Samuel Beckett and cinema

209 Pages·2.662 MB·English

by  Beckett, Samuel, Paraskeva, Anthony

Samuel Beckett and Cinema
Historicizing Modernism
Series Editors
Matthew Feldman, Professor of Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK
Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway
Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chester, UK
Editorial Board
Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago,
New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn
Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews,
Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of
English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative
Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of
Northampton, UK.
Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an
empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources
made available over the last decade.
Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-
garde 1900–45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers
by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods.
Series Titles
Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini
British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch
Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead and Erik Tonning
Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck
Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron
Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson
John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh
James Joyce and Catholicism, Chrissie Van Mierlo
Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson,
Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid
Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer, Alex Latter
The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman
Literary Impressionism, Rebecca Bowler
Modernism at the Microphone, Melissa Dinsman
Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle
Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar
Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong
Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker
Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey
Samuel Beckett’s “More Pricks Than Kicks,” John Pilling
Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon
T.E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead
Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood
Samuel Beckett and Cinema
Anthony Paraskeva
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First published 2017
© Anthony Paraskeva, 2017
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accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-2498-0
ePDF: 978-1-4725-2737-0
ePub: 978-1-4725-3323-4
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Series: Historicizing Modernism
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Late Keaton, Docufiction, the Nouvelle Vague 37
2 Self-Perception and Asynchronous Sound: Godard,
Hitchcock, Resnais 73
3 ‘texte théâtre film’: Auteurism, Meyerhold/Eisenstein, Duras 105
4 Photogénie, the Close-Up, Gender Performance 143
Bibliography 176
Index 189
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the University of Roehampton for support which allowed me to
complete this book, and to my colleagues for advice and friendly encouragement,
particularly Laura Peters, Ian Haywood, Sebastian Groes, Nina Power, Jeff
Hilson and Peter Jaeger.
I owe a debt of gratitude to David Avital, Mark Richardson, James Tupper
and all at Bloomsbury for generous assistance of various kinds. I would also like
to thank the series editors Erik Tonning and Matthew Feldman for seeing the
merits in the project and for helpful comments.
I have greatly benefitted from the expertise and help of the Beckett
International Foundation at Reading University, and I would like to thank James
Knowlson, John Pilling, Mark Nixon and Anna McMullan for generous and
friendly support. I have further benefitted from conversations and feedback at
conferences with the wider Beckett community. Thanks are due to Rosemary
Poutney, Everett Frost, Rhys Tranter, Lois More Overbeck, Dan Gunn, Derval
Tubridy, Garin Dowd, Stan Gontarski, Trish McTighe, and David Tucker.
Earlier versions of sections of the book have appeared in Forum for Modern
Language Studies 51: 4 (May 2013) and Journal of Beckett Studies 22: 2 (September
2013). The publishers are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due to the
Estate of Samuel Beckett, care of Rosica Colin Limited, London.
Of the many people to whom I am indebted for information, criticism,
stimulus and support, I would like to thank, in particular, Adam Piette, Olga
Taxidou, Tom Jones, Scott Klein, Jeremy Hardingham, Chris Goode, Ian
Christie, David Bordwell, Laura Mulvey, Katherine Waugh, Jean-Michel Rabaté,
Ross Lipman, Paul Sheehan, Jeremy Prynne, Matthew Jarron, Brian Hoyle, Chris
Murray and Keith Williams.
I am especially grateful to my parents for their support and encouragement.
Introduction
Beckett’s Film fulfilled an ambition which dates back to 1936, when he wrote
to Eisenstein as a ‘serious cinéaste’1 requesting admission to the Moscow
State School of Cinematography. His study of writing about cinema that same
year, including work by Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Rudolph Arnheim and the
avant-garde film journal Close Up (1927–33),2 also signals a desire to learn the
practical aspects of filmmaking, and a continuing interest in the possibilities of ‘a
backwater […] for the two-dimensional silent film that had barely emerged from
its rudiments when it was swamped’.3 Film is silent, and it is set in 1929, a period
which marked cinema’s transition to synchronized sound; it was produced in
1964, on the cusp of Beckett’s work as a director for stage and screen, and during
the widespread revival of silent film in the period of cinema’s modernist second
wave.
This book will make a case for the fundamental importance of cinema, as
distinct from other media such as painting, video art and radio, to Beckett’s work
for stage and screen.4 Drawing on recently published letters, archival material
and production notebooks, this is the first book-length study to explore Beckett’s
complex, informed, ambivalent relations with both first and second wave
modernist cinema. I extend and enhance scholarship on Beckett’s relation to
silent film by situating his earliest formative period as a writer, when he attended
the cinema regularly, within the modernist silent film culture of the late twenties,
1 Beckett to Sergei Eisenstein, 2 March 1936, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1: 1929–1940, eds
