"I've never quite trusted films about film." "I've been thrilled by them, enthralled, inspired." "But a doubt's lingered in my mind." "Art shouldn't be about art, it should be about life... and speak to life." "Or so I told myself." "As if they were somehow distinguishable." "In 1964, five years before receiving the Nobel Prize," "Samuel Beckett made his only motion picture film." "Called simply Film, it was at once an investigation of the cinematic medium and of the human experience of consciousness." "This controversial experiment was both critically panned... and celebrated." "Beckett himself deemed it a failure and yet confessed," ""In some strange way it gains by its deviations from the strict intention..." ""from the big crazy idea..." ""to a strangeness and beauty of pure image."" "This deviation was the result of a disparity between Beckett's genius and his inexperience in film production." "It was also a tribute to his collaborators." "Together, they made a flawed work that speaks to more than its surface... a riddle that at once revolts and strangely compels." "Its working title, The Eye, suggests a concern with both the "eye" of sight and the "I" of self-consciousness." "Eye and I, through the filter of film." "Both, and yet neither." "Not Eye, and Not Film." "Scream... then listen... scream again... then listen again..." "On March 15th, 1963, Samuel Beckett wrote a distressed note to American director Alan Schneider." ""Dear Alan, the film thing has me petrified with fright." ""To talk with you about it will be a great help." ""Yours ever, Sam."" "At the time," "Beckett was already internationally renowned for his revolutionary playwriting but had never worked in cinema and his rigorous aesthetics would not allow mere dabbling." "In his youth a protégé of the formal genius James Joyce," "Beckett demanded precision in all aspects of his work." "But on a return to his native Ireland at the close of World War ll, he had a vision in which he realized that his own work, in opposition to his mentors, would be defined by extreme austerity," "a poetics of the Void." "Beckett's vision came to light of day with the stunning success of his play Waiting for Godot." "Premiering at the Théétre de Babylone in January 1953 when Beckett was 46 years of age, the production took Paris's intellectuals by the throat, as if they were being shaken down in an alley." "Stop!" "Think!" "Stop!" "bach" "The now classic work turned dramatic structure on its head, anticipating a denouement that never occurred." "Charming spot." "Inspiring prospects." " Let's go." " We can't." " Why not?" " We're waiting for Godot." "Around the same time that France was waiting for Godot, in the U.S., an aspiring film producer named Barney Rosset was pondering his next move after the financial failure of his post-war documentary, Strange Victory." "In 1951, he purchased the tiny Grove Press in New York." "Putting aside his cinematic ambitions," "Rosset began building Grove into an alternative empire that would shape a generation." "The story of Film is not just Beckett's story, but that of his production colleagues, of which Rosset is first." "Hello, I'm Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press and Evergreen Books." "I'm proud to be the American publisher of Samuel Beckett." "In 2011, at age 89, Barney conducted his last interview." "As courageous in his personal life as in publishing, he agreed to take part despite badly failing memory, a theme to which we'll return later." "It began poorly..." "Barney, could you tell us about your first meeting with Samuel Beckett?" "What you did, you drew a blank..." "I spoke with filmmaker and cinematographer Haskell Wexler, whose friendship with Rosset traced back to their schoolboy days in Chicago." "I'm going to be ninety years old in about three weeks and if someone asked me who my best friend in the world is, it's Barney Rosset." "We did grow up together... were in love with the same woman together." "A lot of our growing up and forming life was together and that electricity is between us." "When memory goes, what remains?" "Haskell and I were in love with the same girl." "That I remember." "That I can remember perfectly clearly." "And I could meet him today and carry right on." "Barney got piqued on Beckett through an article in Merlin by Dick Seaver, which, in an ironic twist, introduced the French-writing Beckett to readers in his native English language." "Barney took a boat liner to Paris, met Seaver, then Beckett, and left with a contract." "Dick was very protective of Beckett because Beckett was living like a... not a recluse, but... enormous sense of privacy, he didn't like to go out and meet people, he was who he was." "He warned Rosset right at the beginning that he would not accept any compromises with his publications, would not accept any censorship." "Rosset was true to that when it was quite dangerous to do some of the early Beckett." "Rosset would make a career of dangerous publishing." "He not only fought America's censorship wars, he practically founded them." "Without Rosset, it's unknown whether Beckett would have ever tried his hand at cinema." "Yet when the time came, he was certainly ready." "With his radio plays and Krapp's Last Tape," "Beckett's formal concerns had begun to coalesce in direct explorations of recording and media." "One can follow these works almost in sequence, before... and after Film." "1972's Not I is crucial to understanding his trajectory." "Beckett eventually created two versions, one for stage and one for television." "Each took the focus of pure consciousness to its limits in that form." "Not I marked the summit of the internal monologue, externalized." "Beckett would ultimately choose television as his moving image medium." "But in 1963, this self-realization had not yet occurred, and the field was open." "Rosset, returning to his own dreams of cinema, conceived a compilation of short films created by Grove's authors." "Beckett's was the only that would be completed." "On April 5th, three weeks after his desperate letter to Alan Schneider," "Beckett finally set pen to paper." "He began with a heading:" ""For Eye and one who would not be seen."" "The E of Eye was capitalized for emphasis." "The completed draft elaborated with a premise of the philosopher George Berkeley, in Latin:" "Esse est percipi." "To be is to be perceived." "Berkeley, like Beckett, was an Irishman, born in Kilkenny in 1685." "In his Principles of Human Knowledge, he wrote:" ""Besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects," ""there is likewise Something which knows or perceives them." ""This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself." ""By which I do not denote my ideas," ""but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist;" ""for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived."" "Beckett's sole foray into cinema was in essence a tongue-in-cheek but pointed debate with his Irish forbear." "The script Beckett wrote had only two "characters"," "E, for Eye, and O, for Object, in which the camera was the Eye and Berkeley's thing that engenders existence." "The camera's capacity for this role traces back to the early days of cinema." "The archetypal figure of silent films, Chaplin's tramp, made his first public appearance in a 1914 Keystone short that was in part documentary." "Chaplin interferes with the shoot and ultimately steals the show." "In his birth, we see the tramps identity established precisely through the camera, an impish persona whose esse consists in percipi." "An early choice for the role of O was none other than Chaplin." "Critically, Beckett and Chaplin both knew cinema could generate other responses, as was apparent in Tillie's Punctured Romance, released some months later." "Here, Chaplin plays a shifty city slicker who swindles a widow." "He then goes to the movies with his sweetheart, played by Mabel Normand." "This fear and loathing in self-recognition was closer to Beckett's heart." "To his dark sense of humor, "existence" wasn't necessarily all that desirable." "In cinema, he found the perfect forum for his critique of Berkeley." "The published draft of Film states:" ""Extraneous perception suppressed," ""animal, human, divine," ""self-perception remains in being." ""Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception" ""breaking down in inescapability of self-perception."" "Or, as Beckett wrote in a letter to Barney Rosset," ""I then imagine a naive human," ""so unphilosophically minded as to take Berkeley literally."" "The script describes O, the Object, in flight from E, the camera Eye." "The result was in essence a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid." "The camera seeks to see, the object seeks to hide." "And so, the chase..." "the essence of cinema." "The impulse to flee the camera was for Beckett, however, no mere academic quarrel with Berkeley." "It was, in