Notfilm

Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived is the famous line of the l8th century Anglo-Irish subjectivist philosopher Bishop Berkeley that Samuel Beckett disputed in his sole screenplay, Film--in which Buster Keaton played the leading role. Would Beckett have said, "to be perceived is to die?" Film, shot in l964, was commissioned by Beckett’s American publisher Barney Rosset, directed by the renowned theater director Alan Schneider and shot by Boris Kaufman the cinematographer whose older brother was Denis Kaufman aka Dziga Vertov director of the iconic Man With a Movie Camera (1929). All of this is more significant than it even sounds since Beckett shared the protomodernist rapture with celluloid that’s the basic theme of the Dziga Vertov film;  at one point in his career he even applied to study with Eisenstein, while at the same time experiencing a rejection of photography not dissimilar to that of a body rejecting an organ transplant. Notfilm,  which recently completed a run at the Anthology Film Archives, is Ross Lipman’s movie about the making of Film. But Notfilm is less a documentary than a filmic homage to the original, adopting the form of the Beckett work in which the world that is being sought by the camera vanishes before the viewer’s eyes. Partly due to the vicissitudes of age, Rosset and the famous Beckett actress Billie Whitelaw (whose legendary performance in Not I, the film's title references) are interview subjects whose very being seems to dissolve in the course of Lipman’s encounters with them. Replication is a little like what water does to the Wicked Witch; in a famous moment of the original Film Buster Keaton’s vision of himself is met with great horror recalling the dopplegangers in both the Borges version of Dostoevsky’s The Double: A Petersburg Poem, The Other and also the terrified look of the nurse in the famous Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). The plot of Film is rather simple an Eye (E) is seeking to capture an object (O) and Lipman brilliantly frames the narrative movement of the Beckett work as a chase film, which segues perfectly from the heyday of silent film out of which Keaton emerged (Chaplin had been offered and declined the role). Lipman is a little like an obsessed lover who is competing for attention with the object of his adulation, only to fall short in almost oedipal way. Yet Notfilm is loaded with wonderful perceptions  (“Soundlessness became for Beckett a metaphysical campaign,” Lipman comments at one point) and invaluable archival research.

All That Fall at BAM

One may or may not accuse Beckett of being a dualist, but no writer is as adept at dramatizing the Cartesian agony. Put in another light, let us just say that Beckett, a la what Harold Bloom said about Shakespeare, dramatized what it means to be human. The Pan Pan Theater Company’s production of Beckett’s All That Fall recently completed a run at BAM. All That Fall was written as a radio play and even though it has been staged as a conventional theater piece, Gavin Quinn who directed, remained faithful to Beckett’s original intentions.The audience sat on rocking chairs in a darkness that was punctuated with brilliant lighting and sound effects. Anyone who’s ever enjoyed Fred Newman on Prairie Home Companion would delight in comparing notes with what Pan Pan sound designer Jimmy Eadie brilliantly accomplished for this rendition with its trains and mooing and constant footsteps. Albeit, this is a radio play, the audience’s being deprived of sight (like one of its central characters who is blind) is curiously Beckettian in and of itself. Disembodiment is one of Beckett's ongoing themes. For instance, in the famous Not I, Billie Whitelaw is just a mouth uttering words. In Film, Buster Keaton gradually looses his sense of self-conception. In the current production of All That Fall, the audience is in the dark literarily and metaphorically. There is a wonderful monologue in All That Fall (which is not to be confused with Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, though it’s striking that two so radically dissimilar playwrights appropriated the same iconography) in which Beckett’s central character, Maddy (Ain Ni Mhuiri), describes having gone to hear a lecture by a neurologist as a way of dealing with her lifelong obsession with horses’s buttocks. The lecturer is giving a case history of a girl he couldn’t help. At the end he concludes that all she suffered from was the fact that she was dying “and she did as soon as he washed his hands of her.” What better argument for a mind/body dichotomy? In another section Maddy's husband, Dan (Andrew Bennett), does an accounting of his existence and figures out that it would be far more profitable if he simply stayed home and did nothing and yet another character is described as coping with pain by beating his wife. “What a piece of work in man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties… and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”