The Making of Samuel Beckett?s Play/comédie and Film


Book Description

Samuel Beckett?s short play Play / Comédie and his only film Film were written around the same time (1962-1963). They both have self-referential titles that invite meditation on the genres they represent. Although medium-specific opportunities and challenges underlie their very different geneses, they have influenced each other in terms of both form and content. In more ways than one, Film continues where Play left off. Whereas in Play the genesis shows a steady increase in speech tempo to the point of near unintelligibility, the silent Film radically eliminates speech from the outset. Conversely, the cinematic element is also clearly present in Play, notably in the crucial role assigned to the light beam as the mechanical, mindless inquisitor. Both works are grounded in technology and rely heavily on explanatory notes for the members of their production teams, thus exposing the inherently collaborative nature of such projects. The genetic critical analysis of the manuscripts of Play / Comédie and Film not only contributes to the interpretation of each work separately but also considers the two works together through the prism of Beckett?s multimedial authorship. 00This volume is part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), a collaboration between the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), the Beckett International Foundation (University of Reading) and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin), with the support of the Estate of Samuel Beckett. The BDMP (www.beckettarchive.org) digitally reunites the dispersed manuscripts of Samuel Beckett?s works and facilitates their examination. The project consists of two parts:0a) a digital archive of Beckett?s a manuscripts, with facsimiles and transcriptions, organized in modules;0b) a series of print volumes, analyzing the genesis of Beckett?s works.




The Making of Samuel Beckett's Play/Comedie and Film


Book Description

Samuel Beckett's short play Play / Comédie and his only film Film were written around the same time (1962-1963). They both have self-referential titles that invite meditation on the genres they represent. Although medium-specific opportunities and challenges underlie their very different geneses, they have influenced each other in terms of both form and content. In more ways than one, Film continues where Play left off. Whereas in Play the genesis shows a steady increase in speech tempo to the point of near unintelligibility, the silent Film radically eliminates speech from the outset. Conversely, the cinematic element is also clearly present in Play, notably in the crucial role assigned to the light beam as the mechanical, mindless inquisitor. Both works are grounded in technology and rely heavily on explanatory notes for the members of their production teams, thus exposing the inherently collaborative nature of such projects. The genetic critical analysis of the manuscripts of Play / Comédie and Film not only contributes to the interpretation of each work separately but also considers the two works together through the prism of Beckett's multimedial authorship.




Samuel Beckett and Cinema


Book Description

In 1936, Samuel Beckett wrote a letter to the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein expressing a desire to work in the lost tradition of silent film. The production of Beckett's Film in 1964, on the cusp of his work as a director for stage and screen, coincides with a widespread revival of silent film in the period of cinema's modernist second wave. Drawing on recently published letters, archival material and production notebooks, Samuel Beckett and Cinema is the first book to examine comprehensively the full extent of Beckett's engagement with cinema and its influence on his work for stage and screen. The book situates Beckett within the context of first and second wave modernist filmmaking, including the work of figures such as Vertov, Keaton, Lang, Epstein, Flaherty, Dreyer, Godard, Bresson, Resnais, Duras, Rogosin and Hitchcock. By examining the parallels between Beckett's methods, as a writer-director, and particular techniques, such as the embodied presence of the camera, the use of asynchronous sound, and the cross-pollination of theatricality and cinema, as well as the connections between his collaborators and the nouvelle vague, the book reveals how Beckett's aesthetic is fundamentally altered by his work for the screen, and his formative encounters with modernist film culture.




Samuel Beckett's Plays on Film and Television


Book Description

This is the first book devoted Beckett's innovative work for the big- and small-screens. Herren examines each of Beckett's film and television plays in depth, emphasizing the central role that memory plays in these haunting works.




All that Fall


Book Description

Published to celebrate the centenary of Beckett's birth




Samuel Beckett's Library


Book Description

The first study to assess the importance of the marginalia, inscriptions, and other manuscript notes in the 750 volumes of Samuel Beckett's personal library.




Beckett's afterlives


Book Description

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s work across the world following the author’s death in 1989, Beckett’s afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts of adaptation, remediation and appropriation to reflect on Beckett’s own evolving approach to crossing genre boundaries and to analyse the ways in which contemporary artists across different media and diverse cultural contexts – including the UK, Europe, the USA and Latin America – continue to engage with Beckett. The book offers fresh insights into how his work has kept inspiring both practitioners and audiences in the twenty-first century, operating through methodologies and approaches that aim to facilitate and establish the study of modern-day adaptations, not just of Beckett but other (multimedia) authors as well.




Endgame


Book Description

Four characters play a game of life, concluding with the exit of one character and the immobility of the remaining three, in a study of man's relationship to his fellows




Beckett on Screen


Book Description

This ground-breaking study analyses Beckett’s television plays in relation to the history and theory of television. It argues that they are in dialogue with innovative television traditions connected to Modernism in television, film, radio, theatre, literature and the visual arts. Using original research from BBC archives and manuscript sources, the book provides new perspectives on the relationships between Beckett’s television dramas and the wider television culture of Britain and Europe. It also compares and contrasts the plays for television with Beckett’s Film and broadcasts of his theatre work including the recent Beckett on Film season. Chapters deal with the production process of the plays, the broadcasting contexts in which they were screened, institutions and authorship, the plays’ relationships with comparable programmes and films and reaction to Beckett’s screen work by audiences and critics. This book is a major contribution to Beckett scholarship and to studies of television drama. It will be essential reading in literature and drama studies, television historiography and for devotees of Beckett’s work.




Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event


Book Description

An expressive dialogue between Deleuze's philosophical writings on cinema and Beckett's innovative film and television work, the book explores the relationship between the birth of the event – itself a simultaneous invention and erasure - and Beckett's attempts to create an incommensurable space within the interstices of language as a (W)hole.