fact, quite personal." "Beckett felt the camera's eye as a literal wound and the desire to avoid it was physically embodied." "I can remember, I'll give you one example, of when I was having dinner with him in the PLM Hotel and all of a sudden a bulb in the ceiling, a high ceiling, broke... burst with a flash." ""What was that?" "What was that?"" "And I realized that he might have thought this was a flash photographer and that I had employed a photographer to come to photograph us." "I said "I wouldn't do that to you, Sam."" "Hesmd "But they do, you know, Jim." "They do."" "He was afraid of people stalking him in the street, which happened, of course, in the last years of his life when he was in Tiers Temps, the retirement home." "He was photographed in the street and he had that response of putting his arms across his chest as if he was being stabbed again as he had been in the chest in 1938." "This abhorrence of perception extended even to interviews." "We were making a documentary," "Buster Keaton:" "A Hard Act to Follow," "David Gill and I for Thames Television, and I'd heard how difficult he was as far as interviews go, but on the other hand, what's a stamp to France?" "Let's see what happens if I just ask him." "And to my amazement I got this card, very, very tiny neat handwriting, which said "I could meet you as follows:" ""Thursday, October the 16th at 11 o'clock, Hotel PLM, Boulevard Saint-Jacques." ""No camera or tape recorder."" "Beckett's aversion to being recorded in any medium collided with his parallel fascination with cinema and these conflicting impulses drove the creation of Film." "Beckett divided himself in two and wove the halves into the work's very fabric." "The problem was how to realize his conception and his lack of technical experience was no small concern in this regard." "As a young man in the 1930's," "Beckett had been influenced by the early writings of the German theoretician Rudolf Arnheim, in whom he found a formal rigor that echoed his lessons from Joyce." "In particular, he loved the Soviet cinema, an interest which culminated in a 1936 letter to Sergei Eisenstein seeking admission to the VGIK film school in Moscow." "As he confessed to his friend Thomas McGreevey," ""What I would learn under a person like Pudovkin" ""is how to handle a camera, the higher trues of editing, and so on," ""of which I know as little as of quantity surveying."" "Eisenstein never replied to Beckett's inquiry and so Beckett's life turned in other directions... until Film." "By then, Beckett had a wealth of ideas but no experience whatsoever of production." "Inexperience led to the tangible fear he expressed to Schneider." "He knew full well his concept would be difficult to realize and so went through multiple revisions as he refined his script." "Well, the manuscript itself is interesting because... the first manuscript notebook... because it shows Beckett playing around with a lot of ideas." "It's very clearly the case that he didn't sit down with a fully formed idea in his head." "This is marked by the different pens, the different inks that he uses across the first 25 pages of the notebook." "So you've got the black original and then, as it were, blue and red inks were used to make revisions." "The first draft in Beckett's archive in Reading was completed in five days and is filled with questions to himself, followed by answers, another splitting of persona." "He at one point writes "Sounds..." "Film sounds throughout?", question mark, and then writes afterwards "No", in a different hand, in a different ink." "So he goes back and answers his own questions, essentially." "He initially set the film in 1913, a number crossed out and replaced by 1929, a date set squarely at the transition from silent to sound cinema." "The changes, in Beckett's famously indecipherable hand, suggest a close consideration of every formal dimension, and a work in active formation." "It was to change still more in production." "At the time, Alan Schneider was already the premier American interpreter of Beckett's work and an obvious choice as director." "He had helmed the American premiere of Godot in Miami in 1956, a version that starred Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell and was misleadingly billed as "the laugh sensation of two continents."" "It flopped terribly." "That was basically it." "We opened and it was a catastrophe." "Everybody came looking like Christmas trees, the women all dressed and decked with jewels and dresses and God knows what because it was the opening of the Coconut Grove Playhouse." "And about 95% of the people walked out." "And so we were tarred and feathered by everybody except Tennessee Williams was there and one critic and both of them said this truly is a masterpiece." "When it moved to Broadway, Schneider was replaced by Herbert Berghof but he had earned Beckett's confidence through his meticulous attention to the script in Miami." "I knew him." "He was a friendly, charming man and to me it seemed very improbable to be the director of Beckett because he was not a Beckettian character at all, he was very American, very generous, very kind... kind of loud, a nice man, and Beckett really liked him a lot." "For the 1961 television production of Godot, it was Schneider who directed Zero Mostel and Burgess Meredith." "This was, in fact, Schneider's only cinematic experience prior to Film." "If Beckett was on edge before embarking, Schneider was terrified." "In the spring of 1964 he was in Minneapolis directing a production of The Glass Menagerie." "Chaplin had declined the role of O, and they had also lost their cinematographer, but Rosset was set on shooting in June." "On May 1st, Schneider wrote to him:" ""Dear Barney, I know my own limitations very clearly" ""and unless I have adequate time to think and prepare," ""I am simply going to be unable to do any kind of a job" ""in a medium so totally unfamiliar to me." ""Beyond this, to lose Arthur Ornitz" ""in exchange for a totally unknown camera director, no matter how recommended by you," ""adds to the anxiety." ""L am practically reeling on the ropes already."" "Schneider understood that the production team was crucial." "When you end up seeing something on the screen, you know, you say, "a film by...," forget it." "And that means any one of them, you know." "A film by a lot of people who merged their talents together and made a good picture, or made one not so good." "Arthur Ornitz had likely been their choice of cinematographer due to his work on Shirley Clarke's The Connection, which featured a swirling subjective camera that would have been perfect preparation for the roaming Eye of E." "Another likely choice would have been Wexler, who was not only Barney's close friend, but a pioneer in the use of handheld camera, for which he'd win an Oscar on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" "Wexler was also keenly interested in the nature and impact of the camera." "In 1968 he would direct the classic Medium Cool, which dove directly into ethics of cinematography." "DEMONSTRATORS OFFSCREEN:" "The whole world is watching!" "The whole world is watching!" "Despite his seemingly excellent fit, he was unavailable at the time." "In the end, this proved one of the production's luckiest breaks in that it led to a cinematographer perhaps more suited to the job than anyone... the third and youngest of cinema's Kaufman brothers." "Boris Kaufman was personally sought out by Rosset, whose favorite film was Jean Vigo's anarchist parable, Zero For Conduct, shot by Kaufman in 1933." "Rosset loved the film's anarchist poetry but it was other aspects of Kaufman's work that made him perfect for their project." "His exquisite sense of light would lead to the mystery Beckett loved." "And most critically, self-reflexive cinema was literally in his blood." "Here we see the only known photo of Kaufman, on the left, with his brothers, Mikhail and Denis... better known to history as "Dziga Vertov", an untranslatable Russian pun that at once means "spinning top" and suggests the turning of a film reel." "Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera was revolutionary in its celebration of film as an expression of life itself." "The title figure and principal cinematographer was none other than their brother, Mikhail." "Chelovek s Kino Apparatum remains Vertov's most famous work but was in fact just one stage in an ongoing investigation." "In 1924, his early newsreel work had culminated in a film called Kino-eye, which exalted the camera's extension of human sight." "In so doing, it also showed its potential to heighten the existential dread that Beckett found in Berkeley." "Here we see outwardly the problems Beckett felt inwardly." "Lurking under Vertov's celebration is an existential question waiting to be asked." "If his younger brother Boris was not the theorist that Vertov was, there remains a direct