Writer Samuel Beckett’s only screenplay was for the 1965 avant-garde silent short, Film. Beckett, who made his biggest splash with the play, Waiting for Godot, always had an interest in motion pictures, having first tried to break into the business in the 1930s when he asked director Sergei Eisenstein if he could be Eisenstein’s assistant (the director never got back to him). For Beckett’s short, he recruited former silent film writer/director/star Buster Keaton for what turned out to be a very odd slice of cinema.

Film stars Keaton as a man on the run—but from whom? Seemingly paranoid, he sees eyes everywhere as he attempts to make himself invisible to everyone and everything. Film isn’t as gloomy as it sounds, as there are moments of both humor and slapstick that recall the films of the silent era. The short is open to interpretation, but according to Beckett, it’s about perception—self-perception, specifically—drawing on the philosophy, “To be is to be perceived.” With Film, Beckett was trying to tell us that we can run all we want, but we can’t hide from ourselves.
 

 
Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who produced the short via Evergreen Film, wrote about the making of Film in the pages of Tin House:

The first person Beckett wanted for the only major role in Film was the Irish actor Jack McGowran. He was unavailable, as was Charlie Chaplin and also Zero Mostel, Alan’s choice. Later, Mostel did a marvelous job with Burgess Meredith in a TV production of Waiting for Godot that Schneider directed. Finally, Alan suggested Buster Keaton. Sam liked the idea, so Alan flew out to Hollywood to try and sign Buster up. There he found Buster living in extremely modern circumstances. On arrival he had to wait in a separate room while Keaton finished up an imaginary poker game with, among others, the legendary (but long-dead) Hollywood mogul Irving Thalberg. Keaton took the job. During an interview, Beckett told Kevin Brownlow (a Keaton scholar) that “Buster Keaton was inaccessible. He had a poker mind as well as a poker face… He had great endurance, he was very tough, and, yes, reliable. And when you saw that face at the end…  Ah. At last.”

 

 
Film has its share of fans, including director/film preservationist Ross Lipman. For the past seven years, he’s been simultaneously researching Film and putting together a documentary on the Beckett/Keaton work, resulting in Notfilm, a feature-length examination of a seventeen-minute short. Lipman also played a major role in the reconstruction of Film, as he located the original, long-lost prologue.

Here’s what Rosset wrote about the prologue in Tin House:

Originally, Film was meant to run nearly thirty minutes. Eight of those minutes would be one very long shot in which a number of actors would make their only appearance. The shot was based on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, wherein Welles and his genius cameraman, Gregg Toland, achieved “deep focus.” Even when panning their camera, “deep focus” allowed objects from as close as a few feet to as far away as several hundred to be seen with equal clarity. Toland’s work was so important to Welles that he gave his cameraman equal billing to himself. Sad to say, our “deep focus” work in Film was unsuccessful. Despite the abundant expertise of our group, the extremely difficult shot was ruined by a stroboscopic effect that caused the images to jump around. Today it would probably be much easier to achieve the effects we wanted to capture. Technology is now on our side. Then, the problems proved too much for our group of very talented people so we went on without that shot. Beckett solved the problem of this incipient disaster by removing the scene from the script.

Now fully restored, Film will be included on the Blu-ray and DVD editions of Notfilm.  There’s just one issue, lack of funds, so Lipman has teamed up with Milestone Films Fandor for a Kickstarter campaign. $30,000 is needed to complete the project and you can help make it happen. Check out their Kickstarter page to see all the incentives.

Here’s the trailer for Notfilm:
 

 
Watch Beckett’s ‘Film’ after the jump…

 
Buster Keaton said his first appearance on-stage was inspired by a desire to take part in the fun his parents seemed to be having. Keaton was just nine-months-old when he crawled on from the wings, and encouraged by the audience’s laughter, planted himself between his father’s legs, where he played peek-a-boo with the smiling faces.

