Popular reviews

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 6

  Keaton drew an influence on Beckett; this film drew an influence on Lynch; Lynch drew an influence on Tsukamoto. I mentioned three transitions, but I missed a lot of names in those transitions. It is wonderful how an inspiration can acquire a mutated form when it is passed on to another auteur mind, but an influence is not limited to one single ramification.

  Film is Beckett's and Schneider's notorious venture into the world of cinema, disguised as an an avant-garde project, but it is more experimental in its narrative and aesthetics without being fully abstract. We begin with an escape sequence from a surrounding city in ruins where a man does not want to be perceived, therefore trying to neglect…

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  Review by Zoey Zatara ★★★★★

  i can't be perceived rn, i'm doing hot girl shit

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  Review by 📀 Cammmalot 📀 ★★★ 1

  ’shhh”

  Playwright Samuel Beckett’s only film is an experimental short starring Buster Keaton. Sadly it comes off a bit like a student film and if it weren’t for the bonus of watching the legendary Keaton, there’s not much else of interest for me.

  However, I just watched the deep dive documentary Notfilm which gave me some insight into the intent of the piece as well as some bonus Buster background. So cheers for that.

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  Review by Kieran Schilling ★★★★½

  The inescapable horror of seeing and being seen. Such a brilliant piece of filmmaking.

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  Review by Evan “Raymond Gun-Virus” Pincus ★★★★½ 1

  I’d say it’s amazing that this hasn’t been ripped off by every upstart no-budget horror filmmaker but you just know most of those guys don’t know who Beckett is

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★ 2

  Reminds me a little of David Lynch in the way it creates a completely disturbing and fleshed-out world with only a few simple ingredients. In this case, an aged Buster Keaton, a probing "camera" that seems to have an unfortunate side-effect on those it records, and minutes upon minutes of empty silence. "One-of-a-kind" probably gets thrown around too often but it fits this movie perfectly.

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  Review by David Conner ★★★★★ 4

  On one level, Samuel Beckett’s single embattled foray into filmmaking lends itself to an “easy” philosophical reading. It’s almost an ultraminimalist restaging of the last line of Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is other people.” But Beckett takes the existentialist bumper sticker one step further to propose that “Hell is the Gaze itself.” This gaze, in the Sartrean sense, is that which fixes our identity in the field of the Other and detaches and alienates it from our “authentic” sense of self. In other words, the “I” that I experience myself to be is not the same as the “me” that others see, assess, and judge. The ultimate horror that the film pinpoints is the inevitable realization that there is something…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★ 1

  The Act of Trying Not to See With One's Eyes

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  Review by Will Steele ★★★★ 1

  Caught somewhere between Meshes of the Afternoon and Eraserhead sits Film: a perplexing short imagined by Samuel Beckett featuring one of the last performances of the legendary Buster Keaton. Rarely is Buster confronted, instead he is continuously followed. He remains recognisable from the brim of his signature pork-pie hat to the unmistakeable way he moves, yet the eye of the camera is withholding. We see the shocked expressions of passersby before ever glimpsing that iconic stone-face visage. Knowing it is Buster without ever seeing him is rather haunting. When the human brain can’t see something, it fills in the gaps. It’s why we’re afraid of the dark, for anything could lurk in the void. That’s what Beckett tapped into. Film…

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  Review by Noah Cassidy ★★★★

  "Shhh!"

  Certainly a film. In all seriousness, legitimately thought this was really cool. There are films that feel "ahead of their time" that are worth watching just based on that aspect alone, and while Film has that going for it, it's also just interesting as its own short film removed from the concept of time. It's obsessed with gaze while focusing on someone who can't even bear the mere sight of himself, and whose appearance seems to shock and terrify the few people he encounters. As always, Buster Keaton absolutely thrives as a silent performer, his body language so precise and meticulous. It's a concept that benefits from near-silence. We have to sit focusing intently, our mind naturally dedicating itself…

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  Review by Vladimir

  "A little darkness, in itself, at the time, is nothing. You think no more about it and you go on. But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything." *Samuel Beckett

  since the first shot, I had a feeling that it was you and I wanted to see your face, but, when I actually did see your face, I cried, something died inside of me! I'm not talking about the "film", I'm talking about you.

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  Review by London ★★★★½ 1

  Samuel Beckett is a god. My favorite playwright, at least from the stuff I have read and experienced. Waiting for Godot actually was an incredibly experience for me, and after seeing the play I immediately bought a paperback copy and have read it over a hundred times. I am not too familiar with a lot of his other works, besides Endgame and Act Without Words, but even from the small body of his work I have consumed he has fascinated me.

  This short has been on my radar for quite some time, but I wanted to become a bit more accustomed to Buster Keaton as a performer before seeing this. And I am very glad for that. It's fascinating how…