No matter how proven Samuel Beckett may be in the arena of the theater, his single attempt at filmmaking remains somewhat stunted by the medium of film itself. To recreate his meditations on the male consciousness the way he did on stage with What Where, Ohio Impromptu and Catastrophe on film Beckett cast silent film clown Buster Keaton as the sole performer in his Film (1965). The roll of “character directors” in Beckett’s plays becomes interesting in Film, delving beyond the surfaces of reflexive media in that Film also seems to work as the conscious of a single male mind in whom other aspects of the mind are embodied in the other supporting cinematographic forms (sound, montage, framing, etc).
Buster Keaton serves not only as an ideal performer for Beckett’s minimalist script, but also as a cultural signifier. To audiences throughout the world Keaton’s stoic features are immediately recognizable, recalling the faceless everyman Keaton portrayed in each of his silent slapstick comedies. So it is with one broad stroke that Beckett immediately grounds Film in the same context as his theatrical works. This pseudo-short hand allows the film to focus, much in the same way Keaton’s two reel films did decades before, on the immediate conditions and scenarios constructed around the film’s apparent protagonist.
Beckett’s cinematic translation of his aesthetic lies in how static Film is. Keaton is only physically active for a third of the film, and the camera for even less. This is problematic for Beckett because, unlike theater, the cinema has the possibility to manipulate the audience’s gaze and by doing so instruct the audience as to what the emotional timbre and social context of a character is to be perceived as. Because Beckett’s interests are clearly in duration and in Keaton’s portrait it is safe to assume that Film is meant to convey a motion through either physical space or intellect; mechanisms inherent in filmmaking. Yet, Keaton’s objective is unclear, and the film’s conclusion is therefore isolated in the space of the film’s montage. Thus transforming the film’s relationship to its own structure into a kind of joke and punch line.
