SILVER SCREEN

SAMUEL BECKETT, BUSTER KEATON, AND THE END OF LOOKING

CORMAC O’DÁLAIGH

March 3, 2026

In 1965, Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton met at the edge of their mediums. “Film” is the austere result: a work that reduces cinema to a single, inescapable problem, namely what it means to be seen. In stripping image, gesture, and narrative to their bare minimum, it turns modernism’s faith in vision into a final, unsentimental reckoning.

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In 1965, an unlikely convergence occurred between two figures who, in different ways, had already reached the ends of their respective traditions. Samuel Beckett, the writer who had reduced literature and theater to voices, pauses, and near silence, wrote a short screenplay for cinema. Buster Keaton, the great engineer of silent comedy, appeared in what would become his final major screen performance. The result, Film, officially directed by Alan Schneider but entirely supervised by Beckett, is neither a synthesis nor a collaboration in any conventional sense. It is closer to a collision—a brief, austere work in which cinema itself is interrogated, stripped down, and left staring at its own conditions of existence.

To understand Film is to situate it not only within Beckett’s literary trajectory and Keaton’s cinematic afterlife, but also within the longer, more oblique history of experimental film—a history preoccupied with the act of seeing, the authority of the camera, and the uneasy ethics of perception.

“All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.”

By the time Beckett wrote Film, he had already dismantled the novel and radically redefined theater. Works such as Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953) hollowed narrative from the inside, leaving consciousness circling itself without resolution. His plays, from Waiting for Godot (1952) to Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), reduced drama to repetition, delay, and exhaustion. Later works would push even further toward minimalism: disembodied mouths, isolated heads, figures half-buried or barely visible.

Cinema, for Beckett, was not a new playground, but another limit case. He approached it with suspicion, wary of its descriptive power and its tendency toward illusion. Film is his only completed screenplay, and it bears all the marks of a writer trying to neutralize the medium from within. The premise is famously concise, drawn by Beckett from a line by the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley: esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). A man, designated only as O (Object), attempts to evade all perception. The camera, designated E (Eye), pursues him.

O, played by Buster Keaton, moves through the world with one objective: not to be seen. For much of the film, his face is withheld from the viewer. We see the back of his head, the brim of his hat, the edges of his coat. The camera, E, approaches him only from angles he cannot perceive. Whenever it comes too close to his field of vision, he recoils in panic. The rule is precise: He must not meet the gaze.

“There’s no lack of void.”

He passes strangers on the street, overtakes an old lady in a stairwell. Their brief glances unsettle him. He covers his face. He flees into a run-down room, bolts the door, and draws the filthy and raggedy curtains. There, the effort intensifies. A dog looks at him; he drives it away. A cat stares; it too must go. A bird in a cage, a fish in a bowl—each becomes a threat, a witness. Even a framed image on the wall is torn down. Photographs of O himself, which he carries in a briefcase, are ripped up by him. Mirrors are covered. Anything capable of returning his presence to him must be neutralized. The room becomes a chamber of elimination. Perception is treated as contamination.

The man who once built a career on the precision of his visible face now refuses visibility altogether. In silent cinema, Keaton’s expression was ubiquitous; here, it is concealed as long as possible. The body hunches inward. The gestures are defensive. What had once been mastery of space becomes withdrawal from it.

Only at the end does the prohibition collapse. Seated alone, believing he has extinguished all witnesses, O slowly confronts the final perceiver. The camera moves into alignment. For the first time, O’s face is fully revealed. He looks and discovers that what has been pursuing him is not an external enemy, but himself. E and O coincide. The eye that has stalked him is his own. The terror is not social exposure but self-perception. The attempt to escape being seen concludes in the inescapability of seeing oneself.

“Perhaps he could see me.”

This binary structure is not narrative so much as ontological. Beckett is not telling a story; he is staging a condition. The chase is not suspenseful, nor is it comic in any traditional sense. It is relentless and pointless. Every act of avoidance produces another angle, another frame, another proof that perception cannot be escaped.

What makes Film so severe is Beckett’s refusal of metaphorical comfort. Perception is not social judgment, not surveillance, not morality. It is simply the fact of being seen—by others, by objects, by oneself. In this sense, Film belongs squarely within Beckett’s late project: the progressive elimination of everything that might soften the terror of consciousness.

