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"How can we rid ourselves of ourselves, and demolis ourselves? This is the astonishing attempt made by Beckett in his cinematographic work entitled Film, with Buster Keaton. Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, declares Beckett, taking up the Irish Bishop Berkeley's formula of the image. But can one escape from 'the happinesses of the percipere and the percipi' – given that one perception at least will subsist as long as we live, the most awesome, that of self by self? Beckett elaborates a system of simple cinematographic conventions in order to pose the problem and carry out the operation. Nevertheless, in our view, the directions and the schemas that he gives himself, and the moments that he distinguishes in his film, only go half-way towards disclosing his intention. For, in fact, the three moments are the following. In the first, the character O rushes forward and flees horizontally along a wall; then, along a vertical axis, tries to climb a staircase, always sticking to the edge of the wall. He 'acts', it is a perception of action, or an action-image, subject to the following convention: the camera OE only films him from the back, from an angle not exceeding forty-five degrees; if the camera which follows him happens to exceed this angle, the action will be blocked, extinguished, the character will stop, hiding the threatened part of his face. The second moment: the character has come into a room and, as he is no longer against a wall, the angle of immunity of the camera is doubled – forty-five degrees on each side, thus ninety degrees. O perceives (subjectively) the room, the thing and the animals which are there, whilst OE perceives (objectively) O himself, the room, and its contents: this is the perception of perception, or the perception-image, considered under a double régime, in a double system of reference. The camera remains subject to the condition, that it does not exceed ninety degrees behind the character, but the convention which is added is that the character must expel the animals, and cover up the all the objects which can act as mirrors or even frames, in such a way that the subjective perception is eliminated and only the objective perception OE remains. Then O can be installed in the rocking chair and rock gently with his eyes closed. But it is at this moment, the third and last, that the greatest danger is revealed: the extinction of subjective perception has freed the camera of the forty-five degree restriction. With great caution, it advances beyond, into the domain of the remaining two hundred and seventy degrees, but each time wakens the character who regains a scrap of subjective perception, hides, curls up and forces the camera to move back again. Finally, taking advantage of O's torpor, OE succeeds in coming round to face him, and comes closer and closer to him. The character O is thus now seen from the front, at the same time as the new and last convention is revealed: the camera OE is the double of O, the same face, a patch over one eye (monocular vision), with the single difference that O has an anguished expression and OE has an attentive expression: the impotent motor effort of the one, the sensitive surface of the other. We are in the domain of the perception of affection, the most terrifying, that which still survives when all the others have been destroyed: it is the perception of self by self, the affection-image. Will it die out and will everything stop, even the rocking of the rocking chair, when the double face slips into nothingness? This is what the end suggests – death, immobility, blackness. But, for Beckett, immobility, death, the loss of personal movement and of vertical stature, when one is lying in a rocking chair which does not even rock any more, are only a subjetive finality. It is only a means in relation to a more profound end. It is a question of attaining once more the world before man, before our own dawn, the position where movement was, on the contrary, under the régime of universal variation, and where light, always propagating itself, had no need to be revealed. Proceeding in this way to the extinction of action-images, perception-images and affection-images, Beckett ascends once more towards the luminous plane of immanence, the plane of matter and its cosmic eddying of movement-images."
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