Martha Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 317.
2 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 226.
3 Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, 6 February 1936, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, 312.
4 For studies on the influence of painting on Beckett’s work, see for instance Lois Oppenheim, The
Painted Word: Samuel Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000),
James Knowlson, Images of Beckett (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2003) and David
Lloyd, Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); on
video art, see Mark Nixon, ‘Samuel Beckett: Video Artist’, in eds Peter Fifield and Daniel Addyman,
Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 177–190; on television, see
Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2009); on radio, see Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2008).
2 Samuel Beckett and Cinema
which sought to resist the coming of the talkies, and which included figures such
as Eisenstein, Artaud, Meyerhold and Chaplin. By examining striking parallels
between particular film techniques and his own dramaturgical and cinematic
methods, my study will show forth Beckett’s engagement with silent cinema,
including German expressionism, Hollywood comedy, Soviet cinema and
French impressionism. The tendency of silent film modernism’s investigation
into the formal properties of the medium, cut short by the arrival of the talkies
in 1928, is revived by second wave modernism between 1959 and 1975, a
period which coincides with Beckett’s first practical encounter with camera
and editing technique, and his first experience as a director of his own work.
This book also situates Beckett, for the first time, within the context of cinema’s
second wave of modernism, including figures such as Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc
Godard, Marguerite Duras and Robert Bresson. Critical work on Beckett has
comprehensively overlooked this crucial context, and this is surprising given
Beckett’s long-standing interest in cinema, the shared aesthetic principles and
techniques between his work and some of the key films of the period, as well
as the direct connections between Beckett’s collaborators and the films of the
modernist new wave.
Beckett did not write and direct for stage and screen in isolation, I will argue,
but within the context of a culture of interconnected representations between
film, theatre and literature. Beckett’s theatre practice, from the beginning
of his work as a director in the mid-sixties, belongs to a modernist tradition
of hybrid interactions between theatre and cinema. After Film, and the film
adaptation of Comédie, he begins to develop a directorial style which overturns
conventional distinctions between the mechanical reproducibility, limited
spatial perspectives and asynchronous sound of cinema, and the specific or
contingent quality of the fluid theatrical event. While his theatrical work from
Play onwards achieves an inflexible rigour of pre-determination, as though the
performance aspired to the condition of a recording, his work for the screen
begins to incorporate techniques of liveness and gesture ordinarily found in the
theatre. Critical scholarship on Beckett’s television, I will argue, excludes a full
reckoning of the sustained influence of cinema on his work for the screen. The
distinctions Beckett scholars have drawn between his film and television work,
I will claim, are less important than the similarities of camera operation and
editing. I resituate Beckett’s work for television within the context of his own
long-standing interest in cinema; what makes Beckett’s television so distinct
and anomalous, I will argue, is its resort to techniques active in the modernist
cinema of the period. In this respect, I will break with the consensus in studies of
Introduction 3
Beckett by referring to the individual works for television as ‘films’ rather than
‘television plays’.
Allusions to a diverse range of films are steadily recurrent in Beckett’s earliest
prose fiction, critical writing and correspondence, indicating regular habits of
film-going and a sharp awareness of the full range of imbricated movements,
genres, institutional modes and practices which constituted the ambit of film
culture in the twenties and thirties. References to Hollywood and modernist
cinema appear in a variety of registers and rhetorics and animate the modes
of irony, and the often satiric, parodic strategies of his earliest fiction and
critical writing. Belacqua in Dream of Fair to Middling Women finds himself
immersed in the heady Parisian atmosphere of ‘concerts, cinemas, cocktails,
theatres, aperitifs’;5 in More Pricks than Kicks, he passes a ‘queue standing for
the Palace Cinema’,6 and later, races off in a car with Ruby ‘after much clutch-
burning […] in Hollywood style’.7 When Beckett lists a range of cultural events
while planning an evening out in London in 1935 – ‘Otway’s Soldier’s Fortune,
T.S.E.’s Sweeney & the Ballets Jooss and a new Garbo Karenina’ – he expresses
a preference for the Garbo film: ‘Perhaps the last might be managed.’8 In More
Pricks, Belacqua sees a hatless woman walking slowly towards him in a bar, in
Garboesque close-up:
But her face, ah her face, was what Belacqua had rather refer to as her
countenance, it was so full of light. This she lifted up upon him and no error.
Brimful of light and serene, serenissime, it bore no trace of suffering, and in
this alone it might be said to be a notable face […] The features were null,
only luminous, impassive and secure […] An act of expression, he said, a
wreathing or wrinkling, could only have had the effect of a dimmer on a
headlight.9
The lightness and serenity of the face and the impassive act of expression
evoke the luminous otherworldliness of a Garbo close-up. For H.D., writing in
Close Up, her face in Pabst’s Joyless St (1924) is marked by its ‘chiselled purity,
its dazzling, almost unearthly beauty’; Garbo is less a personality, according to
H.D., but a ‘symbol […] a glorified embodiment’, a sentiment also echoed in
Rudolph Arnheim’s Film.10 Amongst the ‘arsenal of strange objects’ belonging
5 Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992), 37.
6 Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks (London: Calder Publications, [1934] 1993), 43.
7 Ibid., 97.
8 Beckett to Thomas McGreevy, 8 October 1935, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, 284.
9 Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks, 47.
10 Rudolph Arnheim, Film, trans. L.M. Skieveking and Ian F.D. Morrow (London: Faber and Faber,
1933), 182–185.