Clearly 'airline pilot', 'absurdist author / playwright', and 'film director' are closely-related career paths in the vocational universe, for Beckett also considered the last of these. In an alternative reality he worked under Eisenstein on Alexander Nevsky and then with Charlie Chaplin on The Great Dictator, before collaborating with Orson Wells during the latter's successful re-invention of himself as the go-to director for blockbuster Hollywood existentialism.
In this reality, alas, his only film was 'Film'* A meditation on the pain of awareness and the insatiable nature of observation, Film did not provide Beckett with the breakthrough to the lucrative scriptwriting job he had sought. I rate for it but Beckett himself deemed it "an interesting failure". A crucial outdoor scene with multiple extras was painstakingly scripted but went to naught when the budget was too small to re-shoot it properly.
Even so, I think we can all agree that a big-budget Hollywood re-make with explosions and CGI special effects is a VERY BAD IDEA.* Cinematography by Dziga Vertov's younger brother.
UPDATED because I came across another "people-fleeing-from-menacing-eye" SF cover and had to change the GIF.
11 comments:
Through the wonders of the Interfishnet we learn that despite Samuel Beckett's scholastic accomplishments and glittering academic prospects, the young author flirted with the idea of throwing it all aside and becoming an airline pilot.
Any fule kno (IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY) that pilots cannot become famous authors.
It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something.
At least Beckett didn't become a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics (or the Council For Bombing Foreigners, aks the CFR).
~
In a moment of almost inexplicable serendipity, here's the book I'm reading now, by an editor at The Atlantic Monthly who also happens to be a pilot!!
I think the fascination with floating eyes is excellent. These ones all look fearful except the B+W drawing. Is it the projection of a witness to our innermost self... representing both the desire for and fear of being known? Or is it the ego toying with an omniscient view of its domain?... or just an everyday kind of witness that simply adds meaning to our tasks, and perhaps feels our pain! I draw them often.
I was going to post certain eye-related stills from Un Chien Andalou but decided not to. YOU'RE WELCOME.
THANK YOU TIGRIS.
The Eye re-appears in "Ill Seen Ill Said", which is written in the style of a series of stage directions and could easily be an extended dance remix of Film.
Many of those directions involve the sinister comings and goings of a black-clad old woman across a desolate landscape of moors and standing stones. I would pay silly money for a version illustrated by Paul Kidby but Beckett's estate is unlikely to permit that.
Even so, I think we can all agree that a big-budget Hollywood re-make with explosions and CGI special effects is a VERY BAD IDEA.
Let's just say we agree to disagree and leave it at that.
the sinister comings and goings of a black-clad old woman across a desolate landscape of moors and standing stones
HOTT.
Let's just say we agree to disagree and leave it at that.
That ought to be the tagline of the ex-fish-blog.
Sodbuckets and fucksocks! Now I'll have to update the GIF.
http://doc40.blogspot.co.nz/2012/05/docs-paperback-classics-101.html
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