Beckett was interested in cinema and had written to Eisenstein in 1936 asking to be admitted to the Moscow Film Academy. Fortunately, I think, Eisenstein had better things to do than exchange letters with an unknown Irishman -- all of Beckett's fame was ahead of him: Waiting for Godot and his other celebrated theatrical works all were published and first performed post-War. So Beckett didn't embark on a film career but, nevertheless, seems to have been very interested in the opportunity provided by Grove Press in 1964. He spent weeks writing a script and, then, recruited the director of the American premieres of his plays, Alan Schneider, to make the movie. There was only one problem: Schneider had never directed a movie and had no idea how to do this work. Schneider, however, had two seasoned professionals on his crew: Boris Kaufman and Buster Keaton -- that is, probably about 80 years of cinema production experience collectively. The problem was that Kaufman and Keaton weren't really engaged in the project. Keaton had no idea what Beckett's obtuse script was supposed to mean and was indifferent to the enterprise -- he is said to have refused to engage with Beckett and morosely sat in his car reading the sports page between takes. Kaufmann is one of cinema's greatest cameramen -- he shot Vigo's Zero de Conduit and L'Atalanta as well as On the Waterfront -- but he also couldn't figure out what Beckett wanted. In fact, even Beckett didn't know what he wanted and he was revising the script even when shooting was underway. (The British Film Institute has apparently shot Beckett's published script in a reconstruction of what the author intended -- but this differs markedly from what Schneider and Beckett actually produced.) Extensive tests were made but when it came time to produce the film on a sweltering day in New York -- it was 100 degrees -- everything went wrong. The opening nine-minutes of the film, an overture, as it were, introducing the picture's major themes, had to be scrapped. After a short minute of so prelude, the picture, as released in 1965, takes place on one set simulating a dilapidated cell-like room.
Beckett, who seems to have been a monstrous pain in the ass, overthought the project. He superimposed layers upon layers of complications on the script, a riff on Bishop Berkeley's notion that "to be is to be perceived" -- that is, esse is percipi. Beckett wanted one style of footage for the point-of-view of his principal character, a schlemiel called "O" ("Object" of perception); he demanded another style of camerawork for "E" -- that is, the perceiving lens. This couldn't be accomplished and so lots of smudged and smeared film showing O's "diseased" perspective had to be scrubbed. Beckett also devised an elaborate geometry for the relationship of O to E -- if the camera angle between O and E was greater than 46 degrees, this perspective was banned. (Beckett illustrated this with elaborate diagrams in the script and called the 45 degree angle the "angle of immunity). None of this worked in practice and people who saw the film at Cannes and then Lincoln Center were totally baffled. (The only one who benefited from the project was Buster Keaton whose career was revived by the attention that the film garnered -- although no one understood the movie, Keaton always was given standing ovations when he was in attendance. He would, then, approach the microphone and explain that he had no idea what the film was supposed to be about.)
Lippman wanders down many paths, most of them quite digressive if interesting, yet misses some key aspects to the film. In fact, he doesn't seem to understand Film himself. He devotes time to showing that Beckett was a habitual liar -- he always claimed to have never heard of a farce involving a character who doesn't appear until the last moment of the play: the character's name is Godot and the farce was by Balzac, a writer with whom Beckett was very familiar. The hapless Billy Whitelaw, Beckett's muse as an actress, describes her travails in appearing as an illuminated and white-painted pair of lips and teeth in Not I. But she also makes a bizarre distinction between her "inner core" and the rest of her flesh -- the sort of comment that would set Beckett spinning like a top in his grave. (It's pretty evident that she didn't fully understand what his works were about although she was sadistically manipulated by her boss, for instance, buried in sand up to her neck or forced to squat in a garbage barrel to the point that she was actually crippled permanently by performing these roles.) There's a disturbing digression about Keaton's alcoholism -- he said he had drank "oceans of whiskey" -- but this information, although extremely interesting, has nothing to do with Film -- Keaton had been sober for many years when he made that picture. Schneider was still alive when NotFilm was made but couldn't recall anything -- he seems to be suffering from dementia. (Lippman likes the fact that most of his informants can't really recall much of anything about the vexed production -- it's a Beckett touch.) We get some spectacular scenes from Keaton movies -- there's one mindboggling scene in which Keaton dives off the top of a sand dune and turns somersaults in the air as he bounces like a ball off the flanks of the hillside. Because Dziga Vertov was Boris Kaufman's brother we gets lots of imagery from Vertov's Kino-Eye films -- but this has nothing to do with Film. Similarly, fantastic images of Billy Whitelaw's lips and tongue and enormous teeth in Not I are impressive but have nothing to do with the Beckett project under consideration. Film features a moving camera that people see and, then, to which they react with expressions of terror and revulsion. Beckett's idea was that "to be is to be observed" -- since Beckett's art attempts to reverse the curse of being into non-being, the idea in Film is efface all traces of O's existence by destroying pictures of him as wall as tearing up an image of the God (Berkeley's God here shown as a Sumerian divinity with huge bug-eyes) whose perception confirms O's being. Having eliminated all signs of being perceived by anyone, O finally comes face to face with the menacing camera lens. It turns out, of course, that the lens is the hero's own face and single eye (Keaton is like a camera; he has a single lens and wears an eye patch.) Beckett thought long and hard about this climax, but the notion that, if we eliminate God and our fellow creatures observing us, we will still find ourselves under the scrutiny of our own consciousness is sophomoric and you can see this coming a mile away. The problem that Beckett faced in using Keaton is that the comedian's silent films express more about existential Angst in a more authentic form than anything that Beckett could muster on-screen. Images of the tiny Keaton pursued by vast armies of avenging cops carrying billy-clubs are far more alarming than anything Beckett could configure for Film. Furthermore, much of Film inadvertently looks like a low-budget horror picture. You know the plot: a man wakes up from strange, unsettling dreams and walks down a busy street -- everyone recoils from him in utter horror, something that we see from the POV of the hero. In fact, we come to learn that the man has been killed in a ghastly industrial accident and that he is wandering the streets as an undead corpse terrifying everyone with his mangled face and body.
Lippman ends the movie with a lament for the demise of film in the wake of the digitalization of cinema. This is poignant but beside the point. NotFilm contains recordings of Beckett's voice, a great rarity since he evaded cameras and microphones. (In fact, he was fantastically photogenic.) The produced smuggled in a recorder and we can hear Beckett debating issues about the film with Schneider. Someone says that Beckett was a "lyric" Irishman and that everything he said sounded like poetry. On the evidence of the film, like Finnegan in the song, he "had a beautiful brogue (both) broad and sweet."
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