All language subtitles for notfilm.2015.1080p.bluray.x264-sprinter

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 prot�g�
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 Th��tre 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.

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.

O's vision is really a different
world. Everything becomes slower, softer.

That's the quality we're looking for.

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.

Sam, how can you judge abnormality
unless you have normality?

What is your criteria?

h' you have two abnormal points of view...

Normality is what
they're previously associated with.

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.

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.

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.

I mean, O sees everything,
you know. This is what threw us...

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...

O or E?

O!

No! E! E! E!

O never sees anything acutely. Never!

Right. This is what threw
us a few minutes ago...

No, I never said that,
I couldnt have said that.

Tensions ran high and fault
lines became apparent.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But you don't mean slow motion.
That's a trick.

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 d�tente.

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?

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.

it we had created a studio street,
then I think that's a different story.

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.

The problem comes
from the fact that we have to shoot six...

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.

But that's not difficult.

Kaufman disagreed.

This is the hardest...

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, lmean 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.

She simply comes down very slowly.
She's old and frail...

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?

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.

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.

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...

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 doppelg�nger.

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 Doppelg�nger�.

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 doppelg�ngefs
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 doppelg�inger.

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

l' 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 doppelg�nger 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