It may be quite strange to imagine the possibility, but Irish absurdist theater writer and playwright Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989), the once protege of fellow countryman James Joyce (whom he met when they were both expatriates in Paris); secretly had another vocation in mind - cinematographer. Beckett was so thoroughly impressed and besotted by the works of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein that in the year 1936, would write to the auteur personally, requesting tutelage in the areas of cinematography and film editing at the Moscow State School of Cinematography. Lo and behold and unfortunate thanks to the reliably fickle fingers of fate, Eisenstein was never to receive Beckett's communique, for it would arrive at a troubled time for the director who was privy to his own certain blue period and was far too adrift to have noticed . Had Eisenstein received Beckett's inquiry, Beckett's curriculum vitae could have been a far cry different.
Despite the lack of riposte, Beckett still held allegiance to his mentor and muse, Mr. Eisenstein and Beckett's works continued to draw heavy influence from the 'Father of Montage.' Nearly three decades later in 1964, a chance encounter in New York with silent legend Buster Keaton (Beckett was equally besotted by Keaton's genius) would spur Beckett on to collaborate with theater director Alan Schneider and pen his first and only film. The succinctly titled Film would be released in 1965 and it was also significant for being one of Keaton's last on-screen appearances before succumbing to cancer the following year. The film was shot deliberately in black and white and it capitalized on the now infamous scene in which Simone Mareuil's vitreous humour is none too funnily expelled by the razor of man on a surrealist mission - Luis Bunuel in Un chien andalou (1929).
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| The eye has it...Buster Keaton in Beckett's Film (1965) |
And befittingly in its economical twenty-minute running time, the film was visceral, thought provoking and chock filled of quandaries hosting its own locked room mystery, seen through the roving eye of an aged Buster Keaton , was it absurdist theater put to nitrocellulose, or perhaps a blatant Descartian message? It was frustratingly beautiful however that this little taste, Beckett's one and only foray into the field of filmmaking, an inkling of what just might have been if only Sergei Eisenstein opened up his bloody mail!
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| Eisenstein checked the Dailies but not his daily posts. |