Writer
Samuel Beckett’s only screenplay was for the 1965 avant-garde silent short,
Film. Beckett, who made his biggest splash with the play, Waiting for Godot,
always had an interest in motion pictures, having first tried to break into the
business in the 1930s when he asked director Sergei Eisenstein if he could be
Eisenstein’s assistant (the director never got back to him). For Beckett’s
short, he recruited former silent film writer/director/star Buster Keaton for
what turned out to be a very odd slice of cinema.
Film
stars Keaton as a man on the run—but from whom? Seemingly paranoid, he sees
eyes everywhere as he attempts to make himself invisible to everyone and
everything. Film isn’t as gloomy as it sounds, as there are moments of both
humor and slapstick that recall the films of the silent era. The short is open
to interpretation, but according to Beckett, it’s about
perception—self-perception, specifically—drawing on the philosophy, “To be is
to be perceived.” With Film, Beckett was trying to tell us that we can run all
we want, but we can’t hide from ourselves.
Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who produced
the short via Evergreen Film, wrote about the making of Film in the pages of
Tin House:
The
first person Beckett wanted for the only major role in Film was the Irish actor
Jack McGowran. He was unavailable, as was Charlie Chaplin and also Zero Mostel,
Alan’s choice. Later, Mostel did a marvelous job with Burgess Meredith in a TV
production of Waiting for Godot that Schneider directed. Finally, Alan
suggested Buster Keaton. Sam liked the idea, so Alan flew out to Hollywood to
try and sign Buster up. There he found Buster living in extremely modern
circumstances. On arrival he had to wait in a separate room while Keaton
finished up an imaginary poker game with, among others, the legendary (but
long-dead) Hollywood mogul Irving Thalberg. Keaton took the job. During an
interview, Beckett told Kevin Brownlow (a Keaton scholar) that “Buster Keaton
was inaccessible. He had a poker mind as well as a poker face… He had great
endurance, he was very tough, and, yes, reliable. And when you saw that face at
the end… Ah. At last.”
Film
has its share of fans, including director/film preservationist Ross Lipman. For
the past seven years, he’s been simultaneously researching Film and putting
together a documentary on the Beckett/Keaton work, resulting in Notfilm, a
feature-length examination of a seventeen-minute short. Lipman also played a
major role in the reconstruction of Film, as he located the original, long-lost
prologue.
Here’s
what Rosset wrote about the prologue in Tin House:
Originally,
Film was meant to run nearly thirty minutes. Eight of those minutes would be
one very long shot in which a number of actors would make their only
appearance. The shot was based on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, wherein Welles
and his genius cameraman, Gregg Toland, achieved “deep focus.” Even when
panning their camera, “deep focus” allowed objects from as close as a few feet
to as far away as several hundred to be seen with equal clarity. Toland’s work
was so important to Welles that he gave his cameraman equal billing to himself.
Sad to say, our “deep focus” work in Film was unsuccessful. Despite the
abundant expertise of our group, the extremely difficult shot was ruined by a
stroboscopic effect that caused the images to jump around. Today it would
probably be much easier to achieve the effects we wanted to capture. Technology
is now on our side. Then, the problems proved too much for our group of very
talented people so we went on without that shot. Beckett solved the problem of
this incipient disaster by removing the scene from the script.
Now
fully restored, Film will be included on the Blu-ray and DVD editions of
Notfilm. There’s just one issue, lack of
funds, so Lipman has teamed up with Milestone Films Fandor for a Kickstarter
campaign. $30,000 is needed to complete the project and you can help make it
happen. Check out their Kickstarter page to see all the incentives.
Here’s
the trailer for Notfilm:
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