Abstract
Beckett’s correspondence of the 1930s reveals his awareness of the artistic possibilities offered by film, and a particular interest in the optical manipulation of the image achieved both in the camera and at the editing bench. This interest grew stronger as his critical taste developed by immersive reading in film theory in 1936, the year he wrote an application to study with Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow. His extensive theoretical knowledge came from the pages of the modernist film magazine Close Up (1927–33), where the first English translations of Eisenstein’s essays appeared, and which epitomized a significant cultural meeting point of literature and cinema. Taking Eisenstein’s writing on film published in Close Up and the magazine’s overall cultural project as points of departure, this paper explores the traces of early cinematic forms and editing theories in Beckett’s late text, Ill Seen Ill Said (1981).
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Notes
- 1.
The surviving original of Beckett’s letter to S. M. Eisenstein dated 2 March 1936 is preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow (RGALI 1923-1-1642). The full text of the letter was published in LSB I (317).
- 2.
Some critics relying on Deirdre Bair’s biography of Beckett mention that, having received no answer from Eisenstein, he also wrote to Pudovkin, but Bair’s account does not state this explicitly (Bair 1978: 204). No proof of the existence of such a letter has been found to this day.
- 3.
My thanks are due to Anthony Paraskeva for pointing me in the direction of the Close Up material discussed here.
- 4.
- 5.
Isaacs’s account of the lectures was broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme on 17 December 1949. See Marcus (2008: 486n118).
- 6.
For a complete account of Eisenstein’s unrealized cinematic project see Forsdick and Høgsbjerg (2014).
- 7.
In his Beckett in Black and Red: Translations for Nancy Cunard’s Negro (2015), Alan W. Friedman provides the most detailed account to date of Beckett’s involvement in the project and its historical circumstances, along with the original translations by Beckett and the full contents of the 1934 publication.
- 8.
A black-and-white photograph, with a handwritten message in pencil from Cunard on the reverse, reads, ‘Cher camarade Eisenstein, Vous téléphoner comme je le fais ne mène à rien. J’ai une lettre pour vous de Tristan Tzara. […] Je désire beaucoup causer avec vous d’un filme. J’espère pouvoir rester quelque temps dans les Soviets’. Preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI 1923-1-1896).
- 9.
See, for instance, Bignell (2009).
- 10.
Having written his first television piece, Eh Joe, in 1965, Beckett continued to work within the medium until after the SDR production of Was Wo (1985), often advising on productions of his work and drafting adaptation suggestions. See Beckett’s correspondence from the period, especially his letters to Reinhart Müller-Freienfels (LSB IV).
- 11.
The examples listed in Close Up are: (1) Graphic Conflict; (2) Conflict of Planes; (3) Conflict of Volumes; (4) Space Conflict; (5) Lighting Conflict; (6) Tempo Conflict; (7) Conflict between a Material and its Angle; (8) Conflict between Material and its Spacial Nature; (9) Conflict between Process and its Temporal Nature; (10) Conflict between the whole Optical Complex and some quite other sphere (as in sound film) (Eisenstein 1931a: 180–181, cf. also 1930b: 99).
- 12.
Research on this project has been supported by the Charles University Grant Agency (GAUK 235915).
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Kiryushina, G. (2018). ‘Execrations on another plane’: Film Theory in Close Up and Beckett’s Late Prose. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_14
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