In 1964, two guys walk into a movie studio. One of them was Buster Keaton, a silent film master of physical comedy, and the other was Samuel Beckett, a master of cerebral literature. They were there to make a movie together, and now a new movie tells the story of their unlikely collaboration.
Beckett and Keaton’s project was called Film, and the new account of that project — created by former UCLA archivist Ross Lipman — is called Notfilm. Lipman was fascinated by the Beckett-Keaton collaboration. “I love storytelling,” he says, “and I love all the historical figures involved and I love pursuing these strange little nooks and crannies of cultural history.”
Film is certainly one of those crannies, but making a movie about the making of a movie posed a problem. In the beginning of Notfilm, Lipman says, “I’ve never quite trusted films about film. Art shouldn’t be about art; it should be about life, and speak to life — or so I told myself, as if they were somehow distinguishable.”
As an archivist, Lipman worked on a bunch of restoration projects, from silent films to the movies of John Sayles and John Cassavetes. His research on the Beckett-Keaton project led him to the apartment of the man who funded Film. Under the sink, Lipman found reels of outtakes and a prologue that was eventually rejected.
“There were lots of outtakes of the camera panning across this abandoned room — this decrepit, decaying space,” Lipman says. “And they were so evocative. … I’ve got all this wonderful material that obviously speaks to me from a historical and intellectual standpoint, but underneath it got to me at this emotional level, and that was the thing that pushed me.”