a bone, such as at the neck , at the wrist , behind the knee , on the inside of the elbow , and near the...
and E moves in. As soon as he becomes aware of E's presence he rushes down a couple of steps and cowers beside the wall until the camera retreats a little. When it does he reverses back up to street-level and then begins up the stairs.
A frail old woman is coming down. The camera gives us a brief close-up. “She carries a tray of flowers slung from her neck by a strap. She descends slowly and with fumbling feet.” O backs up and hurries down the steps to the right again where he sits down on a step and presses his face against the baluster
Baluster
A baluster is a moulded shaft, square or of lathe-turned form, one of various forms of spindle in woodwork, made of stone or wood and sometimes of metal, standing on a unifying footing, and supporting the coping of a parapet or the handrail of a staircase. Multiplied in this way, they form a...
s. He glances up briefly to see where she is then hides his head from view.
As the woman reaches the bottom of the stairs she looks straight into the lens. The expression on her face changes to the one of wide-eyed horror that we saw displayed on the faces of the man and woman outside. She closes her eyes and collapses. E checks on where the man had been, but O has made his escape. We just catch his coat tails flying up the stairs.
E chases after him and finds him at the top of the first flight. He looks around to see if there is anyone about. Satisfied he turns left and, not without some difficulty, opens the door to a room and enters. E slips in unnoticed as O locks the door behind him and then takes his pulse once more.
The room
We find ourselves in a “small barely furnished room. The man – and the camera following him from behind – survey its contents: a dog and a cat share a basket, a caged parrotParrot
Parrots, also known as psittacines , are birds of the roughly 372 species in 86 genera that make up the order Psittaciformes, found in most tropical and subtropical regions. The order is subdivided into three families: the Psittacidae , the Cacatuidae and the Strigopidae...
and a goldfish
Goldfish
The goldfish is a freshwater fish in the family Cyprinidae of order Cypriniformes. It was one of the earliest fish to be domesticated, and is one of the most commonly kept aquarium fish....
in its bowl sit atop a small table; the walls are bare apart from a mirror and an unframed picture of “the face of God the Father
God the Father
God the Father is a gendered title given to God in many monotheistic religions, particularly patriarchal, Abrahamic ones. In Judaism, God is called Father because he is the creator, life-giver, law-giver, and protector...
” pinned to the wall; there is a couch with a pillow, some blankets and a rug on it, a rocking chair
Rocking chair
A rocking chair or rocker is a type of chair with two curved bands of wood attached to the bottom of the legs . The chair contacts with the floor at only two points, giving the occupant the ability to rock back and forth by shifting his/her weight or pushing lightly with his/her feet...
with a “curiously carved headrest” and there is a window with a tattered roller blind with full-length net curtains to either side.
Preparation of room
Systematically O takes each object or creature in the room and disables its ability to ‘see’ him: he closes the blind and pulls the net curtains across, he covers the mirror with the rug, the cat and dog (“a shy and uncooperative, little ChihuahuaChihuahua (dog)
The ' is the smallest breed of dog and is so named for the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. Chihuahuas come in a wide variety of sizes, head shapes, colors and coat lengths.-History:...
”) are – with some difficulty – ejected from the room and the picture is torn up. Although stated simply the mechanics needed to execute these tasks are laborious, e.g. as he passes the window he hides behind the blanket which he holds in front of himself to cover the mirror and he carries the cat and dog facing away from him as he tries to put them out the door.
After all the above he goes to sit in the chair. There are two holes in the headrest that suggest eyes. He ignores them and sits. O takes the folder from his case and goes to open it but there are “two eyelets, well proportioned”; he turns the folder through 90°
Right angle
In geometry and trigonometry, a right angle is an angle that bisects the angle formed by two halves of a straight line. More precisely, if a ray is placed so that its endpoint is on a line and the adjacent angles are equal, then they are right angles...
but he’s disturbed by the parrot’s eye and has to get up and cover the cage with his coat.
- Keaton asked Beckett what O was wearing underneath. “I hadn't thought of that,” the author admitted and then proposed, “the same coat,” which appealed to both men.
He sits again, repeats the same process with his folder and then has to get up and cover the goldfish bowl too.