His parents, Joe and Myra Keaton were part of traveling medicine show. For a time they were partners with a magician and escapologist called Harry Houdini. Joe told jokes, sang songs, Harry astonished the audience with his tricks, while Myra played the saxophone and acted out roles in the short plays they produced. Houdini was a witness to Buster’s first dramatic entrance.

Aged six-months, Buster fell head-over-heels down a steep flight of stairs in an hotel. Thinking the infant hurt (or worse dead), Houdini rushed to the child and was shocked to find the baby gurgling with laughter. Houdini told Joe and Myra, “That’s some buster your baby took!” Buster was the term for a theatrical prat-fall or stunt. Thereafter, the name “Buster” stuck with the young Joseph Frank Keaton.

Whether the story’s true or not it was repeated so often and printed in so many newspapers that it became “true.” When Buster was three, he was carried-off by a cyclone, which deposited him, unharmed, several blocks away.

Buster’s father was an able PR man, who recognized in his son the opportunity to create an act and garner considerable column inches. The stories about Buster and his misadventures appeared all over America. These were clipped and kept by his mother in the family scrapbook. Buster’s addition relaunched the family act as The Three Keatons.

“Keep your eye on the kid,” ran their tag-line. The act was a variation on the infant Buster’s desire to join his parents on stage, only this time Joe would throw the child across the stage, kick-him like a football into the audience, and swing him like a toy over his head—just like the cartoon antics of Homer and Bart Simpson. In front of the audience this may have all seemed like one happy act, but backstage Joe was equally abusive and violent, but this time for real, to his bread-winning son.

Because of his age, Buster was banned from performing certain States. This led to Joe duping the authorities by having Buster dressed as an adult, given a false beard, and described in the billing as “a midget.” It worked. This was Buster Keaton’s entry into his life of show business.

In 1965, Keaton made The Railrodder a two-reeler film in the style of his classic silent movies, for the National Film Board of Canada (in conjunction with Canadian National Railways). The making of this film was in turn documented in a short film called Buster Keaton Rides Again, in which Keaton gave incredible insight into filmmaking and comedy, and discussed his career as an actor, writer and director.
 

 
After the jump, Buster Keaton in ‘The Railrodder’...
 

 
Buster Keaton shows his brilliant comedy skills on this episode of Candid Camera.
 

 
Film, based on a script by Samuel Beckett, was made in 1965 and stars Buster Keaton. While Alan Schneider gets director’s credit, Beckett made his only trip to America (NYC) to supervise the making of the film and is generally considered to be the film’s actual director or, at the very least, a very present influence on its creation.

Beckett admired Keaton and chose him to play the character of “0.” Keaton, who was old and struggling with alcoholism, agreed to appear in the film despite not caring much for the script. Keaton wasn’t discriminating when it came to money gigs. The fact that Beckett had flown to Los Angeles to woo him was certainly a factor in Buster’s decision to do the movie.  Little did he know at the time, or ultimately care, that he was starring in what is considered by many to be a small masterpiece.

Beckett describes the theme of Film thusly:

Film is about a man trying to escape from perception of all kinds - from all perceivers - even divine perceivers. There is a picture which he pulls down. But he can’t escape from self-perception. It is an idea from Bishop Berkeley, the Irish philosopher and idealist, “To be is to be perceived” - “Esse est percipi.” The man who desires to cease to be must cease to be perceived. If being is being perceived, to cease being is to cease to be perceived.’

According to film scholars Katherine Waugh & Fergus Daly:

Beckett sets his film in the year 1929, the year Un Chien Andalou was made (and of course the first year of the sound film). In addition the film opens and closes with close-ups of a sightless eye which would seem to refer to the notorious opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou in which a human eye is sliced open with a razor blade. In fact ‘Eye’ was Beckett’s original title for Film.

For a detailed and entertaining reflection on the making of Film read this piece by Alan Schneider.

Film is silent. Beckett intended that the script be read live during screenings. Here it is in its entirety.