Customer Reviews

Beckett on Film DVD Set

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First let me say I've been waiting my whole adult life for this collection. I've spent 30 years trying to collect audio and video recordings of Beckett's work, and suddenly here are all the theatre peices in one beautiful package. The chance that you will ever find another film version of most of these works, or ever have a chance to see them on stage, is almost nil. If you love Waiting for Godot and Endgame, you will not regret the money spent on this. Unlike most plays and almost all movies, these are peices to be seen again and again, over a lifetime, letting the beauty and subtlety of Beckett's language slowly soak into your being.

That being said, I was disappointed with only one peice: Endgame. With Michael Gambon as one of the leads, I expected the most from this play. But I'm afraid he was badly misdirected in this. He simply enjoys his dispair too much. He enjoys being a selfish, cruel master and his "Perhaps I could go on..." speech (one of Beckett's greatest)loses all its power. Gambon delivers this with hardly a pause, rambling on with the same puckish tone as the rest of his performance. (I thought maybe I was just too used to an earlier film version directed by Beckett, so I went back to the script to check this. After almost every phrase in the speech, Beckett has written (Pause). Without these pauses to let the anguish of the words sink into our minds, the speech carries no more weight than the rest of the text. Well, probably much more than you wanted to know.)

Short Review: BUY THIS NOW! You'll be watching these films again and again as long as you own a DVD player.

Curious that DVD Basen, the wonderful Danish web-compendium of dvd reviews from all over the world, has yet to register a word on BECKETT ON FILM, by any measure the dvd release of the year. These film renditions of Samuel Beckett's nineteen works for the stage (which is not the same as his "complete dramatic works," which would include radio plays and scripts for television), are, for the most part, thrillingly successful. The plays fall into two types. WAITING FOR GODOT, ENDGAME, KRAPP'S LAST TAPE, and HAPPY DAYS, however revolutionary in their time, still more or less conform to the conventional understanding of what a play is, ie: they contain recognizable characters and the shortest is an hour long. Despite the filmmakers' protests to make true movies of these plays, as opposed to "filmed plays," each of their single-locale settings make the theatrical origins of each work inescapable. Having said that, they are the best "filmed plays" this viewer has ever seen. Most of the remaining plays, particularly the late plays, are very short (under 15 minutes), and as Alan Rickman remarks, seem more like installations or "performance art," then full-fledged plays. What makes these works among the greatest plays ever written is precisely their inability to be transfered to another medium. With one exception, each of these little films, even the most brilliant of them (I'm thinking of the mind-blowing PLAY), must somehow compromise itself as a play in order to make the transition to film. The exception is OHIO IMPROMPTU. The intensity of this two character, ten minute piece perhaps reaches the full measure of its power as a film. Beckett's stage directions specify that its two actors be as alike as possible. On film, they can be exactly alike, by virtue of being played by the same actor, namely Jeremy Irons, who has famously played twins before. Despite the actor's disavowal, the characters of Reader and Listener can't help but conjure the image of DEAD RINGERS' Elliot commiserating with his twin brother Beverly aeons from hence in their own personal purgatory. Irons' performance is impeccable and affecting, although the Beckett purist might wish there were a little less of it. The performances throughout the plays are deliriously good, with the sad exception of the beautiful FOOTFALLS, which suffers from an overly mannered delivery on the part of its two actresess. One can only feel sorry for the director saddled with the relentlessly uncinematic THAT TIME. But BECKETT ON FILM is mostly a box of treasure, and a gift to the world.

Those who are familiar with the original productions will find this collection both exhilarating and frustrating. The more faithful the directors are to Beckett's vision, the more successful the adaptation to film. Come and Go is perhaps the purest of them, and also the most chilling. Other effective adaptations include Krapp's Last Tape, Rough for Theatre II, Act Without Words II, A Piece of Monologue, and Play (Minghella's truly -cinematic- adaptation probably deserves the highest marks). I'm ambivalent about many others, not least Ohio Impromptu and Catastrophe.

Unfortunately the longer plays (Godot, Happy Days, and Endgame) suffer from the directors' mistaken impression that Beckett's characters must be decrepit, disgusting, and/or humorless. Quite the contrary, there is levity and compassion to be found in Beckett's work, and without it his meditations become intolerable rather than incisive. Godot has its moments, but it's not nearly as effective (or funny) as any number of previous productions.

Pacing is also a significant issue here. Beckett's plays (excepting Not I and Play) demand a very slow reading, with an abundance of silence. Many of these adaptations simply plow through the texts with no apparent consideration of heft or nuance; Rockaby is probably the most egregious example. Other directorial liberties make Not I and What Where wholly unacceptable; these simply cannot be considered Beckett's work.

Happily, more Beckett productions are becoming available on DVD. You can purchase Happy Days with Irene Worth's excellent performance on this very site, three plays (Eh Joe, Footfalls, Rockaby) starring Beckett's favorite actress Billie Whitelaw, and a DVD of Beckett Directs Beckett (the three long plays) hopefully in the near future.

Those of us living in the heartland - Iowa, in my case - have little access to live productions of Beckett's work. This DVD set provides my only window into the performance of several of these plays. Until I purchased this set I had never SEEN Endgame, though I had read the work dozens of times. The same is true of several other plays. This set provides ACCESS, and I am eternally grateful to the producers, directors, actors, and crew for granting me a glimpse into a world otherwise beyond me immediate apprehension. Nit-pick if you must, but we living in the desert cannot but rejoice at this cool drink. "We're getting on"!

The fact that this DVD set exists at all is cause for ecstatic and superlative praise: at last we have nearly all the plays of one of the 20th century's most technically innovative--but also emotionally affecting and eloquent--dramatists, available together in professional productions created with sympathy, respect for the author's intentions, and often inspired insight into these works' theatrical potential.

Because this box set presents the work of 19 different directors, each working with a different play, it is inevitable that this collection would be uneven: the most disappointing performances, in my opinion, are drawn from the most familar works: Endgame, in particular, suffers from an awkward rhythm and rushed delivery which violates both the general sense of the work as well as several of its most memorable and touching sequences.

There are nonetheless many very pleasant surprises among these performances, none more welcome than Julianne Moore's extraordinary rendition of "Not I." John Hurt's version of "Krapp's Last Tape" will similarly, I think, come to be regarded as definitive, as will the idiosyncratic collaboration among David Mamet, Harold Pinter, and the late Sir John Gielguld in "Catastrophe." Most revelatory of all is the rendition of "Rough for Theatre II," which turns what reads in print as an ostensibly inconsequential fragment into a nuanced and perhaps uniquely detailed contribution to the Beckett canon.

Perhaps the greatest mystery in a package promising to be "the comprehensive cinematic interpretation of Beckett's plays" are the omissions here, most surprisingly his several works--"Eh Joe,' "Nacht und Traume," "...but the clouds," among others--for television. One also wonders, given the extraordinarily generous resources at the producers' disposal, if it was only the Beckett estate that prevented a mounting of the author's great deskdrawer drama Eleutheria, or the early fragment "Human Wishes."

The fact that this set is easily available, and that it contains so many highlights, ultimately overrides any disappointments. The price of this collection probably puts it out of reach of all but the most devoted fans of Samuel Beckett--which is also a shame, because many of these performances would refute the unreflective complaints that Beckett's work is boring, emotionally arid, or depressing. Were the set less expensive, it would help win for Beckett a popular audience commensurate with his contribution to contemporary literature and theatre. But for those of us lucky enough to own a copy, there is much to enjoy, contemplate, and re-play for years to come.

Directors working on stage-to-screen adaptations find themselves torn between dual obligations to both the original work and the new medium. In the case of creating a collection of films meant to highlight the playwright's vision, questions raised by these obligations become even more controversial: should they remain true to the text, even if elements of the play don't work well on film? Dare they change those elements to better fit their new mode of expression? And in the case of Beckett, what percentage of the collections' earnings should go towards manic-depressive treatment centers? Of course, total objectivity in stage-to-screen adaptation remains a pipe dream. But we have to remember that even a theatric production has a director, who-while possibly faced with less decisions than a film director-invariably must makes choices leading to his own personal interpretation of the play. Ultimately, every production of a play, be it for DVD or Broadway, interprets rather than mirrors the original work. Therefore, the Beckett on Film Project should not be regarded as an unbiased representation, but rather an ambitious interpretation of one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century. And in this regard, with few exceptions, the Beckett on Film Project shines with commendable effectiveness.

I wish to illustrate a few interpretive anomalies in the collection, to give you an idea of both the kinds of adaptive problems these directors had to face and some of their solutions. Consider "Act Without Words II," a short and dialogue-free play in which two characters mime their different daily routines against a narrow backdrop "violently lit in its entire length, [with] the rest of the stage in darkness." Director Edna Hughes chose to divide this backdrop into three film frames and to add a movie reel-like quality to the video. This constant reminder that we are watching a film is the same sort of self-referential metatextuality we find in many of Beckett's plays. Hughes' interpretive decision regarding the background also reinforces the repetitive theme of the play. That is to say, these characters' routines will go on and on, day after day, just as this very movie is being filmed-one frame after another. Hughes' use of a freeze-frame effect also highlights the technological superiority that film holds over its older cousin, theatre. The play calls for a "Frieze effect," but only on film can this be accomplished literally; in theatre it must be acted out. These changes by Hughes show intelligence in both his reading and adapting of the play to screen. Now, for something of a contrary example, consider one of Beckett's most famous short plays, "Play," in which three characters, trapped in urns, are forced to perpetually retell the story of the love triangle between them. The inquisitor: a lone spotlight that dictates which one of the three urns speaks, when, and for how long. But director Anthony Minghella's version gets rid of the light altogether, in favor of a loud and sometimes shaky camera, whose stronger presence is meant to take the light's place as these characters' inquisitor. Minghella's technique here ultimately falls somewhere between failure and success. The audible clicks and zooms of the camera do, for a time, give the viewer a feeling of submersion within the scene; since the camera now questions these characters, and we as viewers share the camera's gaze, the film achieves an interesting effect that draws us into the world of the story. But the camera cuts between the three urns so many times that the sense of a "unique inquisitor," as Beckett requests, soon dissipates. Not that the adaptation adds nothing to the play; once or twice, the camera pans around to give a broad scene of the background, a dark, foggy, and graveyard-like field littered with many more people in urns. While this background reduces the ambiguity of setting present in the original play, it does so perhaps necessarily, and in addition, clearly suggests that these characters' situations are in fact meant to be symbolic of some greater human condition. Ultimately, we recognize a tradeoff for every one of these questions of adaptation, but by and large, as these two examples illustrate, the gain outweighs the loss in the Beckett on Film Project. Or, put simply: the directors and actors earn their paychecks.

Now keep in mind that despite the interpretive decisions I just described, the main thrust of this collection remains Beckett's. What does that mean? It means that these plays glimmer and shine with a bleak despair. The most dramatic moments are often the most comedic, and the only happy characters-well, forget about happy characters (after all, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," as Nell from Endgame tells us). But, dismal as they can be, Beckett's plays always manage to match their gloom in originality, creativity, and importance. They pose critical questions about what it means to exist as a human being. Do we simply spend our days idly, waiting-for Godot or anything else? Do we bury ourselves in the desert when we say "I do"? Can our condition be reduced to the emblem of a solitary finch, living in a draped cage with a dead mate and only a cuttle-bone to eat, in a darkened room stalked by a black cat whose own life depends on a suicidal man standing at a window? Whether or not you agree, you cannot help but ask, once Beckett has shown you the shadowy corners of his imagination. And keep in mind his influence on theatre and even art in general. Often touted as odd and sometimes inaccessible, but always brilliant, Beckett's plays deserve our attention, whether or not we choose to buy the Beckett on Film collection. What these productions add to Beckett's vision is an important sense of a modern moment. How have the technological advances made since Beckett's death affected what it means to be Beckettian? And how do the questions his work poses affect you? It's worth your time to find out.

Not to gush, but many of the versions in this set far surpass my expectations of film adaptations of theatre. For instance, "Endgame" is brilliantly realized, with finely nuanced acting. Top talent on both sides of the camera, often visually arresting works. Really great stuff for any Beckett or experimental theatre enthusiast. Pricey, but worth it.

First let me say I can't for the life of me believe my eyes reading the reviewer who praised highly the whole Beckett on Film except for ENDGAME. Its a tour de force. I saw it for tthe first time on YouTube albeit in 9 parts it still made lasting and moving impression that I have just experienced again. I have seen it for four times over a couple of years. Just before reading the reviewer (and unfortunately the first review) I saw it and thought it may have spoiled me from seeing other productions. The reviewer's main complaint is that Hamm is too happy, enjoys his situation too much, isn't morose enough I suppose is meant. I think the Hamm is maniac depressive---delusional. He tries as many of Beckett's character's does (i.e. Happy Days) shows how tragic by contrast between reality and fantasy. Hamm talks about hopes and dreams and stories bbut Clov and the stage brings him always back and he is as a subtext knows denial is a way of survival. He cannot die--finish---just pause---sleep like it was death and then wake up, start over. Gambon plays this, all the actors play together, by turns farce and tragedy. I haven't seen BECKETT ON FILM. But I would like to own it yet it is expensive. I agree with the reviewer and others that it is shocker and a shame that this great playwright and writer with all his influence on others like Pinter and Albee and that playwright who wrote HOme. I write this quick and in defense off Endgame with Gambon. This production along would induce me to find the funds to buy BECKETT ON FILM, besides the rarity of it. There should be two or three movies of Waiting for Godot on Amazon. As it is this is by and large it.

I was bitterly disappointed that such a handsome collection on Beckett is neither subtitled nor close-captioned, considering that words are all important for Beckett. Could it be for copyright reasons that this collection is without subtitles?

With great anticipation and relish i awaited this accumulation of the works of probably one of the greatest playwrites of the 20th century. Having seen a short promotional film of the project, my eagerness was picqued.But, alas, flash, star-worship and diminished expectations rule once again in this travesty. Having actually not even been able to sit through the Endgame of this set, and having also seen the foolish, punk-flash version of Breath, and the unsympathetic and misunderstood, braindead interpretation of Not I, i am so appalled i nearly whipped this weighty and overly expensive set, frisbee-like,out the window.
It never ceases to amaze how so much star power can do so much damage. Remember the Broadway travesty of Godot a few years ago with Robin Williams?
So, Engame is a beautiful performance. all the Gaelic colloquial nuance of Beckett's language,perfectly understood and delivered in a heightened naturalism that is a joy to behold. The only problem is, one can NOT behold it because of the hack direction. Done in obsessively Television Direction School multi-camera work, anytime a charecter speaks or moves he is held in extreme talking-head close-up. next actor speaks, close up for him, then back to the other actor and so on and so on until the stomach of the viewer churns from this sea-sick demntia of camera close-ups,reaction shots, two shots and flashing long shots. So you don't have a play, or a film, you end up with a Television show of utter convention and utter unwatchability. i suggest people stay away from this possibly well-intentioned but decadent and unwatchable and expensive lump of Beckett Meets Hollywood by way of London.