“Beckett initially contemplated setting Film in the evening, but had to decide against it for a practical reason: ‘to remove all possibility of his putting off light in room.’”
Period in rocking chair
Finally O sits down opposite the denuded wall, opens the folder and takes out seven photographs, all of him, which he examines in sequence:- 6 months old – in his mother’s arms
- 4 years old – kneeling in an attitude of prayer
- 15 years old – in his school blazer teaching a dog to beg
- 20 years old – in his graduation gownAcademic dressAcademic dress or academical dress is a traditional form of clothing for academic settings, primarily tertiary education, worn mainly by those that have been admitted to a university degree or hold a status that entitles them to assume them...
receiving his scroll from the RectorRectorThe word rector has a number of different meanings; it is widely used to refer to an academic, religious or political administrator... - 21 years old – with his arm around his fiancée
- 25 years old – a newly enlisted man with a little girl in his arms
- 30 years old – looking over forty wearing a patch over one eye and looking grim
He spends twice as long on pictures 5 and 6. After he looks at each one he places them at the back of the pile so the viewing order is reversed. He does not need to do anything with the seventh photograph since it is now on the top of the pile. After a few seconds he rips it up and drops it on the floor and then works his way one after another through the rest of the photos, looking at each one briefly again and then tearing it up. The photograph of him as an infant must be on a tougher mount and he has some difficulty with that one. “[I]n Beckett the distant past is always more tenacious than recent events.” Afterwards he rocks slightly, hands holding the armrests and then checks his pulse once more.
O is now in a similar situation to the man in A Piece of Monologue
A Piece of Monologue
A Piece of Monologue is a fifteen-minute play by Samuel Beckett. Written between 2 October 1977 and 28 April 1979 it followed a request for a “play about death” by the actor David Warrilow who starred in the premiere in the Annex at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York on 14 December...
who has also destroyed all his old photographs and now stands facing a similarly blank wall.
Investment proper
(See the opening two paragraphs of Richard Cave’s review of the 1979 version of the film for a discussion of the possible definition of ‘investment’ here).As O begins to doze off, E begins to move round to his left. Suddenly O realises he is being watched and turns his head violently to the right. E moves behind him again. He resumes rocking and dozes off. This time E whirls round to the right, passing the window, the mirror, the birdcage and fishbowl and finally stops in front of the space on the wall where the picture was.
E turns around and, for the first time, we are face-to-face with O, asleep in his rocking chair. All of a sudden he wakes and stares straight into the camera lens. He looks very much like the man in the seventh photograph only much older. He still has the eye patch.
He half starts from the chair then stiffens. Gradually the horrified look we have seen before on the couple and the old woman’s faces appears on his. He is looking at himself but not the scruffy, wearish man we have been watching, the man before him, standing with a big nail beside his head, has a look of “acute intentness” on his face. O slumps back into the chair and starts rocking. He closes his eye and the expression fades. He covers his face with his hands briefly and then looks again. This time we see the face of E in close-up, just the eyes.
O covers his eyes again, bows his head. The rocking dies down and then stops. The screen goes black. We then see the opening image of the eye, which is frozen, and the credits are presented over it. Once finished, the eye closes and the film is over.
Interpretation
- "The greatest Irish film." – Gilles DeleuzeGilles DeleuzeGilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
- A "load of old bosh." – Dilys Powell (The Sunday Times)
The work is studied by and has been the subject of criticism from both film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
and theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
scholars, with the former tending to study the film as shot, the latter tending to study the script as written. Critical opinion is mixed, but it is generally held in higher regard by film scholars than it is by theatre or Beckett scholars. The views above represent extremes. A ‘middle-ground’ review would probably be “a poor attempt by a genuine writer to move into a medium that he simply hadn’t the flair or understanding of to make a success.” Beckett’s own opinion was that it was an “interesting failure.”
The film opens and closes with close-ups of a sightless eye. This inevitably evokes the notorious opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou
Un chien andalou
Un Chien Andalou is a 1929 silent surrealist short film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. It was Buñuel's first film and was initially released in 1929 to a limited showing in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months....
in which a human eye is sliced open with a razor blade. In fact, The Eye was an early title for Film, though admittedly, at that time, he had not thought of the need for the opening close-up. As a student of French literature
French literature
French literature is, generally speaking, literature written in the French language, particularly by citizens of France; it may also refer to literature written by people living in France who speak traditional languages of France other than French. Literature written in French language, by citizens...
