Samuel Beckett and Cinema

In 1936 Samuel Beckett wrote a letter to Sergei Eisenstein - the legendary director of such films as Battleship Potemkin - expressing his own desire to work in the lost tradition of silent film. Drawing on substantial archival material, 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. Examining his writing on second wave modernist cinema, including the work of directors such as Eisenstein,Godard, Griffith and Bresson as well as performers such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo, the book reveals film art to be central to Beckett's modernist aesthetic. In this way, Beckett is revealed to be part of a wider modernist theatrical tradition that stood as an inheritor of early 20th century cinema, alongside Meyerhold, Brecht and Artaud.

Anthony Paraskeva is Lecturer in English and Film at the University of Dundee, UK. He is the author of The Speech-Gesture Complex: Modernism, Theatre, Cinema.

Introduction 1. Beckett, Modernism and Silent Film 2. Keaton's Last Tape 3. Beckett and Second Wave Modernist Cinema: Alain Resnais and Delphine Seyrig4. Beckett's Nonsynchronisity: Godard and Resnais5. 'texte théâtre film': Duras/Akerman, Biomechanics and Eisenstein's Reading of Kleist's Marionettes6. Handwriting in Nachtund Träume; Bresson and The Politics of Depersonalisation; Intermediality and the Late AestheticConclusionBibliographyIndex