connection." "Vertov visited Boris in France, and both brothers wrote him as he was learning his craft." "Boris said "Mikhail taught me cinematography by mail."" "Here we see Vigo and Kaufman's 1930 city symphony, A propos de Nice." "After the war, Kaufman would re-invent his career in the U.S., where he won the Academy Award for his brilliant location cinematography on Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront." "So Schneider need hardly have worried about Kaufman." "Yet that was only one concern." "By May 17th, he was still in Minneapolis and things were hardly resolved." "He wrote again to Rosset:" ""Dear Barney, the jam-up is bound to occur once I get back to New York." ""We will all have made a movie and wind up wishing we hadn't." ""You will hate me, I will hate you, and Sam will be compassionate to both of us." ""We need more than a miracle to pull this off; we need half a dozen."" "With Kaufman in place, the biggest problem was the lead role of O." "Along with Chaplin, they had approached both Jackie McGowran and Zero Mostel unsuccessfully." "Schneider continued," ""Why, why take this property and throw it down the drain this way?" "Please understand." ""Please." "Call me."" "This time, his entreaties convinced Rosset and production was postponed till July." "But they still had no one lined up for the key role of O." "As their desperation peaked, a strangely fitting solution arose... silent era genius, Buster Keaton." "In 1956, he'd been offered the role of Lucky in the ill-fated Miami Godot production and turned it down, saying of the script, he "didn't get it."" "In other respects, he was the right choice." "Keaton's screen persona, unlike Chaplins tramp, was the expressionless "stone face"" "which, in its resistance to interpretation, opened itself... to interpretation." "In this inscrutability, he was well suited to Becketfs universe wherein Godot, as one example, was at once nothing and everything." "More so, no film artist in any genre could lay claim to the formal inquiry and perfection in Keaton's work." "If one can imagine an American slapstick counterpart to Vertov's Russian self-reflexive cinema, it would be none other than Keaton." "Like Vertov, his interests were demonstrated time and again across multiple films." "Keaton also had another, apocryphal, connection to Beckett." "In the early 1950's he had performed at the Cirque Medrano in Paris, concurrent to the original run of Godot." "James Knowlson's meticulously researched biography documents that Beckett had seen him perform there." "Yet a mystery surrounds his visit." "In Kevin Brownlow's 1986 interview, Beckett claimed to have never seen him." "Was Beckett's memory at fault?" "In most regards, his memory was excellent, even in his later years." "What then, about Brownlow's?" "I used to have a photographic memory for conversation." "I remember doing one with Adolph Zukor and came out and tested the machine and it hadn't worked and I didn't have anything." "So I immediately sat down and wrote it as I remembered it and then went to have the tape recorder repaired and it was there all the time, thank God." "But the difference between the transcript that I wrote immediately aftenrvards and what I got from the tape was, I think, the difference between something like 20 pages and 50 pages." "You know, that's how much you lose." "There's one other notable instance where Beckett's memory proved mysterious." "He claimed unfamiliarity with a certain Balzac play called Mercadet." "The play was a farce written in 1851 and centered on a group of creditors awaiting payment from an absent character named Godeau." "While it's certainly plausible that Beckett hadn't read it, one should remember that not only was Beckett one of the century's most erudite authors, he had once actively taught Balzac's works in his courses." "I have several times found out that he had actually said, perhaps truthfully, that he didn't know something when subsequently we have discovered that he has pages and pages of notes." "He may have been forgetting but I have maintained on a number of occasions that I thought he was conveniently forgetting something." "Whatever the truth may be, Keaton would provide an answer to their problems." "Keaton represented an ideal for Beckett and they found him..." "He was not getting as many parts, he was a little bit on the decline of his career." "They found him in Canada." "He was shooting a movie, I think in Montreal." "They got him there." "Schneider flew to Los Angeles to meet him." "He takes up the story here." ""It was a weird experience." ""Late one night, I arrived at Keaton's house" ""to discover that I had interrupted a four-handed poker game." ""L was told that the game was imaginary," ""with long-since departed Irving Thalberg, Nicholas Schenk, and somebody else," ""had been going on since 1927 and Thalberg owed Keaton over two million dollars," ""imaginary, I hoped."" "Keaton had been as befuddled by the script for Film as he had been by Godot but was in need of money and agreed to take the part." "Keaton wasn't the only one trekking to New York for the shoot." "Beckett was as well." "This was no small news." "He had studiously avoided visiting America previously and would never return." "On Friday, July 10th he was greeted at Kennedy Airport by Grove assistant Judith Schmidt and they immediately boarded a private plane Barney rented for the occasion." "Rosset recalls that it "was very small plane and he arrived at East Hampton at night." ""They put up spotlights on the runway!"" "Rosset greeted them and took them to his home nearby, a Quonset hut designed by architect Pierre Chareau." "Its previous owner was the painter Robert Motherwell who commissioned it from Chareau and in 1951 sold it to Rosset." "After some sleep, they began a series of intense production meetings, interrupted by tennis." "At this point, something unusual happened." "Sorry, what didn't you approve of?" "I'm not quite clear." "If you could explain that." " What?" " You just said you didn't approve of something..." "Well, there's a certain point that I..." "Yes, I don't know if it was in this trip." "He..." "There was a camera." "Not a camera on, but something on and it was sneaked in." "It was like listening, listening to secrets, you know." "But this is my impression of it." "I don't remember actually what happened." "So Beckett did or didn't know?" "It was something that was done when Beckett did not know." "Oh!" "Rosset wanted to record the meetings but there was the expected issue of Beckett's reticence." "Just as he dreaded the capture of images, so did he dread the capture of sound." "I spoke with Beckett scholar Stan Gontarski." "Beckett was talking freely, but it was quite clear to me he didn't know that such a tape existed." "Barney said he just came to these meetings, he had a hand-held recorder, even then in 1964, set it up under the table." " So Barney was operating the recorder himself?" " Barney was operating the recorder himself." "Evidently he had a small enough one, a small enough tape recorder in 1964, that it was unobtrusive." "Look, I love Barney, and I love his wife Astrid, but Barney was... did things that I didn't approve of." "I mean, it was like anything is forgivable as long as it's in a good cause." "And he decided it was a good cause." "I mean, Barney was always surprising him with various kinds of matters." "Barney would show up every once in a while in Paris with a photographer that Beckett knew nothing about and Beckett reluctantly went along." "He was really quite cooperative with people who were trying to do honest, reputable work." "When Beckett allowed his photo to be taken, he was extremely photogenic." "Similarly, author Mel Gussow wrote," ""When he spoke, he exuded Irish lyricism." "Our loss is that his voice was not recorded." ""Beckett's last tape, if it existed, would be a marvelous legacy."" "Finally I just told him that Barney had taped a lot of their conversations and I would like to transcribe them." "And he wrote back and said, sure, but he'd rather I not include everything so that what we had was an edited version." " So he did give his blessing to it?" " He did." "Rosset gave me the tapes before he died." "But as I never met Beckett myself, I can't say whether he'd bless their use or not." "Let's now listen to Beckett and Schneider." "BECKETT:" "O's vision is really a different world." "Everything becomes slower, softer." "That's the quality we're looking for." "SCHNEIDER:" "But you don't mean slow motion." " No, that's a trick." " No, not slow motion." "They're discussing the respective visions of O and E, which lay at the heart of the film." "Well, the space in so far as..." "The space in the picture is a function of two perceptions," "both of which are diseased." "He later elaborates on the two perceptions." "Examplifying these to try and find a technical, a technical equivalent, a cinema