The collision of modernist avant-garde theater and silent cinema was neither accidental nor merely technical. It arose from a shared distrust of language and a common faith in the expressive intelligence of the body. In the early twentieth century, theater practitioners reacting against bourgeois realism—Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erwin Piscator, Antonin Artaud—sought forms of performance that would bypass psychology and speech in favor of gesture, rhythm, and physical extremity. Silent cinema, developing in parallel, offered a mass-cultural version of this ambition: meaning produced through movement, timing, and spatial logic rather than dialogue. Performers like Keaton embodied a mechanized, anti-romantic physicality that echoed theatrical experiments in biomechanics, alienation technics, and cruelty, while the camera itself became a dramaturgical device, structuring attention, proximity, and duration.

“Nothing to be done.”

Those traditions treated the human figure less as a character than as a formal problem, an object in space, subject to forces larger than intention. When Beckett later stripped modernist theater of plot, speech, and even full bodies, he was not importing cinematic ideas so much as returning it to a preverbal, pre-psychological logic that silent cinema had already explored with brutal clarity. In this sense, Film does not unite two art forms so much as reveal their shared origin: a modernism that believed meaning could survive the collapse of language, provided the body remained visible long enough to fail.

Casting Keaton was not a nostalgic gesture. Beckett reportedly insisted on him precisely because his body already carried a history that could not be erased. Keaton, by 1965, was no longer the acrobatic daredevil of Sherlock Jr. (1924) or The General (1926). His career had been derailed by the transition to sound, studio control, alcoholism, and decades of marginalization. What remained was the face: impassive, unreadable, resistant to psychology.

In silent comedy, Keaton’s stone face had functioned as a stabilizing force amid chaos. Buildings collapsed, trains derailed, gravity betrayed him, yet his expression barely registered surprise. In Film, that same face becomes something else entirely: not resilience, but erasure. The comedy drains away, leaving behind a figure whose movements are cautious, defensive, and anxious. He covers mirrors, frightens animals, destroys images. Even God, suggested by a photograph, is eliminated as a potential witness.

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”

This is Keaton stripped of spectacle. No stunts, no gags, no triumphs. His body is no longer a machine navigating space with mathematical precision; it is a vulnerable object trying to withdraw from space altogether. In this sense, Film is a kind of negative monument to silent cinema. It acknowledges the medium’s origins in physical presence and visual mastery, only to negate them.

That this was Keaton’s final major appearance is not incidental. Film does not revive him; it seals him. The great performer of visibility ends his career in a work about the impossibility of disappearing.

Film occupies a peculiar and largely unassimilated position within the history of experimental cinema. By the mid-1960s, an international network of filmmakers was already engaged in sustained efforts to dismantle the inherited conventions of narrative cinema, often proceeding with little reference to literature or theater. In Europe and North America, figures such as Ernie Gehr, Kurt Kren, and Birgit Hein were developing practices that treated cinema less as a narrative art and more as a temporal and optical system. Their work frequently reduced film to flicker, loop, repetition, and duration, probing the perceptual thresholds of spectatorship with a rigor that bordered on the clinical. These films did not so much tell stories as demonstrate conditions, placing the viewer inside systems that foregrounded their own mechanics.

Within this context, Beckett’s Film appears neither aligned with nor opposed to these tendencies so much as adjacent to them. It does not pursue abstraction, nor does it seek to extend cinema’s formal vocabulary. Instead, it narrows its scope, concentrating attention on a single, unresolved problem: the status of perception. While much structural and materialist film of the period treated the exposure of cinematic mechanisms as a form of clarity, Beckett’s approach moved toward restriction rather than disclosure. The film’s austerity functions not as an invitation to heightened awareness but as a limit imposed on both image and spectator. Its severity is not programmatic but consequential, the result of a sustained refusal to elaborate beyond what is strictly necessary.

“The eye has no lid.”

The camera in Film is therefore positioned not as a neutral recording device, nor as an instrument of revelation. It operates instead as a persistent presence whose authority is never questioned but never justified. In this respect, the work can be situated within a longer lineage of reflexive cinema extending back to Dziga Vertov and his Man with a Movie Camera (1929), as well as to the less frequently discussed theoretical and poetic investigations of early European avant-garde filmmakers such as Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac. Yet where these figures tended to regard cinematic self-awareness as a means of renewing perception or reconfiguring social experience, Film proceeds without such expectations. It neither celebrates nor critiques the act of seeing; it simply treats it as unavoidable.

