drop a close-up of an eyelid fills the frame. The lid lifts, the eye stares into
the camera, the frame freezes and the words ‘filmby Samuel Beckett’
superimpose.
Filmis a simple and profound examination of cinematic perception.
Even so, its use of still photographs is quite conventional. Were we to
survey all the moments in which cinema deploys photos (and they are
countless), we would find most often they concern its complex status
as evidence.^1 Whether in mainstream or avant-garde, modern or post-
modern film, the ‘proof’ of photography as memory or history is nearly
always at stake. 95
85 Production still from Samuel Beckett’s
Film(Alan Schneider, 1965).