Samuel Beckett and Cinema by Anthony Paraskeva

Abstract

Reviewed by: Samuel Beckett and Cinema by Anthony Paraskeva Colin Gardner Samuel Beckett and Cinema. Anthony Paraskeva. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Pp. 195. $108.00 (cloth); $37.95 (eBook). In a 1967 interview with Cahiers du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard revealed: "I once intended to make a film of Happy Days. … I'd have liked to do it because I had a text and all I needed to do was film it. I'd have had just a single tracking shot beginning in long shot and ending in close-up. It would have started at precisely the distance necessary to bring me into close shot in an hour and a half, to end on the last sentence. It was just a matter of elementary arithmetic, a simple calculation of speed in relation to time."1 Although Beckett was notoriously opposed to cinematic adaptation of his stage plays (he once rejected Ingmar Bergman's request to direct a film version of Waiting for Godot, arguing that he did not want the play "Bergmanized"), Godard's strict harnessing of the gestic expressiveness of the diegetic action to the spatiotemporal exigencies of the cinematic apparatus would probably have been fully approved by the playwright. Indeed, after Film (1965) and the 1966 film adaptation of Play (Marin Karmitz's Comédie), his writings and directorial style had already begun to break the clear distinction between mechanical reproducibility and the contingency of the fluid theatrical event. This interdisciplinary focus on exact precision of timing and gestic movement—as well as the complete eschewal of improvisation—is central to Anthony Paraskeva's brilliant new book, which situates Beckett's methods as a writer-director within a historical double register of two [End Page 225] key moments in cinematic modernism. As he puts it, "Beckett did not write and direct for stage and screen in isolation … 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" (Samuel Beckett and Cinema, 2). The first wave of such interactions is marked by the young Beckett's interest in the pictorial and temporal innovations of silent film, influenced by the work of Soviet directors such as Sergei Eisenstein (Paraskeva begins with Beckett's 1936 letter to the latter requesting admission to the Moscow State School of Cinematography), Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov. Equally important were the robotic biomechanics of Vsevolod Meyerhold (which, with Kleist's writings on the marionette theater, were to become an important influence on the seemingly effortless lack of self-awareness in Ronald Pickup's performance in Ghost Trio); French impressionist filmmakers such as Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, and Marcel L'Herbier; and the vaudevillian slapstick of silent comedians such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton (who would go on to star in Beckett's Film). Drawing upon references in Beckett's letters and other archival material, Paraskeva shows that there is clear evidence Beckett was a regular film-goer and that he was also familiar with the theoretical writings of the day, most notably the avant-garde film journal Close-Up (1927–33) and the work of Rudolf Arnheim, whose 1933 book Film is predicated on the fact that the unique virtues of film as an art form derive not from its indexical realist properties but from the exploitation of its limitations: lack of sound and color and the inherent flatness of the cinema screen. These limitations were superseded by the coming of the sound film, whose overdetermined synchronization of dialog and image turned all formal innovation into pure spectacle, a case of true cinema being killed in the cradle. Antonin Artaud, for example, fought against the completion of the open-ended "meaning" of the image by speech—the major encumbrance of sound cinema—by developing his vision of a "language of signs, gestures and attitudes having an ideographic value as they exist in certain unperverted pantomimes."2 As Paraskeva argues, "For Artaud, the transition to sound had obstructed the development of an anti-naturalist silent cinema still in its infancy...