Notes Introduction: Intuition/Image/Event: ‘Beckett’s Peephole’ as Audio- Visual Rhizome 1. The quote is from Beckett’s The Unnamable. 2. Beckett first outlines this concept in his 1932 novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, where the character Belacqua desires to write a book whereby ‘The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement.’ Beckett (1992), p. 138. 3. I will discuss this distinction in Chapter 1. 4. See Uhlmann (1999), specifically chapter 2; (2004), pp. 90–106; and (2006). 1 Thinking the Unthinkable: Time, Cinema and the Incommensurable 1. They could thus be said to be more ‘thallic’ than ‘phallic’, horizontally fugitive rather than vertically hierarchical, molecular rather than molar. On the ‘ thallic’, see Weber (1982), pp. 65–83. 2. The Proustian implications of this temporal multiplicity are obvious, although Proust, like Beckett, is less concerned with duration, the past-present’s ability to ‘move on’ as becoming- future, than with the role of memory as a means of destroying the pernicious influence of habit. His distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory is predicated on a desire to preserve lost time as it survives in itself, the better to regain it for ourselves as art. 3. See Bellour (1977), pp. 66–91; (1986), pp. 66–101. 4. The reference to Wim Wender’s Falsche Bewegung (1975) is not uncoincidental. Wenders is paradigmatic of one aspect of the crystal- image in Cinema 2. See pp. 76–8. 5. For Nietzsche’s eternal return as an affirmation of difference, see Deleuze (1983). 6. ‘The will to power is, indeed, never separable from particular determined forces, from their quantities, qualities and directions. It is never superior to the ways that it determines a relation between forces, it is always plastic and changing.’ Deleuze (1983), p. 50. 2 Beyond Percept and Affect: Beckett’s Film (1964) and Non- Human Becoming 1. Clark’s version can be viewed on DVD at the BFI archive in London. 2. The room, like the vestibule, was an Upper West Side studio set built to Beckett’s exacting specifications. 190 Notes 191 3. According to Rosemary Pountney, Beckett originally planned to have a recent scowling photo of O himself on the wall with a dedication to his mother, dated Xmas 1929. See Pountney (1988), p. 126. 4. A possible allusion to Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928), where a pet monkey saves the day. 5. Note how God is also represented as a split subject in the form of two parts of the Holy Trinity. 3 From ‘Dialoghorrhea’ to Mental- Image: Comédie (1966), Not I (1977) and What Where (1986) 1. Karmitz went on to have a distinguished career as both director – most notably his post- May ’68 political drama, Coup pour coup (1972) – and producer: Godard’s Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980); Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary (1991); and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy: Blue, White and Red (1993–94). 2. In the western, for example, the ultimate encompasser is the sky and its pulsations, which envelops the milieu and, in turn, the collectivity that develops and acts within it. 3. Lutterbie (1991) gives an excellent account of these processes in his essay, ‘Tender Mercies’. 4. In contrast, while Sean McGinley plays both images of Bam, Gary Lewis plays Bem, Bim and Bom in Damien O’Donnell’s 1999 ‘Beckett on Film’ production. 4 Matter and Memory: The Image as Impersonal Process in Eh Joe (1966), Ghost Trio (1977) and ...but the clouds... (1977) 1. Even so, the image quality benefited a great deal from its BBC 2 airing – 625 lines, UHF sound (compared to 405 lines and VHF on BBC 1 until 1969). 2. For an excellent comparative analysis of three different versions of Eh Joe, see Herren (1998). 3. All four versions may be viewed at the Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media of New York University’s Bobst Library. 4. This seems to be a variation on the opening of Robert Browning’s ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’: ‘Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made: / Our times are in his hand / Who saith, “A whole I planned, / Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”’ 5. There are already obvious structural similarities to Beckett’s radio piece, Words and Music. 6. It is absent from the Herms/Whitelaw production, suggesting that Joe is too exhausted from his battle with Voice’s whispered venom to even acknowledge any sort of ‘victory’. 7. According to cameraman Jim Lewis, the perfectionist Beckett wanted the corners of the lips to protrude into the image by ¼ cm, not ½. Deleuze (1997c), p. 205 n. 70. 