equivalent, for visual appetite and visual distaste." "These two perceptions, visual appetite and distaste, are a direct extension of Beckett's own love/hate relationship with the nature of recorded images." "It was Kaufman's task to interpret these perceptions technically." "KAUFMAN:" "Sam, how can you judge abnormality unless you have normality?" "What is your criteria?" "h' you have two abnormal points of view..." "SCHNEIDER:" "Normality is what they're previously associated with." "BECKETT:" "There is no norm within the picture since there 'rs no normal eye in the picture." "There can't be any normal vision in the picture." "The norm is in the spectator's personal experience with which he will necessarily compare these new experiences." "What Beckett isn't saying is that his own experience of sight was suffering in 1964." "At the time when he was doing Film in New York, he had problems with his own blurred vision through his cataracts, so that this was something which was not just a philosophical concern of Beckett but a practical reason for being interested in vision." "Myth has it that Beckett finally abandoned tennis after his frustrations seeing the ball on Rosset's court in East Hampton." "For Beckett at the time of production, distortion was the norm." "The challenge was establishing two distinct distortions, expressed through cinematic form." "BECKETT:" "Nobody's asking O to cut at any, at any point." "E's the cutter and O's the panner." "Isn't that the idea we've reached?" "It wasn't as clear to everyone else." "SCHNEIDER:" "I think that we're confusing two ideas." "One is the sort of conceptual idea and the other is the physical idea." "Over the course of the meetings, confusion dominated." "Here we hear producer Milt Perlman." "PERLMAN:" "I mean, O sees everything, you know." "This is what threw us..." "BECKETT:" "No, he doesn't see everything." "In the street he sees nothing at all, except very exceptionally." "Because he's blind." "He's blind." "Right, but when he does perceive, ifs very..." "SCHNEIDER:" "O or E?" "O!" "No!" "E!" "E!" "E!" "O never sees anything acutely." "Never!" "Right." "This is what threw us a few minutes ago..." "BECKETT:" "No, I never said that, I couldnt have said that." "Tensions ran high and fault lines became apparent." "SCHNEIDER:" "Listen, I still say, I think..." "Between now and next Thursday, Boris ought to think about it some more." "We know what Sam's intention, Milt, is." "We know what it is." "I think Boris is clear." "He's not clear on how to accomplish it, he's clear on the intention." "KAUFMAN:" "I must admit..." "I understand the intent more intuitively than rationally." "At a certain point, one imagines all the abstract conversation wore thin on Kaufman." "KAUFMAN:" "Let's read the script." "Let's read it." "On Monday, July 13th, they commenced a week's pre-production in New York City." "Kaufman shot a series of camera tests for the distorted vision of O." "By varying filters, diffusion, and treatments of the lens, he sought to achieve the blurring Beckett sought." "Let's listen again to how Beckett described it." "BECKETT:" "O's vision is really a different world." "Everything becomes slower and softer." "That's the quality we're looking for." "Beckett was aware they risked mere gimmickry." "SCHNEIDER:" "But you don't mean slow motion." "That's a trick." "BECKETT:" "No, not slow motion." "Despite the comments about both visions being diseased, in the end they did nothing technically to distort the shots from E's perspective." "Its sharpness becomes pronounced simply by contrast with O's." "They're intertwined." "Schneider said..." "E has no reality except through O and O has no reality except through E." "I mean, we only can see O through E's point of view." "So the cinematic analogy for visual appetite becomes sharpness of focus." "Numerous filtration methods were tested for O's sight, however." "In this test, a Vaseline smear seems to evoke the sense of an eye's iris." "Here we see a blurry Dick Seaver, who wrote the 1952 article in Merlin, now working as one of the main editors at Grove." "Kaufman's tests were only part of the week's events." "Another major date was the meeting of Beckett and Keaton." "Let's let Schneider resume the story." ""That meeting was one of those occasions which seemed inevitable before they take place," ""impossible when they do, and unbelievable afterward." ""When Sam and I arrived, Keaton was drinking a can of beer and watching a baseball game." ""Now and then, Sam or I would try to say something" ""to show some interest in Keaton or just to keep the conversation going." ""It was no use." "Keaton would get right back to the Yankees." ""'Do you have any questions about the script, Buster?" "'" "'"No.'" ""What did you think about the film when you first read it?" "'" ""Long pause." ""'It was harrowing." "And hopeless."" "Here, Kevin Brownlow recounts Beckett's own description." "I wrote down the notes as soon as I came out of the meeting so this is what he said exactly." ""Buster Keaton was inaccessible." ""He had a poker mind as well as a poker face." ""L doubt if he 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."" "Beckett said he didn't communicate with him very well." "He gave up trying" "I know I never tried." "Obviously Beckett and Alan Schneider used Keaton's famous stoic persona to their benefit." "And yet they were not in any way disrespectful of him and I've read all about this." "You know, they were admirers of his." "So he just had to be what he was and that was all Beckett wanted." "They never consulted Keaton on their technical problems." "While on the one hand this was quite understandable given the differing nature of their work and his lack of interest in the material, on the other, his technical knowledge was profound." ""He thought we were all crazy" ""but then he was a seasoned professional in films and we were all amateurs."" "if Beckett and Schneider never truly engaged Keaton, neither did he truly open himself to them." "The collaboration might be described as a kind of détente." "But to fully realize a Beckett work required a different kind of approach." "What you have to remember, every time that Alan had to do a Beckett play, he went over to Paris to see Sam." "He didn't ask him, "What is this about?", but he wanted the local situation of doing it correctly." "And then when Alan did it in New York he knew exactly what Sam wanted, which was not always easy, especially with actors." "Working with Beckett was one of the hardest tasks in theater." "He was very, very stern." "Not just stern, sometimes brutal." "He didn't really understand what someone like Billie Whitelaw was going through, for instance, when she was rehearsing Happy Days." "Billie Whitelaw was the premier Beckettian performer of all." "In Happy Days, she spent half the play buried up to her waist, the second up to her neck." "She suffered extreme physical duress for the work and also developed an approach that defied common theatrical practice of the day." "I didn't intellectualize at all, not at all." "I did what he wanted, and I didn't argue with him." "A lot of actors used to argue and say "Why should I do it like that?" "That doesn't make sense."" "and I just did what I felt he wanted to the best of my ability, you know." "I think we did have an intuitive understanding." "The most excruciating project of them all was Not I, where burial to the neck was insufficient." "She had to be totally immobilized in black." "And then very high up, everything black and tight and not move any muscle except her mouth." "Not I culminated an aesthetic project of sensorial reduction that embodied in its very production the pain of life itself." "What?" "... the buzzing?" "..." "yes... all the time the buzzing... so-called... in the ears... though of course actually..." "not in the ears at all... in the skull... dull roar in the skull... and all the time this ray or beam..." "like moonbeam... but probably not... certainly not... always the same spot... now bright..." "now shrouded... but always the same spot..." "as no moon could... no... no moon... just all part of the same wish to..." "torment... scream... then listen... scream again... then listen again..." "Film's shooting was marked by a schism that would inscribe itself in the finished work." "Production began on July 20th." "Their plan was to start with the biggest scene, and the only exterior." "Schneider and his colleagues had advance-scouted several sites to find the perfect match to Beckett's vision, a dilapidated street with a "memorable wall."" "At the production meeting, Kaufman needed more specifics and asked Schneider to describe it." "What characteristics you looking for?" "SCHNEIDER:" "A nice Jewish street." "Beckett described his intentions like this:" "To me ifs not... unimportant." "It's a kind of absolute street, absolute exterior, absolute transition, if