When Samuel Beckett Tried to Capture the Power of the Movies

In the summer of 1964, Samuel Beckett arrived in New York City for his first and only trip to the United States, to oversee production on what would be his first and only film. Titled “Film,” it was commissioned by the avant-garde publisher Barney Rosset as part of a triptych; the other two pieces were written by Harold Pinter and Eugène Ionesco (both of whom, like Beckett, were published by Rosset’s Grove Press), though Rosset was unable to bring those to fruition. Beckett, by the mid-nineteen-sixties, had cemented his global reputation with the successes of “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame,” and he and Rosset marshalled a remarkable collection of talent for their movie: celebrated theater director Alan Schneider; cinematographer Boris Kaufman, who had worked on “12 Angry Men” and “On the Waterfront,” among other films; and, most notably, the silent-screen legend Buster Keaton.

The silent-film great Buster Keaton starred in “Film,” an avant-garde movie by Samuel Beckett.Photograph from Everett

The plot of “Film” is, not surprisingly, scarce. “O” (Keaton) a dilapidated figure who wears an oversized trench coat and a flattened white Stetson, is pursued by “E” (the camera, essentially—and, by proxy, you, the viewer). O scurries along Pearl Street, in the bombed-out area beneath the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. He collides with an old couple who are dressed in quaint Victorian style, and whose perturbed stares slowly twist into horror. When E then confronts them, they shrink in the “agony of perceivedness,” according to the script. A similar encounter in the stairwell of an apartment building follows, this time with an old woman carrying flowers. Beckett’s spare text dictates that E can only approach O “from behind and at an angle not exceeding 45 degrees.” This “angle of immunity” is the hallmark of Beckett’s experiment: once it has been breached, then our hero, our O, will know he is perceived; horror will set in, and all will be lost.

“It’s really quite a simple thing . . . It’s a movie about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver—two aspects of the same man,” Schneider explained to a writer for The New Yorker who visited the set. “The perceiver desires like mad to perceive, and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.” Simple enough.

“Notfilm,” a documentary by film historian Ross Lipman that traces the production of “Film,” recently had its North American premiere at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, as part of an annual festival put on by Film Comment. (After additional festival screenings this month, it will have a limited theatrical release in April.) Lipman draws on previously unheard conversations between Beckett, Schneider, and Kaufman, plus interviews with Rosset and the frequent Beckett collaborator Billie Whitelaw, among others—including the critic Leonard Maltin, who visited the set of “Film” as a teenager. “Notfilm” also features part of a never-before-seen prologue to “Film,” footage that had been stashed underneath Rosset’s kitchen sink for decades, and was thought lost.

“Notfilm” leaves you with the unmistakable sense of “Film” as a failed, fascinating experiment, a grand harnessing of craft and creative genius that couldn’t gel into coherence. Yet, for all of its shortcomings—failures that Beckett himself eventually acknowledged—Lipman finds in “Film” genuine insights about Beckett’s work as a whole, and even about the nature of the movies. For Beckett, the cinema was pregnant with exciting, terrifying potential: the power to burn onto celluloid a performer’s likeness, his fears, his history, and make him confront, in a particularly modern way, his mortality.

The ideas about perception that Beckett explores in “Film” are both grandly philosophical and deeply personal. Lipman describes the movie as a “tongue-in-cheek but pointed debate” between Beckett and the Irish enlightenment philosopher George Berkeley—specifically, Berkeley’s notion that esse est percipi (“To be is to be perceived”).* But Lipman also notes that the very phenomenon of being recorded both repulsed and resonated deeply with Beckett, who was famously averse to having his voice captured on tape. He “felt the camera’s eye as a literal wound,” Lipman argues. Cinema was, for Beckett, something like the fullest form of perception, with all the invasiveness and pain that that entailed.

For the character of O, Beckett at first wanted Zero Mostel or the Irish actor Jackie MacGowran, who had played Lucky in “Waiting for Godot.” But he had long been a fan of Keaton, too—in fact, Keaton was offered the role of Lucky in the original American run of “Waiting for Godot,” in 1956. (Keaton turned it down.) The bumbling physical comedy of “Godot” owes a great deal to vaudeville, and Keaton came from a vaudeville background: he started performing with his parents, as part of “The Three Keatons,” when he was three. In the early sixties, Keaton was still working, but his heyday was long since over—and that past-his-prime quality resonates deeply in “Film.” O, as embodied by Keaton, is a man desperate to escape the camera and the penetrating eye of the public.

