ABSTRACT
Admirers of Samuel Beckett show a natural tendency to explain the film’s unsatisfactory quality in terms of the techniques used in its making. Film, then, shows actors battling against the odds with an intrinsically disobliging scenario. Both author and director could have done more for their cast. In Film only the camera movement can give adequately the sense of pursuit and Beckett’s suggestion prevented his idea from realisation on film with maximum intensity. Beckett toys with the notion that these two different points of view might be conveyed to the audience simultaneously, but rejects it, not on the grounds of practicability, but because it might leave the spectator confused. Instead he opts for ‘a succession of images of different quality, corresponding on the one hand to E’s perception of O and on the other to O’s perception’ of his surroundings.