there is such a thing, and an absolute interior, I mean, abstract almost." "Here are some Polaroids of the sites considered." "Questions arose as to how to attain the archetypal quality Beckett sought while using a real location." "SCHNEIDER: it we had created a studio street, then I think that's a different story." "BECKETT:" "Yes, we'll have a considerable degree of non-realism in the street by the way we're treating it, haven't we?" "Not the physical street, the people in it." "Well, the whole set, the whole appearance of the thing is going to be extremely unreal." "Yes..." "The elements are real." "It's a real building, and real cobblestone..." "Listen, make it as..." "I think that looks fine." "Despite the scouting, Beckett wasn't satisfied and while touring the city, himself found the scene's final location near the Fulton Street fish market in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge." "The scene featured numerous couples all actively engaged in perception of themselves or the world." "A 1979 BFI remake adapted the scene from the Grove Press edition of the screenplay." "Yet Beckett was characteristically revising his conception of it." "The published version was based on his manuscript of May 22nd, 1963." "But on July 1st, 1964, things were in transition as production realities approached." "By July 20th, the shooting date, a different and far more detailed version had arisen with completely different characters." "Casting was uncertain till the last moment." "Alan always wanted to see the odd off-Broadway, off-off Broadway theater because he saw talents that were not famous at that time." "And very often those people, you know, got Broadway shows, or got into a movie or got into television or whatever." "So that's how the casting came about, it was through Alan?" "Oh yeah, certainly Beckett doesn't know anybody." "Here we see Couple 6, including then unknown character actress Sudie Bond, who later appeared alongside Sandy Dennis and Cher in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean." "Seven couples were planned to establish a mathematical pattern of sevens repeated throughout the film." "Only six appear initially." "SCHNEIDER:" "The problem comes from the fact that we have to shoot six..." "BECKETT:" "You have six elements." "You don't bother about them moving." "You establish the fact that they are moving towards the camera at the beginning and then you pick 'em up in three series, each time bigger, cutting." "Production finally commenced." "In his memoir of it, Schneider described the scene." ""My introduction to filmmaking." ""Much hoopla: reporters, hordes of onlookers..." "Light, actor and camera problems..." ""I didn't know or even suspect what I was doing."" "The results were unequivocally disastrous." "On seeing the rushes, he wrote," ""Everything looked completely different from the way it had while we were shooting it." ""The timing was so changed that I couldn't understand it." ""The group scenes suffered so badly from strobe effect that they were impossible to watch." ""None of the scenes involving the other actors was even remotely usable."" "By the end of the first day, they had blown a sizable chunk of the shooting budget and hadn't completed the scene." "Calling back all the extras and re-shooting was financially impossible." "Given the scene's importance, the entire production was in jeopardy of collapse and a panicked meeting was held." "In the end, Beckett himself suggested what no one else could envision... cut the entire sequence." "Once a cornerstone of the project, the street scene footage was abandoned." "Thought lost for decades, it became a tantalizing legend amongst Beckett scholars." "I ultimately uncovered it in a pile of rusty film cans in Barney Rosset's kitchen cupboard on 4th Avenue." "In the surviving fragments, a glimpse of Beckett's conception of the scene arises." "The final version featured a completely different opening, literally conceived overnight." "During the re-shoot, in classic Beckett fashion, they simply filmed the empty street." "They sought to show a roaming eye, and this eye, unlike the first day's, looked above the earth to the sky." "Gone is the sense of oblivious humans engaged in their own perceptions, save for one figure seen in the distance... perhaps by accident?" "A window into a story we're not told." "It changes one's understanding of the film." "The original scene, laden with characters, established that O was a different kind of being than those around him." "The new scene would have no such context." "I think the clearest way to make my point is something that some famous person said, that it's good not to get what you want, but want what you get." "The new vision, devoid of extras, introduces O himself." "And so we, through the eye of E, find Buster Keaton." "Well, I was thirteen years old and already a movie nut, an old movie nut." "And my folks subscribed to The New York Times, so every day it was there on the doorstep and one July morning I opened the paper and there was an article saying that Buster Keaton was making a movie in downtown Manhattan." "And I was about to go into the city for the day for a day's outing with my best friend Louis Black." "I said "Louis, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity." "We've got to go."" "And we got out at Canal Street, came to the surface and looked around and scanned the horizon." "There were a lot of vacant lots, as I recall, and then, just two or three blocks away, we could see some lights and reflectors, signs of a film production." "So we walked over there, there was no security." "In fact, there were very few people, as I recall." "And there was a car and in the back seat of the car, with the windows rolled down because it was summertime, reading the newspaper with his porkpie hat on the seat of the car next to him, was Buster Keaton." "So I kind of leaned in the window a little bit and said "Mr Keaton?" He said "Yeah."" "I said "Hi, my name's Leonard Maltin, I'm a big fan of yours." Blah, blah, blah..." "So I had my moment, which is exactly what it was, a moment with Buster Keaton." "But we were so awestruck by that experience that we didn't even take in the bigger picture of what was going on around us." "So I don't remember even looking to see the camera, who was operating the camera, what the set looked like, who else was there that day." "Samuel Beckett could have been standing six feet from us, we wouldn't have known it." "We didn't care, we were just, you know, blinded by the light of Buster Keaton and the experience of having gotten to meet him." "The blinding encounter is inverted in the film itself." "When E finds Keaton, it's Keaton who freezes, and the freezing less pleasant." "The camera replies, in movement." "Beckett comments:" "Actually we haven 't been speaking at all about, not very much about this business of the angle of immunity." "Because at the very beginning of the film, it's mentioned." "We haven't done anything about..." "We haven 't spoken about that at all." "SCHNEIDER:" "But that's not difficult." "Kaufman disagreed." "This is the hardest..." "BECKETT:" "We haven't spoken about it." "Accidentally..." "E's first perception of O, at the beginning of the street scene, is at an angle exceeding that of immunity." "Which stops..." "O, doesn't it, it stops..." "Is it perpendicular to the..." "Well, it's instead of looking at it from a very oblique angle, Imean it's a little wider." "So that E..." "E's first move in the film is to draw back, to close the angle." "In the Grove edition of Beckett's 1963 manuscript, we see this illustrated." "The angle above which O feels the pain of E's gaze is 45 degrees, which is close to that of peripheral vision." "But as Beckett notes..." "It was a fairly arbitrary one..." "Whatever the angle, when O senses E, he knows he's prey and the chase is on." "O immediately encounters a couple near the wall." "The man is played by actor James Karen." "A close friend of Keaton's, Karen was the one who put Schneider in touch with him." "Here the production's fault lines, like those between E and O, begin to surface." "Beckett had never made a movie and nor had Alan Schneider ever directed a movie and there they were with a master of moviemaking whom they never took into their confidence." "If Keaton knew his way around a film shoot, so too did Kaufman." "And Karen himself was the ultimate professional with a career dating back to Elia Kazan's classic 1948 stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire and even earlier." "Not only was he close friends with Keaton, he'd also worked with Kaufman on Willard Van Dyke's 1947 educational film Journey into Medicine." "The one with the glasses is typical." "Name?" "Michael Kenneth Marshall, Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Medicine." "He's twenty-nine and still a student." "Karen would go on to appear in hundreds of films