Sunday, December 30, 2012
If you need a key to Samuel Beckett's universe...
SAMUEL BECKETT – BUSTER KEATON – FILM –
1964/5
This film was
made in 1964 in
black and white and silent. The artist’s choices in the style of 1929.
Obviously Beckett is not trying to make anything commercial or even popular but
something artistic, avant-garde in a retrospective if not retrograde way: to go
back to what it was in those distant days, even using Buster Keaton for the
film, an actor who accepted to do it though he admitted he did not understand
what it all was about.
The film has
recently been restored and published on DVD by the French producer MK2. The
introduction is from a university professor, François Noudelmann and has little
interest. The documents which are testimonies from people who took part in the
project insists on Beckett’s active presence on the set and that’s all. The cut
scenes are in fact rushes that were not used because they were just bad, like
the dog or the cat reappearing in the basket without having crossed the door
back into the room.
So what about
the film?
Once again it
is a fair representation of Beckett’s mental and hence artistic universe. The
back of an old urban industrial or residential building, the back alley
cluttered with trash and rejects. One man we will never see from the front
before the last scene comes up dressed in a long black coat, his face covered
with some rag (so we think since we only see the back of the head) and a hat on
top of it. He looks more like the Invisible Man the may H.G. wells describes
him. That man walks right against the wall, pushes and frightens two people
there, and finally comes around to the entrance of the building.
He hides on the
down going stairs while an aging flower girl comes down from upstairs. She
drops dead or something at the bottom of the stairs and the man goes around her
and climbs to his room. He opens the door and enters a nearly empty room with
one bed and one rocking chair. He will successively pull the blind down and
draw the curtains, both on the only window, wrap up the mirror with the blanket
from the bed, get the cat and the dog that were in a basket out into the
corridor, one after another and since the ousted one comes back in each time
the other is being ousted it does take some time. Finally with the fifth
attempt, in that case the cat, he will manage to oust the cat and keep the dog
out.
Then he covers
the parrot in the cage with his coat and then he covers the fish in the
fishbowl with the tail of the coat. Then, he pulls down a picture from the wall
that had two big round black eyes and tears it up. Then he is obsessed with two
holes at the top of the back of the rocking chair that look like eyes but he
cannot do anything anyway and when he sits in the chair he does not see them,
hence he may think they do not look at him any more, or they do not exist at
all.
He then opens
his satchel, gets a file out, obsessed by the string and the two buttons that
look like eyes, but untie the string and get pictures out of the file. He is
going to look at the pictures one after the other. They are his life in
perspective and then he looks at them backward and tears them up one after the
other. The pictures are typical: a mother and her new born baby, a mother and a
young child, a teenager and a dog, a young man graduating from some school, a
man and a woman probably on their wedding day, the man and a child and finally
the man alone. That last picture reveals something happened that deprived him
of his past, his wife and his child. Then he can go back and destroy all that
past, picture after picture
He remains
alone and haunted by the past because you can destroy pictures but not
memories.
That’s when the
film comes to a close and the man we have never seen from the front, whose face
has always remained hidden is finally captured by the camera in a full front view.
He is one-eyed and has a patch over his left eye and he sees himself in a
nicer, cleaner and sterner attire, yet with the patch and that image of himself
that cannot be in the mirror or any reflecting surface since there is none is
the picture that haunts him in his own mind and he ends up his hands on his eye
and patch blocking the view and maybe crying.
In his life
there has been a crime, catastrophe, cataclysm that deprived him of his happy
past and happy marriage and happy fatherhood and he feels guilty of it and he
runs away and hides away from people and the world that he sees as interlopers
and a ruin-looking universe, but he cannot run away from himself, from his
mind, from his conscience and his conscience is like Cain’s eye in the tomb: it
is looking at him.
You can find
that situation all over Beckett’s works, plays, novels, whatever, and of course
in this film. It is brutally visible. The only thing that the presentation of
the film tells us is that in 1934 Beckett applied for a studying and working
placement in Eisenstein’s cinema school in Moscow 1934 in Stalin’s USSR
All that may
explain why the left loved him so much, including the communists who reduced
his works and especially his plays to vast metaphoric parables about the end of
the capitalistic world, or the end of the world brought up by capitalism which
carries nuclear war in its own gut. French productions of the dramatic trilogy
are most of them going towards that kind of a political interpretation.
This film reveals
there is nothing political in the parable (that anyone is free to read as a
political fairy or bad fairy tale) but the systematic exploration of the mind
of people after the cataclysmic event in their lives that destroyed everything
they had before and left them naked in front of fate and death that will take a
long time to come out of sheer pleasure. None of these characters have the
courage to commit suicide, being Catholic at heart no matter what and their
hypocritical protestation.
Dr Jacques
COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 6:24 AM 