, Beckett would have been familiar with Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....
’s poem La Conscience. ‘Conscience’ in French can mean either ‘conscience’ in the English sense or ‘consciousness’ and the double meaning is important. Hugo's poem concerns a man haunted by an eye that stares at him unceasingly from the sky. He runs away from it, ever further, even to the grave, where, in the tomb, the eye awaits him. The man is Cain
Cain and Abel
In the Hebrew Bible, Cain and Abel are two sons of Adam and Eve. The Qur'an mentions the story, calling them the two sons of Adam only....
. He has been trying to escape consciousness of himself, the self that killed his brother, but his conscience will not let him rest. The eye/I is always present and, when he can run no further, must be faced in the tomb.”
Film takes its inspiration from the 18th century Idealist Irish philosopher Berkeley. At the beginning of the work, Beckett uses the famous quotation: "esse est percipi" (to be is to be perceived). Notably, Beckett leaves off a portion of Berkeley’s edict, which reads in full: “esse est percipi aut percipere” (to be is to be perceived and to perceive). Beckett was once asked if he could provide an explanation that ‘the man in the street’ could understand:
- “It’s a movie about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver – two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.”
In between takes on the set near the Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. Completed in 1883, it connects the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River...
, Keaton told a reporter something similar, summarizing the theme as "a man may keep away from everybody but he can't get away from himself." From this comment it shouldn’t be assumed that he understood the film – there is too much evidence to the contrary – but he got the point.
In Beckett's original script, the two main characters, the camera and the man it is pursuing are referred to as E (the Eye) and O (the Object). This simplistic division might lead one to assume that the Eye is only interested in the man it is pursuing. This may be true but it does not mean it will not have the same effect on anyone who comes in contact with it. “E is both part of O and not part of O; E is also the camera and, through the camera, the eye of the spectator as well. But E is also self, not merely O’s self but the self of any person or people, specifically that of the other characters — the elderly couple and the flower-lady — who respond to its stare with that look of horror.” E is, so to speak, O’s blind eye. "He has the function of making all with whom he comes into contact self-aware.”
O does everything physically possible to avoid being seen by others but the only thing he can do to avoid perception by an “all seeing god” is to tear up his picture, a symbolic act, as if saying, “If I don’t believe you exist you can’t see me.” There is no one there to see him for what he really is other than himself and so, in this godless world, it is only fitting that E, representing O's self-perception, would appear standing where the picture has been torn from the wall. O also destroys the photographs of his past, his ‘memories’ of who he was. Now all that remains for O is to escape from himself - which he achieves by falling asleep until woken by E's intense gaze. The room is more figurative than literal, like many of Beckett’s rooms, “as much psychological as physical, ‘rooms of the mind,’ as one … actor called them.”
If Beckett were Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
he might well have written: “To be seen or not to be seen, that is the question.” It is an issue that concerns many of Beckett’s characters. At the end of the first act of Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...
, when the boy wants to know what to tell Mr Godot, Vladimir
Vladimir
Vladimir is a city and the administrative center of Vladimir Oblast, Russia, located on the Klyazma River, to the east of Moscow along the M7 motorway. Population:...
tells him: “Tell him … (he hesitates) … tell him you saw us. (Pause.) You did see us, didn’t you?” But what happens when you are alone? The narrator of The Unnamable
The Unnamable
The Unnamable may mean:* The Unnamable , a 1953 novel by Samuel Beckett* "The Unnamable" , by H. P. Lovecraft* The Unnamable , a 1988 movie based on the H. P. Lovecraft short story...
answers: “They depart, one by one, and the voices go on, it’s not theirs, they were never there, there was never anyone but you, talking to you about you…” The old woman in Rockaby
Rockaby
Rockaby is a short one-woman play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in 1980, at the request of Daniel Labeille, who produced it on behalf of Programs in the Arts, State University of New York, for a festival and symposium in commemoration of Beckett's 75th birthday...
appears to be the exact opposite of O but although she actively seeks to be seen by someone while O does everything to avoid perceivedness, the irony is that both characters are alone with only themselves for company.
