Film

Synopsis

Throughout the first two parts, almost everything is seen through the eye of the camera (designated in the script as E), although there are occasional moments when O's perception is seen. In the third part, much more of O's perception of the room and its contents is given. In order to distinguish between the two perceptions, objects seen by O were shot through a lens-gauze, blurring his perception while E's perception was shot without gauze or filters, keeping the images sharp.

The street

The film opens onto a rippled image that fills the entire screen. Without colour, it is difficult to discern what is being shown, but it is alive. As it moves, it is shown to be an extreme close-up of an eyelid; it fills the entire screen. The eye opens, slowly, closes, opens again, blinks and then fades into a different rippled image, still somewhat organic but changed, still. As the camera begins to pan right and up, it is discernable as a wall; we are outside a building (an old factory situated in Lower Manhattan). It is summer, though it is hard to tell. The camera's movement is not smooth. It is as if it is looking for something. Eventually, it loses interest and pans left and down back to the wall.

Suddenly, the camera (E) shifts violently to the left. A man (O) is hurrying along the wall from left to right. He pauses, hugging the wall, and E gets a chance to focus on him. He has on a long dark overcoat, the collar of which is turned up and his hat is pulled down over his face. (Keaton had asked Beckett what O was wearing underneath. "I hadn't thought of that," the author admitted and then proposed, "the same coat", which appealed to both men.) He is hanging onto a briefcase with his left hand whilst trying to shield the exposed side of his face with the other. He realises he's been seen and cowers against the wall; E quickly shifts behind him.

No longer conscious of being observed, O starts off again, knocking over a trestle and stumbling over a railway sleeper—anything to stay as close as possible to the wall. He charges into a man and woman, knocking the man's hat off. E looks from the man's face to the woman's and back again. The man has a moustache and is wearing a pince-nez. They have been consulting a newspaper, which the woman keeps hold of. They both look appalled at what has happened.

E moves back to a long shot and watches O barge through and on his way. The man replaces his hat, takes off his pince-nez. and looks after the fleeing figure. The couple look at each other and the man "opens his mouth to vituperate" but the woman shushes him, uttering the only sound in the whole play. Together they turn to stare directly at E as an open-mouthed expression takes over their faces; they can not bear to look at what they have seen and turn their faces away. But what had they seen?

The action shifts back to O just as he reaches and turns a corner. He heads off down the street until he realises he is at the right doorway. He enters.

Stairs

The camera cuts to the vestibule. The viewer is directly behind O. Stairs lead up on the left, but O veers right and pauses, pulling himself together. He takes his pulse and E moves in. As soon as he becomes aware of E's presence he rushes down a couple of steps and cowers beside the wall until the camera retreats a little. When it does he reverses back up to street-level and then begins up the stairs.

A frail old woman is coming down. The camera gives us a brief close-up. "She carries a tray of flowers slung from her neck by a strap. She descends slowly and with fumbling feet." O backs up and hurries down the steps to the right again where he sits down on a step and presses his face against the balusters. He glances up briefly to see where she is, then hides his head from view.

As the woman reaches the bottom of the stairs, she looks straight into the lens. The expression on her face changes to the one of wide-eyed horror that was displayed on the faces of the man and woman outside. She closes her eyes and collapses. E checks on where the man had been, but O has made his escape. His coat tails are seen flying up the stairs.

E chases after him and finds him at the top of the first flight. He looks around to see if there is anyone about. Satisfied, he turns left and, not without some difficulty, opens the door to a room and enters. E slips in unnoticed as O locks the door behind him and then takes his pulse once more.

The room

We find ourselves in a "small barely furnished room." The man—and the camera following him from behind—survey its contents: a dog and a cat share a basket, a caged parrot and a goldfish in its bowl sit atop a small table. The walls are bare, apart from a mirror and an unframed picture pinned to the wall: a Sumerian Tell Asmar figurine with big eyes (described in the screenplay as "the face of God the Father"). There is also a couch with a filthy pillow, some blankets and a rug on it, a rocking chair with a "curiously carved headrest" and there is a window with a tattered roller blind with full-length net curtains to either side.

Systematically, O takes each object or creature in the room and disables its ability to 'see' him: he closes the blind and pulls the net curtains across, he covers the mirror with the rug, the cat and dog (“a shy and uncooperative, little Chihuahua”) are – with some difficulty – ejected from the room and the picture is torn up. Although stated simply, the mechanics needed to execute these tasks are laborious (e.g., as he passes the window, he hides behind the blanket which he holds in front of himself to cover the mirror and he carries the cat and dog facing away from him as he tries to put them out the door).

After all the above, he goes to sit in the chair. There are two holes in the headrest that suggest eyes. He ignores them and sits. O takes the folder from his case and goes to open it, but there are "two eyelets, well proportioned"; he turns the folder through 90° but he's disturbed by the parrot's eye and has to get up and cover the cage with his coat. He sits again, repeats the same process with his folder and then has to get up and cover the goldfish bowl, too.

"Beckett initially contemplated setting Film in the evening, but had to decide against it for a practical reason: 'to remove all possibility of his putting off light in room.'"

Finally O sits down opposite the denuded wall, opens the folder, and takes out seven photographs of himself, which he examines in sequence:

6 months old – in his mother's arms

4 years old – kneeling in an attitude of prayer

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). Alan Schneider, the director of Film, 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."

Beckett and Keaton

Beckett had never seen Schneider direct any of his plays and yet continued to entrust him with the work. However, for this particular project, Beckett became personally involved. Schneider has speculated that it may simply have been the opportunity to work directly with Keaton. It has even been suggested that one inspiration for Waiting for Godot might have come from a 1949 film called The Lovable Cheat in which Keaton has a small part as a man who is convinced by the main character, who owes him money, to wait endlessly for a man named Godeau, who will pay the debt.

When Schneider managed to hunt up Keaton, he found that genius of the silent screen — old, broke, ill, and alone — some $2 million ahead in a four-handed poker game with an imaginary Louis B. Mayer of MGM and two other invisible Hollywood moguls.

“Yes, I accept the offer," were silent Keaton's unexpected first words to Schneider. Keaton was dying even as they made the film. "We didn’t know that," Rosset told interviewer Patsy Southgate in 1990, "but looking back at it, the signs were there. Couldn’t speak — he was not so much difficult, he just wasn’t there." Keaton would in fact die eighteen months after the shooting of Film.

From this one might think that Keaton jumped at the chance, but this was not the case. James Karen remembers:

“He had to be talked into it by Eleanor [his wife] and I remember calling and saying, ‘You know, it could be your Les Enfants du paradis. It could be that wonderful, wonderful thing.’”

Beckett had wanted to work with Keaton several years earlier, when he offered him the role of Lucky in the American stage premiere of Waiting for Godot, but Buster turned it down. It's said that Buster didn't understand Godot and had misgivings about this script as well. Presumably this went a long way to make him think twice about this new project.

During a meeting with historian and documentary filmmaker Kevin Brownlow, Beckett was quite forthcoming: