NOTFILM
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A kino-essay by Ross Lipman
Produced by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller
Featuring: Kevin Brownlow, Judith Douw, S.E. Gontarski, James Karen, Buster Keaton, James Knowlson, Leonard Maltin, Mark Nixon, Barney Rosset, Steve Schapiro, Jean Schneider, Jeannette Seaver, Haskell Wexler, Billie Whitelaw
and the voices of Samuel Beckett, Boris Kaufman, and Alan Schneider
Music by Mihály Víg
TOP TEN FILMS OF 2016 -- Dana Stevens, Slate
In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, titleless avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett’s canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.
NOTFILM is the feature-length movie on FILM’s production and its philosophical implications, utilizing additional outtakes, never before heard audio recordings of the production meetings, and other rare archival elements.
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AVAILABLE FROM: MILESTONE FILMS
EMAIL: MILEFILMS@GMAIL.COM / PHONE: +1 (201) 767-3117
Samuel Beckett's FILM
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DIRECTED BY ALAN SCHNEIDER
WRITTEN AND CONCEIVED BY SAMUEL BECKETT
With: Buster Keaton, James Karen, Susan Reed, Nell Harrison
Cinematographer: Boris Kaufman
Operator: Joe Coffey
Editor: Sidney Meyers Art Director: Burr Smidt
Produced by: Barney Rosset with Milt Perlman
Original Release: 1965, by Evergreen Theater, INC.
35 MM, B/W, 22 Min
Samuel Beckett, the celebrated author of Waiting for Godot, made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film; the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.
RESTORED BY: UCLA FILM & TELEVISION ARCHIVE, IN COOPERATION WITH THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE. PRESERVATION FUNDED THROUGH THE AVANT-GARDE MASTERS PROGRAM FUNDED BY THE FILM FOUNDATION AND ADMINISTERED BY THE NATIONAL FILM PRESERVATION FOUNDATION. LABORATORY SERVICES BY CINETECH, ASCENT MEDIA, NT PICTURE AND SOUND, DOLBY LABORATORIES, AND AUDIO MECHANICS. SPECIAL THANKS TO: THE ACADEMY FILM ARCHIVE, EDWARD BECKETT, NICOLE BRENEZ, LES ÉDITIONS DE MINUIT, EVERGREEN REVIEW, DAVID GRAY, SHAWN JONES, JONATHAN LEE, IRÈNE LINDON, BRUCE MAZEN, THE PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE, BARNEY AND ASTRID ROSSET.
AVAILABLE FROM: MILESTONE FILMS
EMAIL: MILEFILMS@GMAIL.COM / PHONE: +1 (201) 767-3117