Beckett's script has been interpreted in various ways. R. C. Lamont writes that "Film deals with the apprenticeship to death, the process of detaching oneself from life. Like the Tibet
Tibet
Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...
an Book of the Dead
Bardo Thodol
The Liberation Through Hearing During The Intermediate State , sometimes translated as Liberation Through Hearing or Bardo Thodol is a funerary text...
, it teaches the gradual dissolution of self. The veiling of the windows and mirrors, the covering of the birdcage – the extinction of light, reflection and light – are so many ritualistic steps to be taken before final immobility, the resignation of the end.” At the end of Film, O is seated in his rocker with his face buried in his hands; at the end of Rockaby, the old woman's head inclines forward as if, finally, she had died. The final scene in Film is also comparable to the moment in the library when the old man in That Time sees his own reflection in the glass covering a painting.
It could be tempting to think of O and E as a Beckettian Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – indeed in notes for the first draft Beckett did toy “with the idea of making ‘E tall’ and ‘O short (and) fat’ which corresponds with the dual physique of Jekyll and Hyde” – but Film is not concerned with representations of good and evil, only with the concept of the second self, of pursuer and pursued.”
For Linda Ben-Zvi, “Beckett does not merely reproduce the modernist critique of and anxiety over technology and the reproduction of art; he attaches 'no truth value' to his critique of technology and the reproduction of the gaze. Instead, he creates a dialogue that awakens and revitalises the uncritical perception of his audience... The work not only is predicated on the form but invariably becomes a critique of its form." Having written a play titled Play
Play (play)
Play is a one-act play by Samuel Beckett. It was written between 1962 and 1963 and first produced in German as Spiel on 14 June 1963 at the Ulmer Theatre in Ulm-Donau, Germany, directed by Deryk Mendel, with Nancy Illig , Sigfrid Pfeiffer and Gerhard Winter...
and a song called Song, it comes as no surprise that Beckett would entitle his first foray into cinema as Film. The title supports Ben-Zvi's interpretation in that it is a film about cinematic technology: how the movie camera and photographic images are used in Film are essential to understanding it. When he writes, “No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience”, Beckett takes the emphasis away from Berkeley's maxim
Saying
A saying is something that is said, notable in one respect or another, to be "a pithy expression of wisdom or truth."There are a number of specific types of saying:...
thus stressing the dramatic structure of the work. The viewers are being asked to consider the work structurally and dramatically rather than emotionally or philosophically.
Beckett and Keaton
More has probably been written about the making of this film than the film itself. An entire play has even been devoted to the story, The Stone Face by CanadianCanada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
playwright Sherry MacDonald.
Beckett had never seen Schneider direct any of his plays and yet continued to entrust him with the work. Why then, for this particular project did he decide to make the trip? Schneider has speculated that it may simply have been the opportunity to work directly with Keaton. “It has even been suggested that the inspiration for Waiting for Godot might have come from a minor Keaton film called The Lovable Cheat in which Keaton plays a man who waits endlessly for the return of his partner - whose name interestingly enough was Godot.”
“When Schneider managed to hunt up Keaton, he found that genius of the silent screen — old, broke, ill, and alone — some $2 million ahead in a four-handed poker game with an imaginary Louis B. Mayer
Louis B. Mayer
Louis Burt Mayer born Lazar Meir was an American film producer. He is generally cited as the creator of the "star system" within Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in its golden years. Known always as Louis B...
of MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer...
and two other invisible Hollywood moguls.
“‘Yes, I accept the offer,’ were silent Keaton’s unexpected first words to Schneider. Keaton was dying even as they made the film. ‘We didn’t know that,’ Rosset told interviewer Patsy Southgate in 1990, ‘but looking back at it, the signs were there. Couldn’t speak — he was not so much difficult, he just wasn’t there.’ Keaton would in fact die 18 months after the shooting of Film.”
