ABSTRACT
In January 1966, in a studio on the Rue Mouffetard in Paris, a small cast and crew came together to produce a highly unusual piece of cinema. Filmmaker Marin Karmitz, theatre director Jean-Marie Serreau, film editor Jean Ravel, sound engineer Luc Perini, and actors Eléonore Hirt, Michael Lonsdale and Delphine Seyrig, collaborated with the writer and dramatist Samuel Beckett to create a screen adaptation of the latter’s stageplay, Comédie. Directing the project was the Romanian-born, French-raised Karmitz, a graduate of the prestigious Paris film school, IDHEC, an acolyte of the nouvelle vague, whose aesthetics were also being shaped by the work of other eminent exponents of late modernism in mid-1960s Paris: the music of Pierre Boulez, the paintings of Jean Dubuffet and the novels of Marguerite Duras.1 The latter had written the script for his first major directorial project, the short film Nuit Noire Calcutta (1964). Filming on Comédie lasted around a fortnight, and Beckett, who was present throughout, seems to have had a significant hand in the work’s creation, not least because he had already spent a great deal of time rehearsing the same cast for Comédie’s stage production.2 After a lengthy editing process with which Beckett was also closely involved, the completed film received a largely unfavourable reception at its Venice Film Festival premiere, following which it appears to have been more or less forgotten and not seen publicly again until June 2000 when it was shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris as part of a group show called ‘Voilà, le monde dans la tête’. An exhibition at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London followed in December 2000, and the film has subsequently been shown widely in several exhibitions in Europe and beyond.3