192 Notes 8. Both ...but the clouds... and Ghost Trio were subsequently remade in Polish as …jak obloki... (1987) and Trio Widm (1988) respectively by Antoni Libera for Theatre Centre ‘Warsztatowa’. 9. My analysis of the musical elements in Ghost Trio is heavily indebted to Fletcher and Fletcher (1978), pp. 235–6; and Catherine Laws’s superb account (2003). 10. The cassette player emits music only when the protagonist is seated, leaning over the machine. 11. Beckett uses the opening to bar 83 in the SDR version. 12. For an excellent discussion of these points see Douglas (1990), pp. 19–20. 13. This shot is cut from the SDR version. 14. In the SDR version, ‘F’ bows his head when confronted by his double, so that his hair is reflected in the mirror, suggesting that this is not a literal point- of- view shot – otherwise, following his eyes, we would see the floor – but a free- indirect construction of subjectivity. 15. The oilskins are only in the BBC version. 16. The Bresson citation is taken from (1977), p. 46. Translation modified. 17. For further discussion of Duras’s use of pre- diegetic sound see Liang (2007). 18. Beckett himself asked for the shot to be as unreal as possible. Bignell (2009), p. 110. 19. In an earlier draft, this line is in the present tense, suggesting that Beckett, like M, was self- reflexively aware of a similar process of revision intrinsic to the act of mental creation, both within and outside the exegesis. 20. An early typescript has W speak in her own voice, but Beckett crossed it out. Reading University Library, MS1553/3. 21. Several critics have pointed out the Shakespeare reference here: a line that Hamlet’s Horatio addresses twice to the ghost of the murdered king, a line also met with silence: ‘Stay, illusion! / If thou hast any sound, or use of voice, / Speak to me; / If there be any good thing to be done / That may to thee do ease and grace to me, / Speak to me’ – Act 1, Scene 1. 5 How to Build a Desiring Machine: Quad I & II (1981) 1. Ghost Trio and the TV version of Not I had originally been printed in colour before the decision was made to air them in black and white. 2. The SDR version was actually performed by two men and two women. 3. The paper will appear as the chapter, ‘ Desiring- Machines, Chaoids, Probeheads: Towards a Speculative Production of Subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari)’, in O’Sullivan (2012). 4. The diagram is illustrated in its original context in Bergson (1991), p. 162. 6 Video- body, Video- brain: Nacht und Träume (1983) as Televisual Event 1. In addition to Herren (2007), see also Herren (2000a, 2000b). 2. The vocal ‘was performed by an amateur singer who worked in the studio’s technical crew and did not want his name to appear in the credits’. Kalb (1989), p. 254 n. 4. Notes 193 Conclusion: The Incommensurable Unnamable: Beckett, Deleuze and the Birth of the Event 1. In 2008 the SDR versions of Beckett’s teleplays were released on DVD by Absolut Medien, Berlin. The single- disk package includes a booklet featuring a German translation by Erika Tophoven of Deleuze’s ‘Épuisé’ entitled ‘Erschöpft’. Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter (1973) The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Abbott, H. Porter (1975) ‘A Poetics of Radical Displacement: Samuel Beckett Coming up to Seventy’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 17:1, Spring, 219–38. Abbott, H. Porter (1999) ‘Samuel Beckett and the Arts of Time: Painting, Music, Narrative’, in Lois Oppenheim (ed.) Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non- Print Media (New York and London: Garland), pp. 7–24. Acheson, James (1999) ‘Beckett’s Film, Berkeley and Schopenhauer’, in Bruce Stewart (ed.) Beckett and Beyond (London: Colin Smythe, 1999), pp. 1–9. Acheson, James and Kateryna Arthur (eds) (1987) Beckett’s Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Ackerley, C.J. and S.E. Gontarski (2004) The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press). Admussen, R.L. (1973) ‘The Manuscripts of Beckett’s Play’, Modern Drama, 16:1, June, 23–8. Albright, Daniel (2003) Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press). Anonymous (1964) ‘Beckett’, The New Yorker, 8 August, pp. 22–3. Anonymous (1966) ‘Eh Joe?’, Radio Times, 30 June, p. 19. Anonymous (1966) ‘Looking In: When Joe Hears the Voice’, London Times, 5 July, p. 16. Antoine- Dunne, J.M.B. (2002) ‘Beckett and Eisenstein on Light and Contrapuntal Montage’, in Angela Moorjani and Carola Veit (eds) Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11) (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi), pp. 315–23. Artaud, Antonin (1976) Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed.