Image and Intuition in Beckett's Film

Abstract

Working from a detailed diary Beckett wrote of his thoughts on painting while travelling through Germany and visiting art galleries before World War II, and directed by comments made by Beckett himself, James Knowlson has convincingly displayed how Beckett used images from paintings that had had a forceful impression on him, reconfiguring them in developing his own striking images in later works (256-258).2 Might the same be claimed for Beckett's use of philosophy? In a 1933 letter to Thomas MacGreevy, Beckett identifies an interest in philosophical images even if divorced from the systems in which they are used: Leibniz a great cod, but full of splendid little pictures. Beckett discusses the a number of times in Disjecta (28, 90, 94, 123,130), and Gilles Deleuze sees the use of the image as key in coming to terms with Beckett's works.2 As is well known, Deleuze develops a reading of Henri Bergson, especially Matter and Memory, in developing his own concept of the image in the Cinema books,3 and as I will attempt to establish below, Beckett knew Bergson's work well and drew upon it in developing his own ideas about the image and its relationship to thought.