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Literature and Film, DispositionedFilm

Literature and Film, Dispositioned: Film [In a letter to his friend Thomas McGreevy sent in February 1936, Samuel Beckett explains his reasons for wanting to turn a love of the cinema into an occupation. ‘What I would learn under a person like [the Russian director] Pudovkin’, he writes, ‘is how to handle a camera, the higher trucs of the editing bench, & so on, of which I know as little as of quantity surveying.’1 Beckett’s unconsummated wish to attend the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography is well known. ‘How I would love to go to Moscow and work under Eisenstein’, he tells McGreevy in an earlier letter. ‘Then one would be beautifully qualified for the execrations on another plane.’2 At the time, Beckett was under significant familial pressure to find formal, remunerative employment; it is not for nothing that in the February 1936 letter he conveys his ignorance of editing’s ‘higher trucs’ — a reference to special effects, but also a phrase that inevitably plays off the expression ‘higher truths’ — by comparing the scantiness of his practical cinematic knowledge to his poverty of experience in quantity surveying, the Beckett family profession.3 Beckett’s father, Bill, and his older brother, Frank, were quantity surveyors. Beckett was definitely not, though his fictional ‘vice-exister[s]’4 are persistently interested, if diffidently and with scrabbling difficulty, in measuring the spaces ‘they seek to inhabit’, as Steven Connor observes.5] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Literature and Film, DispositionedFilm

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014
ISBN
978-1-349-45185-2
Pages
120 –153
DOI
10.1057/9781137295453_5
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[In a letter to his friend Thomas McGreevy sent in February 1936, Samuel Beckett explains his reasons for wanting to turn a love of the cinema into an occupation. ‘What I would learn under a person like [the Russian director] Pudovkin’, he writes, ‘is how to handle a camera, the higher trucs of the editing bench, & so on, of which I know as little as of quantity surveying.’1 Beckett’s unconsummated wish to attend the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography is well known. ‘How I would love to go to Moscow and work under Eisenstein’, he tells McGreevy in an earlier letter. ‘Then one would be beautifully qualified for the execrations on another plane.’2 At the time, Beckett was under significant familial pressure to find formal, remunerative employment; it is not for nothing that in the February 1936 letter he conveys his ignorance of editing’s ‘higher trucs’ — a reference to special effects, but also a phrase that inevitably plays off the expression ‘higher truths’ — by comparing the scantiness of his practical cinematic knowledge to his poverty of experience in quantity surveying, the Beckett family profession.3 Beckett’s father, Bill, and his older brother, Frank, were quantity surveyors. Beckett was definitely not, though his fictional ‘vice-exister[s]’4 are persistently interested, if diffidently and with scrabbling difficulty, in measuring the spaces ‘they seek to inhabit’, as Steven Connor observes.5]

Published: Oct 8, 2015

Keywords: Exclamation Mark; Filmic Medium; Horror Film; Person Subjectivity; Quantity Surveying

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