From this one might think that Keaton jumped at the chance but this is not the case. James Karen remembers:
- “He had to be talked into it by Eleanor [his wife] and I remember calling and saying, ‘You know, it could be your Les Enfants du paradisChildren of ParadiseLes Enfants du Paradis, released as Children of Paradise in North America, is a 1945 French film by French director Marcel Carné, made during the German occupation of France during World War II...
. It could be that wonderful, wonderful thing.’”
Beckett had wanted to work with Keaton several years earlier, when he offered him the role of Lucky in the American stage premiere of "Waiting for Godot," but Buster turned it down. It's said that Buster didn't understand Godot and had misgivings about this script as well. Presumably this went a long way to make him think twice about this new project.
During a meeting with documentary filmmaker, Kevin Brownlow, Beckett was quite forthcoming:
- “Buster Keaton was inaccessible. He had a poker mind as well as a poker face. I doubt if he ever read the text - I don't think he approved of it or liked it. But he agreed to do it and he was very competent … Of course, I had seen his silent films and enjoyed them – don't suppose I could remember them now. He had a young woman with him – his wife, who had picked him up from his alcoholism. We met him at a hotel. I tried to engage him in conversation, but it was no good. He was absent. He didn't even offer us a drink. Not because he was being unfriendly, but because it never occurred to him.”
Scheneider’s recollection of that awkward first meeting confirms all of this and more: “They simply had nothing to say to each other, no worlds of any kind to share. And all of Sam's good will and my own flailing efforts to get something started failed to bring them together on any level. It was a disaster.”
But not entirely. Although the role called for Beckett’s seemingly ubiquitous bowler hat, Keaton had brought along some of his trademark flattened-down Stetson
Stetson
Stetsons are the brand of hat manufactured by the John B. Stetson Company of St. Joseph, Missouri.Stetson eventually became the world’s largest hat maker, producing over 3.3 million hats a year in a factory spread over . Today Stetson remains a family-owned concern...
s and it was quickly agreed that he should wear one of those. On the Monday morning they “traipsed down in Joe Coffey's ancient Morgan
Morgan Motor Company
The Morgan Motor Company is a British motor car manufacturer. The company was founded in 1910 by Harry Frederick Stanley Morgan, generally known as "HFS" and was run by him until he died, aged 77, in 1959. Peter Morgan, son of H.F.S., ran the company until a few years before his death in 2003...
to just beneath the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge and began the shooting.” Beckett continues:
- “The heat was terrible - while I was staggering in the humidity, Keaton was galloping up and down and doing whatever we asked of him. He had great endurance, he was very tough and, yes, reliable. And when you saw that face at the end - oh!’ He smiled, ‘At last’”
Both Beckett and Schneider were novices, Keaton a seasoned veteran. That said, “Keaton's behaviour on the set was … steady and cooperative … He was indefatigable if not exactly loquacious. To all intents and purposes, we were shooting a silent film, and he was in his best form. He encouraged [Schneider] to give him vocal directions during the shot, sometimes starting over again without stopping the camera if he felt he hadn't done something well the first time. (Nor did he believe much in rehearsal, preferring the spontaneity of performance.) Often when [the crew was] stumped over a technical problem with the camera, he came through with suggestions, inevitably prefacing his comments by explaining that he had solved such problems many times at the Keaton Studios back in 1927.”
Both Beckett and Schneider pronounced themselves more than pleased with Keaton's performance; the latter called him "magnificent."
Keaton’s negative comments about the film are often reported but this final recollection by Schneider may redress the balance: “[W]hatever he may have subsequently said to interviewers or reporters about not understanding a moment of what he was doing or what the film was about, what I remember best of our final farewell on the set was that he smiled and half-admitted those six pages were worth doing after all.”
In February 1965, when on a trip to West Berlin
West Berlin
West Berlin was a political exclave that existed between 1949 and 1990. It comprised the western regions of Berlin, which were bordered by East Berlin and parts of East Germany. West Berlin consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945...
, “in deference to his recent work with Buster Keaton, he went to see Keaton again in his 1927 film The General
The General (1927 film)
The General is a 1926 American silent comedy film released by United Artists inspired by the Great Locomotive Chase, which happened in 1862. Buster Keaton starred in the film and co-directed it with Clyde Bruckman...
, finding it, however, disappointing.”