including The China Syndrome and Return of the Living Dead." "In Film, his companion is his wife, folk singer Susan Reed." "New York was blistering hot at the time and Keaton was asked to do take after take." "You know, they'd been tearing everything down." "All those bricks were from buildings." "They weren't just put there." "And there was wood and there were nails." "French director Alain Resnais was there with actress Delphine Seyrig and captured this photo." "Barney invited Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky and Ginsberg described the scene in his poem "Today", which tells us" ""Buster Keaton is under the Brooklyn Bridge" ""by a vast red-brick wall still dead pan alive in red suspenders... a hairy bum asked Mr Keaton for money drink!" "Oh Buster!" "No answer!"" "Bums weren't his only problem." "The physical tension mirrored the personal." "God, it was a terrible, terrible couple of days down there." "Look at Buster, how he's dressed." "And he would never complain." "Buster would never complain." "So what was the weather in this?" "It would have been a hundred degrees?" "Over a hundred degrees in the shade and there was no shade." "I had to fight them to get him a chair." "I look at it and get angry." "Yet discomfort was inherent to the process." "Billie Whitelaw suffered countless ailments as a result of her work with Beckett." "She only half-jokingly asked him," ""ls there anything you ever write for an actor that isn't physically painful?"" "Like Whitelaw, Keaton was more than prepared to undergo pain for his art." "If anything, he actively sought it." "His career began as a toddler, performing with his family as The Three Keatons." "The act centered on Keaton's father in essence abusing Buster." "So in the sense that physical abuse was in his bones, he was a perfect Beckettian actor." "Here, Kevin Brownlow quotes Beckett." ""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."" "In a different way, Alan Schneider was the perfect Beckettian director in that he understood his role was to work as a cipher." "I spoke with photographer Steve Schapiro, who documented the shoot." "Beckett really didn't talk very much and he certainly was not directing the crew per se." "I think he was directing the sequence of things and he directed Alan Schneider, the director, who was directing the film." "I think Alan was best when he let his instincts work." "You know, you learn as you go along." "When his instincts worked, he usually did good work." "It's at the meeting with Karen and Reed that we first see O's vision," "Beckett's blurring, grown from Kaufman's tests." "It's also here that Reed delivers the film's only spoken line..." "Sssh!" "It's a joke, but one that tells us sound is possible... if absent." "As far back as 1936," "Beckett wrote that "the silent film had barely emerged from its rudiments when it was swamped."" "These sentiments trace directly to Arnheim, one of the first scholarly mourners for the lost art of silent cinema." "By the time of Film's production, soundlessness became, for Beckett, a metaphysical condition." "In a Herald Tribune interview on July 19th, 1964, the day before shooting began," "Beckett told John Gruen that..." ""Writing becomes not easier but more difficult for me." ""Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."" "Schneider, characteristically, joked around with it during the camera tests... while Jeannette Seaver describes the actual production's atmosphere as having immense focus." "And great silence." "On the set there was silence?" "Because you'd think that even though it's a silent movie... that there would be noise on the set." "I don't remember that." "The silence was enveloping." "The call for silence echoes the flight from the eye." "A moment later, Reed and Karen turn their eyes to E." "Unlike Chaplin's tramp in Kid Auto Races, their reaction is pure Beckett." "Having done away with them," "E returns to the pursuit of O, who, having fled the encounter, enters a building." "Once inside, he encounters a flower lady." "Again, Schneider's casting was excellent." "BECKETT:" "She simply comes down very slowly." "She's old and frail..." "SCHNEIDER:" "I've got a wonderful old gal who's going to take an hour to get down those stairs." "No, I mean, I think that's the answer." "Shes a gal who's going to collapse if she took another step." "She's going to look as though she'd fall apart." "The old lady was played by Nell Harrison, who later appeared in Mel Brooks' The Producers." "Harrison's reaction to E is the same as Karen's and Reed's." "Beckett said..." "We have an example of O's vision in the street scene, and in the hallway scene, of what Buster Keaton's face is... the expression he's going to have at the very end of the film." "This has also been prepared in the first two sections so that when we get it at the end of the film, when what we call the investment begins, it makes a shape." "While E is distracted, O skirts around the collapsed body and up the stairs." "He opens a door." "Where does it lead?" "SCHNEIDER:" "You see, the thing that threw us, Sam... not Boris, me... is the business about, was it his mothers room?" "Everybody who's ever read the script, everybody without exception, thinks it's his room." "BECKETT:" "One might suppose that his mother had gone to hospital." "The exposition is never offered in the movie." "But one most definitely encounters a world." "BECKETT:" "It can't be his room because he wouldn't have a room of this kind." "He wouldn't have a room full of eyes." "The room full of eyes was a set and it's here that the core of the movie was made." "The New Yorker's Jane Kramer visited." ""Rosset steered us across the studio," ""nimbly sidestepping coils of rope and piles of boxes on the floor," ""and left us at the door of a small, exceedingly Beckettian room." ""It contained a large camera on wheels, forty spotlights," ""twelve technicians, one script girl, two magazine photographers," ""Mr Schneider, Mr Kaufman, Mr Keaton..." "and Mr Beckett," ""who was sitting in a corner on a Coca-Cola crate, peering intently at the scene..."" "The set was ingeniously designed by Burr Smidt, and is itself archetype," "Beckett's "familiar chamber", which Billie Whitelaw described as" ""a bleak room with a little camp-bed, a 'pallet' as he called it," ""with one window, all composed in shades of gray."" "We see it reappear in numerous Beckett works including Eh Joe and Ghost Trio." "Beckett described it like this:" "A cell, a cell." "I think principle of the room is..." "to seek the minimum." "There is nothing in this place, this room, that isn't prepared to trap... to trap him." "Upon seeing Smidt's brilliant realization of the concept, Beckett was delighted." "He loved the sets." "The sets were nothing." "They looked like a jail." "It was so depressing." "But he was very happy about it." "For many, it would be maddening." "Which was the experience of not just O, but Keaton himself, who struggled with both the trap of the room and the trap of the concept." "I see Buster not at his full freedom." "I see Buster tethered." "The angle of immunity required his back be kept to the camera." ""Of course he tried to suggest gags of his own."" ""Did you use any of them?"" ""No," he laughed. "We were depriving him of his trump card, his face."" "If his face appeared, it wound up on the cutting room floor." "Amidst the outtakes, some of Keaton's best moments arise." "As with all things Beckett, the gag was more than it seemed." "Throughout the film runs a sub-theme on the nature of animal consciousness." "In the earlier scene with James Karen, the original conception called for Susan Reed's character to be holding a monkey." "As the couple gasps in horror under E's gaze, the script describes" ""Indifference of monkey, looking up into the face of its mistress."" "Animals are unfazed by E's eye." "This contrasts with O's response to the eyes of a parrot and fish." "Here we see Beckett in a stand-off with the parrot and fish." "The theme of animal indifference to percipi was echoed in my interview with Leonard Maitin." "Jimmy's been acting his whole life and as long as he's been acting he's been making friends, and..." "[DOG BARKS IN DISTANCE]" "No, don't let them outside, no!" "Scenes with eye-bearing inanimate objects were partially improvised and shot without Kaufman as B-roll material weeks later." "Rear-lit, some shots don't match the A-roll." "There's an irony there, in that Keaton was dismissed for suggesting gags." "The B-roll material is in essence that." "Cumulatively, the scenes depict a succession of eyes O eliminates in search of the Void of Unconsciousness." "It was the task Beckett pursued since his vision in 1945, after the war." "What's seen in the world mirrors the spirit and needs to be shed." "When she was performing Not I," "Billie Whitelaw described going through her own internal monologue, a personal mantra." ""L