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Event
Ross Lipman's NOTFILM
NEW YORK THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
FILMMAKER IN PERSON FOR OPENING NIGHT!
Ross Lipman's NOTFILM
In 1964 author Samuel Beckett set out on one of the strangest ventures in cinematic history: his embattled collaboration with silent-era genius Buster Keaton on the production of a short, title-less avant-garde film. Beckett was nearing the peak of his fame, which would culminate in his receiving a Nobel Prize five years later. Keaton, in his waning years, never lived to see Beckett's canonization. The film they made along with director Alan Schneider, renegade publisher Barney Rosset, and Academy Award-winning cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and which was eventually titled FILM, has been the subject of praise, condemnation, and controversy for decades. Yet the eclectic participants are just one part of a story that stretches to the very birth of cinema, and spreads out to our understanding of human consciousness itself.
NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM's production and its philosophical implications. Directed by filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman, who has contributed immeasurably to film culture over the past couple decades, both through his own films and his extraordinary work preserving classics such as SCORPIO RISING, WANDA, THE EXILES, KILLER OF SHEEP, and many, many more, NOTFILM is a kind of documentary manifestation of the unique illustrated lectures he's presented at venues around the world in recent years. Featuring in-depth interviews with many of those who participated in the creation of FILM, it is also a treasure trove of archival materials, including audio recordings of the production meetings between Beckett, Rosset, Schneider, and others, and outtakes from the film shoot itself. No ordinary making-of film, NOTFILM is clearly the work of a fiercely committed filmmaker and archivist, and digs deeply both into the film's production and its multiple layers of meaning.
"NOTFILM is a definitive documentary account of the making of Samuel Beckett's only film work and both a brilliant examination of its significance in relation to both Beckett's other dramatic works and to film theory, drawing on many touchstones in film history ranging from Keaton to Vertov to Murnau to make its arguments. Without contesting the critical consensus that Beckett's FILM is a failure (a position maintained even by Beckett and his main collaborator, director Alan Schneider), Lipman very persuasively and masterfully shows its continuing importance." -Jonathan Rosenbaum
SCREENING DETAILS:
Ross Lipman
NOTFILM
2015, 128 min, digital. Produced by Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, with special thanks to Ross Lipman.
- Fri, April 1 through Thurs, April 7 at 8:00 nightly. Additional screenings on Sat & Sun at 4:00.
SPECIAL IN PERSON APPEARANCES!
Friday, April 1 (Opening Night): Director Ross Lipman
Saturday & Sunday, April 2 & 3 at 8pm: Producers Amy Heller & Dennis Doros
Monday, April 4: Ed Halter, editor of the new book, "From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader"
Tuesday, April 5: Editor and publisher Jeannette Seaver, who appears in NOTFILM
PLUS!
FREE SCREENINGS!:
Alan Schneider
FILM
1965, 22 min, 35mm-to-digital, b&w. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preservation funded through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by the Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Laboratory services by Cinetech, Ascent Media, NT Picture and Sound, Dolby Laboratories, and Audio Mechanics.
- Fri, April 1 through Thurs, April 7 at 7:00 nightly.
Samuel Beckett, the celebrated author of WAITING FOR GODOT, made a single work for projected cinema. It s in essence a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider's imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.
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LocationAnthology Film Archives (View)
32 Second Avenue
New York , NY 10003
United States
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| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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