In this way, Film registers a shift in the modernist understanding of vision. The exposure of the apparatus no longer promises emancipation, political insight, or perceptual expansion. Visibility appears instead as a condition that precedes intention and exceeds agency. The camera does not uncover hidden truths, nor does it destabilize authority by revealing its mechanisms. It persists. What emerges is not a cinema of revelation but one of endurance, in which both subject and spectator are held within the same narrow corridor of perception. The film’s refusal to offer alternatives, resolutions, or even commentary allows it to settle into the historical record less as a manifesto than as a terminal observation: that by the mid-twentieth century, the modernist project of reflexivity had reached a point where seeing itself could no longer be assumed to lead anywhere else.

For Marcel Duchamp, film functioned less as an autonomous discipline than as a conceptual tool, an apparatus capable of staging paradox, delay, and non-retinal thought. Duchamp’s own limited but suggestive engagements with the moving image, along with the cinematic experiments of figures such as Man Ray and Hans Richter, established a model in which film served as a temporal extension of the readymade: an event that occurred without expressive urgency. Later artists working in this lineage often treated film as documentation, provocation, or structural frame rather than as a site of perceptual immersion. Duration mattered, but spectacle did not. Meaning emerged through displacement rather than intensity.

“Be again, be again.” 

Against these tendencies, Film appears again as an anomaly. It shares with Duchampian practice a suspicion of visual pleasure and a resistance to expressive excess, yet it refuses the irony, play, and strategic indifference that characterize much conceptual film. Beckett’s cinema neither accumulates nor quotes; it subtracts. Where artists’ films often assume a viewer capable of interpretive mobility, moving between reference systems, contexts, and frames, Film assumes a viewer already caught. Its camera does not document, nor does it reframe art as idea. It simply persists as a function.

Seen from this angle, Film does not comfortably align with either the experimental films of its era or the Duchampian legacy of conceptual art. It intersects them only at a distance, sharing certain methodological refusals while declining their underlying freedoms. The result is a work that seems less situated within a movement than deposited between movements, registering a moment when film, stripped of both narrative ambition and conceptual play, could do little more than acknowledge its own unavoidable presence.

In this respect, Film anticipates later theoretical critiques of the gaze without participating in their rhetoric. It does not explain itself, contextualize itself, or moralize. It simply demonstrates, with pitiless clarity, that cinema cannot escape its own function. To film is to perceive. To be filmed is to be fixed.

The final revelation, when O confronts E and discovers that the perceiver is himself, is not a twist but a confirmation. Subject and object collapse. The attempt to escape perception ends in self-confrontation. Cinema, having chased its subject to the limit, finds only its own eye staring back.

“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

Film has no true descendants. It did not inaugurate a school, nor did it offer a method that could be productively repeated. Like much of Beckett’s work, it is exemplary without being generative. It closes a door rather than opening one.

For Beckett, this was enough. He returned to theater and television, continuing his project of subtraction. For Keaton, it was a quiet farewell, an appearance that acknowledged his past without exploiting it. For experimental cinema, Film remains a kind of philosophical anomaly—a work that uses the medium not to explore new freedoms but to expose a fundamental constraint.

That this encounter took place so late in both of their lives is not incidental; it was followed almost immediately by disappearance, of different kinds, for each of them.

“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Their deaths, belonging to different historical registers, seal Film as a late, terminal encounter. Buster Keaton died on February 1, 1966, in Woodland Hills, California, less than a year after Film was completed, from lung cancer he had reportedly been unaware of until the very end. His death passed quietly, almost anticlimactically, mirroring the long eclipse of his career after the silent era: the greatest physical intelligence US cinema had produced, exiting without ceremony, interviews, or final statements. Samuel Beckett, by contrast, lived another twenty-three years, dying on December 22, 1989, in Paris, after a lifetime spent steadily stripping language, image, and selfhood toward silence. Beckett outlived his century but not its exhaustion; Keaton did not even outlive the aftershocks of his own medium. One died having been gradually reduced by history, the other having actively reduced art itself. Between them, Film stands as a shared moment of late clarity, a work made not in anticipation of the future, but in full awareness that there would be very little left to say, or to show.

What endures is its severity. Film invites endurance less than interpretation. It asks the viewer to remain with an idea long enough for its implications to become uncomfortable. In doing so, it reminds us that cinema’s most radical gesture may not be invention, but refusal—refusal to look away from the fact that to exist, on-screen and off, is already to be seen.

Cormac O’Dálaigh (born in 1958 in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin) grew up in a household that regarded silence as both profession and temperament. He studied philosophy at Trinity College Dublin before completing a doctorate on early modernist theater and the ethics of spectatorship, a subject he insists chose him. O’Dálaigh lives between Dublin and Paris, rarely in the same mood in both cities.

Cover image: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”