Kritiken

My favourite of [Jeonju's movies about movies] was Ross Lipman's Notfilm, an essay work revolving around the 1964 collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton. Although the result, a 20-minute short named Film was considered a failure, Lipman's Notfilm succeeds on every level.

Lipman's Notfilm re-contextualizes Beckett's life and art in a way few critical or biographical studies have thus far managed to do.

When Notfilm is not embarking on a lengthy excursion into Beckett's biography, with information and brief clips from stage versions of his plays, it provides artistic contexts and biographical data on its other luminaries: Keaton, Rosset, and Schneider, in particular. But Lipman's kino-essay has legs beyond its immediate theatrical appeal, and enough merit and seriousness to maintain its place as a continued resource for film students and Beckett scholars.

As we learn in Notfilm, a dense but illuminating 128-minute documentary on the 22-minute Film, it was Beckett himself who chose the exterior location for his movie's first scene: a bombed-out-looking stretch of Pearl Street abutting the Brooklyn Bridge.

Notfilm has a huge advantage over Film in that its subject is concrete rather than theoretical. Superficially, it's about the making of a film that even Beckett called "an interesting failure." But as we witness Rosset and Whitelaw struggling beneath the oppressive weight of age, the documentary becomes about memory and its fading. In other words, the obliteration that awaits us all—the foundation of Beckett's art.

This disparity in duration does indeed prove no barrier to a frequently wonderful symbiosis, with both [Film and Notfilm] functioning as perfectly disparate examples of how striking, stimulating cinema can emerge from any number of different backgrounds.

The festival included a few disasters the most disappointing being Notfilm in the Experimenta section about the making of Samuel Beckett's Film, which stars Buster Keaton. Notfilm manages to make even the funnest pieces of information feel doctrinaire and it's not helped by the director's monotonous narration which reminds me why I never went to film school. No member of the audience could ever be as impressed by this film as Ross Lipman, the man who made it.