Hand-writing inNacht und Träume

In 1936, Beckett writes to Eisenstein as a ‘serious cinéaste’ and expresses a desire to work in the lost tradition of the silent film. His extensive study of silent film history and theory during this period, including Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Rudolf Arnheim and Close Up, inspired the formulation of a view which remained a shaping influence throughout his work: ‘the industrial film will become so completely naturalistic, in stereoscopic colour & gramophonic sound, that a backwater may be created for the two-dimensional silent film that had barely emerged from its rudiments when it was swamped’. Beckett's thinking about silent film culminates in the production of Film (1964), which is set in 1929, the moment in film history when talking pictures had just begun to inundate the screen, when figures such as Nabokov, Lewis, Joyce, Eisenstein, Artaud and Brecht, insisting on the separation or non-coincidence of speech with gesture, sought to resist the transition from cinema's mute language of gesture to the proscenium theatricality of the talkies. He returns again to silent film in one of his final works, Nacht und Träume (1982).

By emphasising continuity with the silent film of the twenties, from Film (1964) to Nacht und Träume (1982), and developing a performance style which refuses to domesticate the contradictions between reading and spectatorship, Beckett's practice exemplifies the relentless blurring of boundaries between speech and gesture, and the refusal of rigidly defined categories of either literrary or performative representation.