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To be or not to be is not the question — On Beckett's Film
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Critchley, Simon |
| Copyright Year | 2007 |
| Abstract | I Samuel Beckett wrote just once for the cinema. Film was written in 1963 and first shown publicly in 1965, forty years ago (Beckett 1986, 321–334). Film was shot in New York in 1964, with the opening external shots in Lower Manhattan close to Brooklyn Bridge and the rest in Greenwich Village, and it was the occasion of Beckett’s one and only trip to the United States. The movie was the idea of Barney Rosset, Beckett’s New York publisher and legendary editor of the Grove Press in its long heyday from the 1950s to the 1970s. Film was the movie debut of Alan Schneider, Beckett’s most trusted, longserving and long-suffering theatre director in the United States. It stars Buster Keaton in one of his last movie appearances – he made several B-movie beach movies before his death in February 1966. Beckett said of Keaton that ‘he had a poker mind as well as a poker face’ and their relationship did not get off to a good start. Schneider tells a story of their first meeting in Keaton’s hotel room, where Beckett awkwardly tried to engage in conversation with Keaton while the latter replied in monosyllables, drank a beer and watched the baseball game on TV. Beckett was a huge sports fan and considerable sportsman himself – the only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature to be mentioned in Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack, playing first-class cricket for Trinity College Dublin – and went to see the New York Mets at Shea Stadium during his trip to New York and apparently thoroughly enjoyed the game. A little sadly perhaps, Keaton was the fourth |
| Starting Page | 108 |
| Ending Page | 121 |
| Page Count | 14 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.3366/film.2007.0013 |
| Volume Number | 11 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.film-philosophy.com/2007v11n2/critchley.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2007.0013 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