said to myself, 'Right, let your skin fall off, let your flesh fall off," ""'let the muscles fall off, let the bones fall off, let everything fall off."" "She wrote, "I wanted to be left with nothing but my centre, my core." ""And I thought, now keep out of the way, Whitelaw." ""Work with what's left."" "She continued," ""At the end when I was unstrapped from my chair," ""my body still felt charged with the electricity that had built up through the performance." ""L felt if anyone touched me they would get an electric shock." ""The ends of my fingers still tingled as I reached my dressing room."" "Her core was the biology of being, a holiness beyond outward notions of God." "In Film, O, our naive human, seeks to free himself from God as more commonly understood." "Here we see Kaufman's camera tests." "The image is Abu, a Sumerian god, found by Beckett's friend Avigdor Arikha in a museum in Baghdad." "O pulls the image from the wall and tears it to pieces." "Lets momentarily leave O with the shards of God trampled underfoot." "We've talked about the stellar cast and crew assembled, but one member has yet to be discussed." "As editor, Rosset hired Sidney Meyers, best known for the classic independent film The Quiet One, which he also directed." "Behind the feelings rise memories which still hold him in terrible hunger and hatred." "Here, a troubled youth remembers his past." "These are the memories Donald lives in day and night." "For the majority of his career, Meyers worked as an editor." "One film on which he worked was The Savage Eye, in 1959." "The title suggests a quite different view of the camera than Vertov's Kino-Eye." "The film depicts a brutality latent in the photographic stare and shows that many kino-eyes are possible, each with its own subjective view." "Also working on The Savage Eye was Haskell Wexler, who well understood the concept." "You're coming in here, you got that damned lens, so you say "Jesus, my nose isn't that big!"" "when you chose that goddamn lens!" "The eye of Film is Beckett's eye:" "not savage, but piercing nonetheless." "Its gaze encompasses more than sight, as witnessed after the shredding of God." "Here we find Beckett the conceptual editor, shredding a life with cuts in time." "These are the photos O reviews." "They stage the stages of a life." "Ironically, the young O is not an archival image of Keaton but James Karen, the actor O encounters on the street." "You know what it was?" "A sack of sugar!" "There was no child there." "I held a sack of something, flour or sugar." "I don't even remember where we shot it." "It was in a studio." "This was superimposed too." "The background?" "Yeah, the whole thing was a fake, it was just me standing with this sack of something in front of a white paper background." "I got into the uniform, that's all I know." "The source image of the sugar sack is lost, but looking closely at the picture, one can see the cut-out edges of the child." "Here we see another doctored photo and its source." "The photos, themselves collaged, become markers of memory... another consciousness to be abolished." "O shreds his old images, like the image of God." "He destroys his consciousness of the past." "Having eliminated all sensory perception, God and memory, whats left?" "We'll pause here, as O falls asleep." "Berkeley had defined existence in being perceived." "However, he later expanded his concept to include the will, or action: to actively perceive." "One's will becomes part of the act of perception, of being." "While O sleeps, these forces move without filter." "The waking "I" of self rests, not acting... not I." "Near the very end of Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley asks," ""What truth is there which glares so strongly on the mind" ""that, by an aversion of thought, a willful shutting of the eyes, we may not escape seeing it?"" "The truth which glares so strongly is, for Beckett, the need to gaze itself... the very need that sunders Things into Objects." "This sundering, of perception and being, is enmeshed in the very fabric of Film." "Beckett forefronts a formal concern in his name for the movie." "Film at that time had a material basis, in photochemistry, silver, and light." "None of these bear on the movie, which begins and ends with the lens." "Film exists in us when we see it, not its material." "Beckett forecasts the present moment when a non-material digital cinema replaces the physical one it was born by." "This essay itself is not film, but digital." "To call it a film is to invert language." "Like sunrise and sunset, which backwardly suggest the sun revolves around the earth." "It transforms the physical memory of being, of esse." "Photochemical film is a physical strip, a material mask of light." "The screen is a mirror filled with shadows." "With video, the monitor is no mirror, but an emanator." "No reflections, no shadow." "We stand at the sunset of film." "As O sleeps, the unconscious acts, becoming unfiltered will." "As an audience, we sit in reverie, in dream, and become aware, ever so fleetingly, of our own being and self." "Film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September of 1965." "Keaton attended." "His reception served as coda to a career." "Rex Reed wrote, "Fellini, Godard, Antonioni, Visconti and several hundred bikini-clad starlets were there." ""But just before the festival ended, a silent fellow from the silent era stole the limelight." ""Keaton was there and it was understood in every language." ""He had come to show Film" ""and when the projector stopped, they stood and cheered for five minutes." ""'This is the first time I've been invited to a film festival,' he said, fighting back tears," ""'but I hope it won't be the last."'" "When asked about the film, Keaton said" ""Heck, I'd be the last one in the world to comment" ""because I didn't know what those guys were doing half the time." ""As for Samuel Beckett, I took one look at his script" ""and asked him if he ate Welsh rarebit before he went to bed at night."" "In a December 1964 interview, Kevin Browniow asked Keaton for his thoughts on Film." "His comments presaged his words a year later in Venice." "A wild daydream he had." "I don't think it meant a damn thing." "Keaton also discussed it on a Canadian television program called Flashback." "Well, it's one of those art things and..." "I was confused when we shot it and I'm still confused." "I think the only thing I remember was Buster saying" ""What the hell did you get me into with those guys?"" "if Keaton was the most self-reflexive comedian, he was not introspective." "Yet despite his profession of ignorance, and a life before the camera, he's quoted by Reed as saying" ""Schneiderjust told me to keep my back to the camera and be natural." ""Try acting natural with a camera crew aiming at your back."" "Keaton was in fact shy by nature and shell-shocked by the paparazzi." "Beneath his veneer of incomprehension is a body that physically knows the pain of E's gaze." "After Venice, Film played the New York Film Festival." "Again the focus was Keaton, and again, confusion reigned." "Leonard Maltin, by then 14, attended the screening." "I remember that I was puzzled by the movie." "And I think a lot of the audience was too." "An awful lot of people, not just me, didn't quite know what to make of it." "Brownlow's view is warmly ironic." "It doesn't work for me." "It's..." "It's not cinematic enough." "It's the sort of thing that when you've done your experiment with the audience, and you tell them, they all go "Oh!"" "What does it say?" "A man who is afraid for anyone to look into his soul?" "Is that what it's about?" "Confusion arose from a divide between concept and realization." "The aphysical nature of E apparently shifts throughout the film." "Is E a free-floating presence?" "The physical camera its body double?" "Beckett himself was perhaps the best arbiter." "He wrote to Schneider:" ""Having been troubled by a failure to communicate by purely visual means the basic intention," ""I now begin to feel that this is unimportant" ""and that the images obtained gain in force what they lose as ideograms" ""and that the whole idea behind the film has been chiefly of value on the formal and structural level."" "Film's failings become success in something else." "The force Beckett describes lies in Kaufman's cinematography which brings a palpable weight to Becketfs concept." "No small feat, for characteristically Beckett's concept upturns the cart." "Most radically, he'd done this in Godot, where the title character never arrives." "There, Beckett inverted the entire notion of dramatic resolution." "In Balzac's Mercadet, described previously, Godeau in fact arrives, offstage." "Nearly 100 years later, in 1949, Mercadet was set to film as The Lovable Cheat." "Among its cast was none other than Buster Keaton." "Here are excerpts of the film's climactic scene." "Gentlemen, I