film - Film film
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Photograph by Ken Lundon Flickr.
In order to distinguish between the two perceptions, objects seen by O were shot through film National Film Registry a lens-gauze, blurring his perception while E s perception was shot without gauze or filters, keeping the image s sharp. The film opens onto a rippled image that fills the entire screen. and there is a window with a tattered roller blind with full-length net curtains to either side. 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 Chihuahua”) are – with some difficulty – ejected from the room and the picture is torn up.
The stairs lead up on the left, but O veers right and pauses, pulling himself together. 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.
We just catch his coat tails flying up the stairs. E chases after him and finds him at the top of the first flight. 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.” The film opens and closes with close-ups of a sightless eye.
He looks very much like the man in the seventh photograph only much older. 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.
When it does he reverses back up to street-level and then begins up the stairs. A frail old woman is coming down. After he looks at each one he places them at the back of the pile so the viewing order is reversed.
She closes her eyes and collapses. He does not need to do anything with the seventh photograph since it is now on the top of the pile.
It is as if it is looking for something. “ 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. (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.
The man has a moustache and is wearing a pince-nez. 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.
They have been consulting a newspaper which the woman keeps hold of. The screen goes black.
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. The views above represent extremes.
A man is hurrying along the wall from left to right. 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.
And all of Sam s good will and my own flailing efforts to get something started failed to bring them together on any level. 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).
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. E slips in unnoticed as O locks the door behind him and then takes his pulse once more. We find ourselves in a “small barely furnished room.
He covers his face with his hands briefly and then looks again. 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 balusters.
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). 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.
C. He has on a long dark overcoat, the collar of which is turned up and his hat is pulled down over his face.
E checks on where the man had been, but O has made his escape. The eye opens, slowly, closes, opens again, blinks and then fades into a different rippled image, still somewhat organic but changed, still.
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. 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.
“She carries a tray of flowers slung from her neck by a strap. The camera gives us a brief close-up.
This inevitably evokes the notorious opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou Film takes its inspiration from the 18th century Idealist Irish philosopher Berkeley. R.
Gradually the horrified look we have seen before on the couple and the old woman’s faces appears on his. O also destroys the photographs of his past, his ‘memories’ of who he was.
Keaton was dying even as they made the film. 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 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.
Satisfied he turns left and, not without some difficulty, opens the door to a room and enters. He closes his eye and the expression fades.
We are directly behind O. 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.
Now all that remains for O is to escape from himself - which he achieves by falling asleep until woken by E s intense gaze. He enters. The camera cuts to the vestibule.
Although the role called for Beckett’s seemingly ubiquitous bowler hat, Keaton had brought along some of his trademark flattened-down Stetsons and it was quickly agreed that he should wear one of those. 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.
It is summer though it is hard to tell. That said, “Keaton s behaviour on the set was … steady and cooperative … He was indefatigable if not exactly loquacious.
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. “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.
The viewers are being asked to consider the work structurally and dramatically rather than emotionally or philosophically. More has probably been written about the making of this film than the film itself. As the camera begins to pan right and up and we realise it is a wall; we are outside a building (an old factory situated in Lower Manhattan).
It was a disaster.” But not entirely. He heads off down the street until he realises he is at the right doorway.
He still has the eye patch. He half starts from the chair then stiffens. A second draft was produced by 22 May and a forty-leaf shooting script followed thereafter.
All of a sudden he wakes and stares straight into the camera lens. “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.
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. The photograph of him as an infant must be on a tougher mount and he has some difficulty with that one.
E moves behind him again. This time we see the face of E in close-up, just the eyes. O covers his eyes again, bows his head.
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.” 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 , Beckett takes the emphasis away from Berkeley s maxim thus stressing the dramatic structure of the work. Film is a film written by Samuel Beckett, his only screenplay.
Eventually it loses interest and pans left and down back to the wall. Suddenly the camera (E) shifts violently to the left. As it moves we realise it is an extreme close-up of an eye-lid; it fills the entire screen.
He encouraged 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: “ 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.” Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Breath, Catastrophe, Come and Go, Eleutheria (posthumous), Endgame, Footfalls, Happy Days, Krapp s Last Tape, Not I, Ohio Impromptu, A Piece of Monologue, Play, Rockaby, Rough for Theatre I, Rough for Theatre II, That Time, Waiting for Godot, What Where All That Fall, Cascando, Embers, The Old Tune, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music .but the clouds., Eh Joe, Ghost Trio, Nacht und Träume, Quad Film . There are two holes in the headrest that suggest eyes.
He is hanging onto a briefcase with his left hand whilst trying to shield the exposed side of his face with the other. 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.
‘We didn’t know that,’ Rosset told interviewer Patsy Southgate in 1990, ‘but looking back at it, the signs were there. They both look appalled at what has happened. E moves back to a long shot and watches O barge through and on his way.
An entire play has even been devoted to the story, The Stone Face by Canadian playwright Sherry MacDonald. Beckett had never seen Schneider direct any of his plays and yet continued to entrust him with the work. In the third part we get much more of O’s perception of the room and its contents.
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.’” Finally O sits down opposite the denuded wall, opens the folder and takes out seven photographs, all of him, which he examines in sequence: He spends twice as long on pictures 5 and 6. It was commissioned by Barney Rosset of Grove Press.
He takes his pulse and E moves in. This may be true but it does not mean it will not have the same effect on anyone who comes in contact with it.
Lamont writes that Film deals with the apprenticeship to death, the process of detaching oneself from life. 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 replaces his hat, takes off his pince-nez and looks after the fleeing figure. 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.” 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.
Like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it teaches the gradual dissolution of self. Without colour it is hard at first to tell what we’re looking at but it is alive.
He looks around to see if there is anyone about. 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.” 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.
Although stated simply the mechanics needed to execute these tasks are laborious, e.g. David Rayner Clark directed Max Wall. It first appeared in print in Eh Joe and Other Writings (Faber and Faber, 1967). 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.
Suddenly O realises he is being watched and turns his head violently to the right. Writing began on 5 April 1963 with a first draft completed within four days.
We then see the opening image of the eye, which is frozen, and the credits are presented over it. He pauses, hugging the wall and E gets a chance to focus on him.
At the beginning of the work, Beckett uses the famous quotation: esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). The camera’s movement is not smooth.
The rocking dies down and then stops. To all intents and purposes, we were shooting a silent film, and he was in his best form.
Critical opinion is mixed, but it is generally held in higher regard by film scholars than it is by theatre or Beckett scholars. 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.
This simplistic division might lead one to assume that the Eye is only interested in the man it is pursuing. 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.
He resumes rocking and dozes off. It s said that Buster didn t understand Godot and had misgivings about this script as well.
Mayer of MGM and two other invisible Hollywood moguls. “‘Yes, I accept the offer,’ were silent Keaton’s unexpected first words to Schneider.
