Children, Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration move relentlessly through the three stages of Robbie’s life. But Davies consciously breaks the rules of linear time as he moves backwards and forwards exploring the jumble of Robbie’s memories, his youth, adulthood and old age. Davies does not want us to just look at Robbie’s life, he requires us to witness it, and presents each fragment as if part of a body of evidence.
February 9, 1928 at the Studio des Ursulines: the story of Antonin Artaud’s disagreement with Germaine Dulac over her treatment of his screenplay for La Coquille et le Clergyman is as well known as it is mired in confusion.
New documentary on Samuel Beckett‘s Film.
In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on his only journey to America, to undertake one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his collaboration with silent era genius Buster Keaton on a short, almost-silent avant-garde film. The production FILM BY SAMUEL BECKETT, was beset with trouble from the start. The entire first scene was unhappily eliminated, and Keaton suffered terribly in the hottest days of a blistering Manhattan summer. The soon-to-be Nobel laureate Beckett never saw eye-to-eye with the legendary slapstick star, and the film they made – along with theater director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman – opened at the Venice and New York Film Festivals to a bewildered reception. In the decades since, it’s been the subject of praise, condemnation, and ongoing controversy. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches back to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.
