Film

Beckett’s only venture into the medium of cinema was written in 1963 and filmed in New York in the summer of 1964. Alan Schneider was hired as director and Buster Keaton as the main character, his last time in front of the camera. For the shooting Beckett made his only trip to America. The film has no dialogue with the exception of that one whispered ‘sssh!’. It takes as its basis Berkeley’s philosophy Esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived), which means: even after all outside perception – be it animal, human or divine – has been suppressed, self perception remains.
Beckett’s attempt to investigate the perceptual referentiality of cinema as an art form differs from the attempts of other film makers. At that time directors such as Hitchcock with Rear Window, Michael Powell with Peeping Tom and Antonioni with Blow-Up were all incorporating explorations of the problems of spectatorship/voyeurism into the very structure of their films. The American avant-garde (through Brakhage, Belson, Snow etc.) was drawing attention to the very materiality of the cinematic process. Beckett chose a radically different perspective.
Composed with loving care, humour, sadness, and Beckett’s ever-present compassionate understanding of man’s essential frailty, Film is, in the words of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, ‘The greatest Irish film’. (Thanks to Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly)