Samuel Beckett and cinema
By: Anthony Paraskeva
Series: Historicizing modernism; Historicizing modernism
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 195
ISBN-13: 9781472524980
Copyright date: 2017
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation; Friends and associates; Influence; Film criticism; Motion pictures and literature
Description: In 1936 Samuel Beckett wrote a letter to Sergei Eisenstein - the legendary director of such films as Battleship Potemkin - expressing his own desire to work in the lost tradition of silent film. Drawing on substantial archival material, this is the first book to examine comprehensively the full extent of Beckett's engagement with cinema and its influence on his work for stage and screen. Examining his writing on second wave modernist cinema, including the work of directors such as Eisenstein, Godard, Griffith and Bresson as well as performers such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo, the book reveals film art to be central to Beckett's modernist aesthetic. In this way, Beckett is revealed to be part of a wider modernist theatrical tradition that stood as an inheritor of early 20th century cinema, alongside Meyerhold, Brecht and Artaud.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 176-188) and index.
Table of contents: title: 1.; title: Late Keaton, Docufiction, the Nouvelle Vague -- -- 2.; title: Self-Perception and Asynchronous Sound: Godard, Hitchcock, Resnais -- -- 3.; title: ̀Texte Theatre Film': Auteurism, Meyerhold/Eisenstein, Duras -- -- 4.; title: Photogenie, the Close-Up, Gender Performance.