NOT FILM, a documentary by Ross LIppman, about FILM, the odd collaboration between Beckett and silent film legend Buster Keaton and Barney Rosset (publisher of Grove Press, who acted as producer). Great archival and interview footage with all the above, as we’ll as actress Billie Whitelaw who has been described as Beckett;s muse and acted under great physical duress in many of his plays. Available to watch on Fandor, online subscription service. DS

PROMO COPY FOR THE FILM:

In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, titleless avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.

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