“It would be nice if sometime a man would come up to me on the street and say, ‘Hello, I’m the information man, and you have not said the word “yours” for thirteen minutes. You have not said the word “praise” for eighteen days, three hours, and nineteen minutes.’”

Edward Ruscha’s imaginary Information Man reminds me of The Film Explainer, whose task was performed in the era of silent movies and is described by Gert Hofmann in his novel of the same name:

“My grandfather was the film explainer and piano player in Limbach. They still had those, back then. A lot of them came from the fairgrounds, from the ‘apish origins of art’ (Grandfather). You could see that from the way they dressed. In the cinema they wore red or blue tailcoats with gold or silver buttons, a white bow tie, white trousers, sometimes top-boots. Others would wear smoking jackets.

Watch out, don’t nod off, here comes a wonderful sequence, maybe the most wonderful in the whole film, cried Grandfather, reaching for his pointer … The sighing and the snoring all but stopped. I was tiny. I leaned back in my seat. I took it all in.”

***

Hollis Frampton’s Lecture, from Circles of Confusion, begins:

“Please turn out the lights.

As long as we are going to talk about films, we might as well do it in the dark.”

His cinematic performance lecture and meditation on the luminous white rectangle of film projection, is a lecture that takes place within the space of the cinema theatre itself.

The etymology of ‘theatre’ combines both the action and the location of looking, the image of a social site of collective and purposeful looking:

“It was a large room. Full of people. All kinds.
And they had all arrived at the same building
at more or less the same time.
And they were all free. And they were all
asking themselves the same question:
What is behind that curtain?”

With these words, Laurie Anderson describes the theatre of her own performance of Big Science and also the generic space of theatre itself, including the movie theatre. At the cinema we might as easily ask ourselves: What is behind that screen?

The philosopher Stanley Cavell, writing about cinema in The World Viewed poses the question beautifully:

“What does the silver screen screen?”

Hollis Frampton again remarks:

“Our rectangle of light is eternal. Only we come and go; we say: This is where I came in. The rectangle of light was here before we came, and it will be here after we have gone.

It is only a rectangle of white light. But it is all films. We can never see more within our rectangle, only less.

Our white rectangle is not ‘nothing at all’. In fact it is, in the end, all we have. That is one of the limits of the art of film.”

This white rectangle is a quintessential modernist monochrome. As Jeff Wall reminds us, in his writing about the paintings of On Kawara, after the ‘White on White’ monochromes of Kasimir Malevich there is no such thing as a blank canvas. Every canvas is always already a monochrome. Every image is inscribed on the surface of a monochrome. For the painter Peter Joseph, gazing at the white rectangle of a cinema screen inspired a lifetime’s work of framed monochromes.

Thinking about the cinema screen, Roland Barthes, in the closing remarks of his essay Right in the Eyes suggests that cinema ‘severs’ the gaze, in that a performer in cinema cannot look directly back at the camera and therefore at the viewer:

“If a single gaze from the screen came to rest on me, the whole film would be lost. But this is only the literal truth. For it can happen that, on another, invisible level, the screen … does not cease gazing at me.”

***

In the opening frames of Samuel Beckett’s Film, his only work for cinema, the screen is filled with the enfolded surface of the skin of the elderly Buster Keaton’s eye-lid.

This film of skin trembles before opening to expose Keaton’s eye to us and expose us to its riveting stare. For the closing frames of the work this close-up is reversed, confirming the complete identification that Beckett makes between surfaces: of the skin of the eye-lid, the photo-sensitised celluloid surface of film itself and the expanse of the cinema screen onto which the luminous, instantaneous and immaterial surface of film is cast.

From this moment on, the relationship between the audience and the performance of Buster Keaton is firmly established as we see, from behind, his figure scuttling along the base of the vast surface of a huge brick wall – until the very end of Film we only ever see Keaton from behind. This cliff-like wall establishes the spatial closure of the work in which Keaton goes on to perform a methodically choreographed series of profoundly iconoclastic actions in the solitary confines of a locked and curtained room.

The figure of Keaton is constantly in flight from the pursuit of what Beckett called the ‘objective camera’, the camera with which we, as viewers, identify. The film alternates in fact, between two points of view, that of this ‘objective’ camera and a ‘subjective’ camera that appears to be Keaton’s own view of the world. The conditions of this observation, in which we are complicit, are themselves a kind of scopic dance between the two cameras, in which the camera/viewer is unable to exceed a critical angle of view from which Keaton’s face cannot be seen and that Beckett, in his detailed scenario of Film called the ‘angle of immunity’.

The viewer’s relation to this image is established, we should remember, within the space of the cinema itself, where we are held between the appearance and the source of the image, between the projector and the screen. The image of Keaton’s back is both before us and behind us at the same time.

It comes as a surprise perhaps, to discover that Buster Keaton was not Beckett’s only choice for this performance for the camera. We can only be thankful that Alan Schneider, Beckett’s director, persuaded the bemused Keaton to take on this late part because it is Keaton who is the very personification of those aspects of cinema to which Beckett was responding. This is a silent film with the exception of one sound, uttered by an incidental performer: ‘Shhhhhhh!’, a furious closure of speech, thus holding Keaton, mute as he always was, within the silent realm of the medium.

And it is only in the closing moments of the film that we see, at last, what we always knew was there to be seen: the uniquely iconic, cinematic image of Buster Keaton’s face, coming face-to-face with its own regarding image.

But this image of Keaton, still wearing his sartorial signature, the flattened Stetson hat, also wears an eye patch. Giuliana Bruno (for Rebecca Horn’s Guggenheim Museum exhibition) writes apropos of Horn’s film, Buster’s Bedroom, that for Keaton:

“… automatism and the mechanistic were synonymous with cinema.”

She adds:

“… Keaton’s screen persona paralleled that of his two favourite film characters, the train and the cinema – two mechanical objects, two apparatuses for viewing space, framed windows for traversing sites – the very epitome of modern vision.”

Here, in Samuel Beckett’s Film, Keaton is framed once again and, like the camera and the projector, has one eye, the eye that is to fill the screen and look back at us with its cycloptic, monocular gaze.

Hollis Frampton says:

“But this is where we came in.”

And Laurie Anderson calls out:

“Hey Professor! Could you turn out the lights?
Let’s roll the film.”

David Ward