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Film
Yes, Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett also made a film once, archetypically titled Film. A man tries to escape the gaze of an all-seeing eye, inspired by Berkeley’s statement, “Esse est percipi”: to be is to be perceived. The disorienting camerawork comes from Oscar winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflective 1929-masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera (with the latter in the title role).
The film begins with an escape scene in a devastated city. A man does not want to be seen and, therefore, tries to change the circumstances of his existence. The idea that being seen is a given is not only absurd to him, but also alarming. This strange, bewildered man has embraced that motto through his isolation, leading to frustration and a desperate attempt to keep all living and even inanimate things out of the camera’s visual range, including animals.
His fear is, in fact, embedded in the film medium itself. It is understandable why Beckett gave his work this title: the narrative grasps the essence of cinema. To complete the meta-interpretation, an elderly Buster Keaton, icon of silent cinema, plays the lead role. Keaton was understandably surprised by Beckett and director Alan Schneider's request to keep his face hidden from the camera. It only makes the finale, in which Keaton finally gets his close-up, all the more powerful.