Saturday, April 15, 2023, 8:00 pm
SAMUEL BECKETT + BUSTER KEATON’s FILM + LIPMAN’s NOTFILM
After many years in post-production, the Bay Area finally gets to see the kino-essay that our LA archivist-ally Ross Lipman has fashioned and about, Beckett’s only motion picture, Film (1965). OC screened the 20-min. anomaly many years ago, though it dropped out of sight with the closure of Barney Rossett’s Grove Press. But Lipman was on the trail, finding out-takes, tracking down production crew members, interviewing family and friends of the principals, and consulting historians and critics like Kevin Brownlow and Leonard Maltin. The result is a fascinating feature-length think-piece that rightfully situates avant-garde literature, theater, and cinema within their 20C socio-historical contexts, and humanizes risky 60s projects like this and others out of Rossett’s provocative publishing house. Lipman‘s magnum opus is screened in two iterations, with the original Film (and an intermission) between them.