Pssst, want to check out Film in our new look?
Information
- Year
- 1965
- Runtime
- 20 min.
- Directors
- Alan Schneider, Samuel Beckett
- Genres
- Drama, Short
- Rating *
- 7.5
- Votes *
- 1,337
- Checks
- 532
- Favs
- 45
- Dislikes
- 5
- Favs/checks
- 8.5% (1:12)
- Favs/dislikes
- 9:1
Top comments
-
BareLolk
I didn't get the message. But the mood and the oddly entertaining plot make me want to watch it again. 9 years 8 months ago -
ucuruju
That ending was real spooky. Pretty interesting stuff. Here's some info that helped me think about the short-- from Wikipedia's unusually thorough and thoughtful entry:
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.”
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."
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.” 1 year 6 months ago -
