Film (film) - Interpretation

Interpretation

"The greatest Irish film." – Gilles Deleuze

A "load of old bosh." – Dilys Powell (The Sunday Times)

The work is studied by and has been the subject of criticism from both film and theatre scholars, with the former tending to study the film as shot, the latter tending to study the script as written. Critical opinion is mixed, but it is generally held in higher regard by film scholars than it is by theatre or Beckett scholars. The views above represent extremes. A ‘middle-ground’ review would probably be “a poor attempt by a genuine writer to move into a medium that he simply hadn’t the flair or understanding of to make a success.” Beckett’s own opinion was that it was an “interesting failure.”

The film opens and closes with close-ups of a sightless eye. This inevitably evokes the notorious opening sequence of Un Chien Andalou in which a human eye is sliced open with a razor blade. In fact, The Eye was an early title for Film, though admittedly, at that time, he had not thought of the need for the opening close-up. As a student of French literature, Beckett would have been familiar with Victor Hugo’s poem La Conscience. ‘Conscience’ in French can mean either ‘conscience’ in the English sense or ‘consciousness’ and the double meaning is important. Hugo's poem concerns a man haunted by an eye that stares at him unceasingly from the sky. He runs away from it, ever further, even to the grave, where, in the tomb, the eye awaits him. The man is Cain. He has been trying to escape consciousness of himself, the self that killed his brother, but his conscience will not let him rest. The eye/I is always present and, when he can run no further, must be faced in the tomb.”

Film takes its inspiration from the 18th century Idealist Irish philosopher Berkeley. At the beginning of the work, Beckett uses the famous quotation: "esse est percipi" (to be is to be perceived). Notably, Beckett leaves off a portion of Berkeley’s edict, which reads in full: “esse est percipi aut percipere” (to be is to be perceived or to perceive). Beckett was once asked if he could provide an explanation that ‘the man in the street’ could understand:

“It’s a movie about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver – two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.”

In between takes on the set near the Brooklyn Bridge, Keaton told a reporter something similar, summarizing the theme as "a man may keep away from everybody but he can't get away from himself." From this comment it shouldn’t be assumed that he understood the film – there is too much evidence to the contrary – but he got the point.

In Beckett's original script, the two main characters, the camera and the man it is pursuing are referred to as E (the Eye) and O (the Object). This simplistic division might lead one to assume that the Eye is only interested in the man it is pursuing. This may be true but it does not mean it will not have the same effect on anyone who comes in contact with it. “E is both part of O and not part of O; E is also the camera and, through the camera, the eye of the spectator as well. But E is also self, not merely O’s self but the self of any person or people, specifically that of the other characters — the elderly couple and the flower-lady — who respond to its stare with that look of horror.” E is, so to speak, O’s blind eye. "He has the function of making all with whom he comes into contact self-aware.”

O does everything physically possible to avoid being seen by others but the only thing he can do to avoid perception by an “all seeing god” is to tear up his picture, a symbolic act, as if saying, “If I don’t believe you exist you can’t see me.” There is no one there to see him for what he really is other than himself and so, in this godless world, it is only fitting that E, representing O's self-perception, would appear standing where the picture has been torn from the wall. O also destroys the photographs of his past, his ‘memories’ of who he was. Now all that remains for O is to escape from himself - which he achieves by falling asleep until woken by E's intense gaze. The room is more figurative than literal, like many of Beckett’s rooms, “as much psychological as physical, ‘rooms of the mind,’ as one … actor called them.”

If Beckett were Shakespeare he might well have written: “To be seen or not to be seen, that is the question.” It is an issue that concerns many of Beckett’s characters. At the end of the first act of Waiting for Godot, when the boy wants to know what to tell Mr Godot, Vladimir tells him: “Tell him … (he hesitates) … tell him you saw us. (Pause.) You did see us, didn’t you?” But what happens when you are alone? The narrator of The Unnamable answers: “They depart, one by one, and the voices go on, it’s not theirs, they were never there, there was never anyone but you, talking to you about you…” The old woman in Rockaby appears to be the exact opposite of O but although she actively seeks to be seen by someone while O does everything to avoid perceivedness, the irony is that both characters are alone with only themselves for company.

Beckett's script has been interpreted in various ways. R. C. Lamont writes that "Film deals with the apprenticeship to death, the process of detaching oneself from life. Like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it teaches the gradual dissolution of self. The veiling of the windows and mirrors, the covering of the birdcage – the extinction of light, reflection and light – are so many ritualistic steps to be taken before final immobility, the resignation of the end.” At the end of Film, O is seated in his rocker with his face buried in his hands; at the end of Rockaby, the old woman's head inclines forward as if, finally, she had died. The final scene in Film is also comparable to the moment in the library when the old man in That Time sees his own reflection in the glass covering a painting.

It could be tempting to think of O and E as a Beckettian Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – indeed in notes for the first draft Beckett did toy “with the idea of making ‘E tall’ and ‘O short (and) fat’ which corresponds with the dual physique of Jekyll and Hyde” – but Film is not concerned with representations of good and evil, only with the concept of the second self, of pursuer and pursued.”

For Linda Ben-Zvi, “Beckett does not merely reproduce the modernist critique of and anxiety over technology and the reproduction of art; he attaches 'no truth value' to his critique of technology and the reproduction of the gaze. Instead, he creates a dialogue that awakens and revitalises the uncritical perception of his audience... The work not only is predicated on the form but invariably becomes a critique of its form." Having written a play titled Play and a song called Song, it comes as no surprise that Beckett would entitle his first foray into cinema as Film. The title supports Ben-Zvi's interpretation in that it is a film about cinematic technology: how the movie camera and photographic images are used in Film are essential to understanding it. When he writes, “No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience”, Beckett takes the emphasis away from Berkeley's maxim thus stressing the dramatic structure of the work. The viewers are being asked to consider the work structurally and dramatically rather than emotionally or philosophically.

Film critic and film historian Andrew Sarris briefly mentions Film in his book, The American cinema: directors and directions, 1929-1968. Sarris discusses Film in the context of his section on the film career of Buster Keaton, writing that: "Even Samuel Beckett contributed to the desecration of the Keaton mask by involving the actor of absurdity before its time in a dreary exercise called Film, the most pretentious title in all cinema."