give you my word I do not expect Godeau today." "Well, then, it'll be tomorrow!" "Tomorrow!" "Another one of your tricks!" "I wouldn't be surprised a bit!" "Swindler!" "He's lying again." "Mr Mercadet, Mr Godeau is back." "Godeau is really here!" "Oh!" "We are going to be partners again." "Everything is going to be all right again!" "Happiness, prosperity..." "Beckett's inversion elevates farce to archetype." "In Film's climactic moment, we're finally allowed to see O's face." "As he sleeps, E pans around the room to better view his prey from the front." "The chase nears its conclusion." "The camera, embodying E, settles against the wall in the very position where the image of God once hung." "Under E's gaze, O awakes." "And looks to see what he's most feared." "E is of course O's double image, his doppelgénger." "In some traditions, encountering one's double is an omen of death, in others, of prophecy." "In Beckett's early notebooks, he considered accompanying Film with Schuberfs "Der Doppelgénger"." "The flute player in the BFI remake of Film, seen earlier, performs precisely this composition as E encounters O." "For Beckett, the self is the path to both enlightenment and death." "But the doppelgéngefs overtones resonate further." "It was also a fascination of Keaton's." "Keaton's early gags, as archetypes themselves, reflect the very themes Beckett explored." "In Film, when O encounters E, Beckett describes the moment as "investment proper."" "It's the moment of self-recognition." "For his famous close-up of the moment, Keaton evoked this image from Playhouse." "According to a 1964 letter to Schneider, Beckett was unsatisfied." "But Kevin Brownlow transcribed his views two decades later." ""When you saw that face at the end, ah!" He smiled. "At last!"" "Brownlow also observed a touching irony." "He began to talk about Keaton exactly in the terms of the Evening Standard article about him!" "He said "Oh, he was very monosyllabic." "He didn't talk very much at all." ""He didn't have anything to say." And it was very funny." "Keaton was in many ways Beckett's doppelgéinger." "A dourness underlay Keaton's humor as much as humor underlay Beckett's dourness." "I once said to him..." "I pretended that I didn't know that he drank." "And he said something about, "Well, I was drinking then."" "And I said "You drank?"" "And he looked at me." "He wasn't sure whether I was lying or putting him on, or what." "And he said "I drank an ocean of whisky."" "And I said "Oh, I didn't know."" "He said "Oh, you didn't, huh?"" "There's a picture of Buster in a Keeley Cure, which was a place they sent alcoholics and they fed them drinks." ""What do you want?" "How much do you..." "Have another drink." "Have another..."" "The drinks had a potion in them that made you throw up." "And Buster was there for six weeks, drinking drink after drink after drink and throwing up until finally he said "No, I don't want to drink any more" and that's when they would release you." "They thought you were cured." "And Buster told me he got out of the Keeley Cure and was walking home." "Nobody met him." "Nobody met him!" "He was alone, he was discarded." "That's what hurts me the most about it, that he was just... thrown away." "This genius was just thrown away." "And he was walking across a golf course to take a shortcut home." "And he saw a bar on the 18th hole and he said "I wanted to be sure I had my life back." ""So I went in and drank fifteen martinis the day I got out." ""Then I went home."" "I don't know what shape he was in." "When I knew him, he never drank anything but a glass of beer occasionally, just a glass of beer." "As Keaton's life infused his art, so, indirectly, did Beckett's his." "Becketfs mistress Barbara Bray put it rather well to me when she said" ""Sam is just like a swan gliding along on the surface of the lake" ""and every so often will dip and take a morsel from here and from there" ""and then will digest it and make it his own."" "Things that you are surprised by come back in another form and are echoed in his work." "His Play of 1963 reflects his relationship with Bray." "The teleplay Eh Joe, which followed Film, begins where Film ends... a protracted zoom into a face." "A woman's voice berates Joe for his sins, high among them, an adulterous love." "Here, Billie Whitelaw performs the voice." "You know the one I mean, Joe..." "The green one..." "The narrow one..." "Always pale..." "The pale eyes..." "Spirit made light..." "To borrow your expression..." "The way they opened after..." "Unique..." "One hears in her voice an echo of Beckett's life companion," "Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil." "What?" "Who?" "No!" "She!" "After Eh Joe and the transcendent Not I," "Beckett's work became yet more minimal." "In 1981, Billie Whitelaw worked on Rockaby." "Rockabys rocker suggests Keaton's in Film." "I asked James Knowlson if Beckett himself experienced enlightenment with age." "He once began to talk to me about old age and he said that he'd always hoped that old age, which he had associated with spirit and light, would actually bring him to a more truthful understanding of this ludicrous parabola from youth to old age," "where you're going through knowledge and then realizing how little you know." "And I remember saying to him at the time, and this was when he was getting quite old," ""And are you finding this, Sam?"" "And he thought for a moment and he said" ""Not really, not really."" "Perhaps Beckett found only a void at the end." "We'll never know." "When I seek my deepest insights, beyond the work itself, or with the work," "I turn to Billie Whitelaw." "It was like music." "I always thought working for Sam was like working with music." "Well, you had to say "out... into this world... this world..." ""tiny little thing... before its time... godforsaken hole... called... called... no matter..." ""parents unknown... unheard of..." "he having vanished... thin air..." ""no sooner buttoned up his breeches... she similarly..." "eight months later... almost to the tick..." ""so no love... spared that... no love such as normally vented on the... speechless infant... in the home..."" "I'm always clicking my fingers when I'm working with Sam..." "To get the rhythm right." "Like being my own conductor." "No... out..." "into this world... this world... tiny little thing... before its time..." "in a godfor... what?" "... girl?" "... yes... tiny little girl... into this..." "out into this... before her time... godforsaken hole called... called..." "no matter... parents unknown... unheard of... he having vanished... thin air.. no sooner buttoned up his breeches... she similarly... eight months later... almost to the tick... so no love... spared that... no love such as normally vented on the..." "speechless infant... in the home..." "In D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus's documentary on Rockaby, we see her rehearse." "Close of a long day to herself" "whom else time she stopped letdown the blind and stopped" "time she went down down the steep stair time she went right down saying to herself" "I' fill?" "' done with that the rocker those arms at last" "saying to the rocker stop her eyes rock her off rock her off rock her off..." "When I interviewed her in the fall of 2011, her memory, like Barney Rosset's, was starting to fade." "Yet still, her self remained, intact, unmarred by persona." "Most actors, you do the best you can, but with Sam, it always came..." "his work always came from my center." "I don't know whether that makes any sense to you." "In her conducting of herself, we see the dissolving of self and the doppelgénger as a path to enlightenment." "In her late interview, though her memory fades, we see her core of self, untouched and whole, waiting for release." "Your mentioning the experience and camera and so on reminds me of a wonderful story about a Swedish cameraman who was peering through the viewfinder and lining up a very beautiful shot and he's saying, "Oh, this is so wonderful." ""L wish I was here."" "When George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, committed suicide in 1932, he left only a brief note:" ""To my friends:" "My work is done." ""W" "In November 1963, a half year before Film began production," "Alan Schneidefs father died." "Beckett wrote to him." ""My very dear Alan, I know your sorrow" ""and I know that for the likes of us there is no ease for the heart to be had from words or reason" ""and that in the very assurance of sorrows fading, there is more sorrow." ""So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thought" ""that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is," ""that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds." ""Ever, Sam."" "Now, as film itself sheds its material body... a new world awaits." "Subtitle Processing:" "Kamil Rutkowski / Di Factory Subtitle Editing and Co-Ordination:" "Nick Shimmin"