The meeting of minds between Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett might have been one of the greatest in performing-arts history if their minds had actually met. In July 1964, the silent-comedy legend arrived in New York City to spend three weeks shooting an avant-garde short from a script by the lionized Irish playwright. Beckett was strongly influenced by the great clowns—Vladimir and Estragon, the eternally patient protagonists of Waiting for Godot, are nothing but a pair of baggy-pants comedians—and while the play was first being staged in Paris, Beckett got to see Keaton perform at the Cirque Medrano. Both men pondered the inescapable joke of existence, one trading in the low art of slapstick, the other in the high art of avant-garde poetry. But Keaton was only a hired hand on Film, which is better remembered now for the oddness of the men’s pairing than for its artistic merit.
Beckett and Schneider were interested in Keaton only as a performer; you have to wonder if they understood they were dealing with a cinematic genius. Actor James Karen, who put Schneider in touch with Keaton and played a small role in Film, remembers his frustration with the writer and director: “Beckett had never made a movie, nor had Alan Schneider ever directed a movie. And there they were, with a master of moviemaking whom they never took into their confidence.” The irony is that Keaton might have latched on to the film’s technical challenges; some of his most brilliant work dealt with tricks of perception and the paradoxes of cinema. In his short The Playhouse (1921), multiple exposures allow him to play every role; in Sherlock Jr. (1924), he leaps up into the frame of a movie and joins the action, stunned when the picture cuts to a new scene and he’s not where he thought he was. A brilliant architect of sight gags, Keaton had a pronounced sense of geometry that might have served Beckett’s idea of a man being continuously stalked just outside his field of vision.
Directed by Ross Lipman Sat 5/7, 7 PM Logan Center for the Arts 915 E. 60thfilmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu 773-702-8596 Free
Sun 5/8, noon Music Box 3733 N. Southport 773-871-6604musicboxtheatre.com $11