Beckett’s use of Keaton is knowingly perverse: since the script requires the camera to stay behind O until the end of the film, it deprives the viewer almost entirely of Keaton’s famous face. On set, Beckett’s regimen was punishing: he and Schneider insisted on take after take in hundred-degree weather. As Lipman notes, such demands were typical of Beckett, who often put his performers in gruelling situations: confining the actors in **“**Play” in urns, forcing the hobbled heroes of “Endgame” into uncomfortable physical contortions, or reducing the actress of “Not I” to a shrieking mouth. In that 1972 play, the star, Billie Whitelaw, “had to be totally immobilized in black . . . everything black and tight,” preventing her from moving any muscle at all, save for her mouth. It was an exercise in “sensorial reduction,” to reveal “the pain of life itself.”

According to Schneider, though, Keaton was a regular gentleman on set, “indefatigable if not exactly loquacious.” And his bumbling physicality made him the ideal choice for “Film.” In the movie’s climax, set in a sparsely furnished room that belongs to O’s mother, O wages his final bid against perception—facing off, so to speak, with a parrot, a goldfish, a dog, a cat, and a rocking chair with a headrest cut into a shape that resembles a pair of eyes. In the scene’s closing moments, O tears apart a print that depicts the Sumerian god Abu, and a series of pictures that stand in for the “stages of life.” Thinking his work done and perception vanquished, he rests. O, or maybe Keaton, can finally unburden himself of his profoundly heavy cinematic baggage, escape our perception, and drift into memory.

Or so it seems for a moment. “E’s gaze pierces the sleep . . . O half starts from chair, then stiffens,” the script reads. Keaton, wearing an eye patch, finally faces the camera, looking startled and wary. He grips the chair’s armrests. “It is O’s face . . . but with [a] very different expression, impossible to describe, neither severity nor benignity, but rather acute intentness,” the script instructs. O falls back into his chair. “He sits, bowed forward, his head in his hands, gently rocking.” The end.

The shoot lasted for three weeks, with Schneider, as he recalled in an essay about directing “Film,” following Keaton’s every “shambling gait,” shooting “more 180-degree and 360-degree pans than in a dozen Westerns.” The veteran Keaton found the filmmaking practices of Schneider and Beckett, both cinematic novices, curious, and the production of “Film” suffered from amateurish scheduling and casting mix-ups. (An entire opening sequence, featuring pedestrians strolling under the Brooklyn Bridge, apparently drowning in self-perception, was ultimately rendered unusable, thanks to camera problems.) Beckett, Schneider, and Kaufman, meanwhile, could never quite settle on the proper visual signatures to distinguish O and E’s perspectives. The idea of the movie was obscured by technical incompetence.

“Film” is “the sort of thing that, when, you’ve done your experiment with the audience and you tell them [what it’s about], they’ll all go, ‘Ahhh,’ ” the scholar Kevin Brownlow tells Lipman in “Notfilm.” But without that kind of critical direction, its meanings can be difficult to discern. Beckett, in a letter to Schneider, wrote that there had been a “failure to communicate by purely visual means” the work’s “basic intention.” But he thought that “Film” was a success in other ways. “What came about from ‘Film’ is that Samuel Beckett realized that he still loved cinema, but that motion-picture film wasn’t his medium,” Lipman told me. Beckett would turn to television, writing “Eh Joe,” in 1966, and, a decade later, “Ghost Trio” and “. . . but the clouds . . .” The first of these, Lipman pointed out, seems to pick up “right where ‘Film’ ends, with a long, slow zoom into a face.” And all of the TV productions reprise the themes of “Film”—the threat of perception, diminished physical spaces, spiritually collapsed men—while adding something that Beckett willfully deprived himself of when making “Film”: spoken words, specifically the spare, haunting kind, married to precise stage directions, of the sort that he had mastered in his plays. “Film” was only the beginning of an effort both to investigate and to portray the power of the camera.

“Film” premiered on September 4, 1965, the third-to-last night of that year’s Venice Film Festival. Rex Reed, in the New York Times, described the scene: “several hundred bikini-clad starlets” surrounding the likes of Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard, and then Keaton, looking “for all the world like the kind of man dogs kick,” with “his pants a little baggy” and “his hat a bit crushed.” Keaton said it was the first time he’d ever been invited to a film festival. Critics mostly panned the movie—but then Keaton hadn’t given them much to go on. “Heck, I’d be the last one in the world to comment,” he told Reed, “because I didn’t know what those guys were doing half the time.”

  • This post has been updated to correct the nationality of George Berkeley and the translation of his philosophical proposition.