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).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 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).
References
Alexandrov, Grigori, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vsevolod Pudovkin. 1928. The Sound Film: A Statement from U.S.S.R. Close Up 3 (4): 10–13.
Antoine-Dunne, Jean. 2001. Beckett and Eisenstein on Light and Contrapuntal Montage. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11: 315–323.
Bair, Deirdre. 1978. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape.
Bergan, Ronald. 1999. Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict. New York: Overlook Press.
Bignell, Jonathan. 2009. Beckett on Screen. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Brater, Enoch. 1975. The Thinking Eye in Beckett’s Film. Modern Language Quarterly 36: 166–176.
Donald, James, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus, eds. 1998. Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism. London: Casell.
Eisenstein, Sergei M. 1930a. Filmic Art and Training (An Interview with Mark Segal). Close Up 6 (3): 195–197.
———. 1930b. The Cinematographic Principle of Japanese Culture. Trans. Ivor Montagu and S.S. Nalbandov. Transition 19–20: 90–103.
———. 1931a. The Dinamic Square: Conclusion. Close Up 8 (2): 91–94.
———. 1931b. The Principles of Film Form. Trans. Ivor Montagu. Close Up 8 (3): 167–181.
———. 1933a. An American Tragedy. Close Up 10 (2): 109–124.
———. 1933b. Cinematography with Tears! The Way of Learning. Close Up 9 (1): 3–17.
———. 1983. Immoral Memories: An Autobiography. Trans. Herbert Marshall. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Flynn, Deirdre. 2016. The Form and Function of Dialectical Cinécriture in Beckett’s Company. Journal of Beckett Studies 25 (2): 188–205.
Ford, Hugh. 1996. Introduction. In Negro: An Anthology, ed. Nancy Cunard. New York: Continuum.
Forsdick, Charles, and Christian Høgsbjerg. 2014. Sergei Eisenstein and the Haitian Revolution: ‘The Confrontation Between Black and White Explodes Into Red’. History Workshop Journal 78 (1): 157–185.
Friedman, Alan W. 2015. Beckett in Black and Red: Translations for Nancy Cunard’s Negro. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.
Kedzierski, Marek. 1995. Beckett and the (Un)changing Image of the Mind. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 4: 149–158.
Knowlson, James, and John Haynes. 2003. Images of Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marcus, Laura. 2008. The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2009. Cinema and Visual Culture: Close Up (1927–1933). In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 505–529. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2017. Samuel Beckett and Cinema. London: Bloomsbury.
———. 1995. On Directing Film. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 4: 29–38.
Seton, Marie. 1960. Sergei M. Eisenstein: A Biography. New York: Grove Press.
Tanaka, Mariko Hori. 2001. Elements of Haiku in Beckett: The Influence of Eisenstein and Arnheim’s Film Theories. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11: 131–142.
Weiss, Katherine. 2012. James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein: Haunting Samuel Beckett’s Film. Journal of Beckett Studies 21 (2): 181–192.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70373-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70374-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)