Notfilm (2015)
(On Cable TV, July 2015) Came for Buster Keaton, stayed for Samuel Becket and drifted off thanks to director Ross Lipman. I’m always amazed at the amount of stuff I don’t know, and the link between noted author/playwright Samuel Becket (of “Waiting for Godot” fame) and comedian Buster Keaton was a missing link in my overall culture. What everyone should know before seeing Notfilm is that back in 1965, Samuel Becket somehow managed to convince a bunch of people to make a short 20 minutes experimental film called, well, Film. It starred Buster Keaton and was received like most experimental films—people called it interesting and/or incomprehensible. Forty years later, a filmmaker working on the restoration of Film got the idea of producing an accompanying making-of/retrospective feature called, ahem, Notfilm. The project grew and grew as Lipman interviewed the producers of the film and as many people he could find that had something to say about it. He found very rare audio footage of Becket (who famously disliked being recorded), uncovered intriguing contradictions coming from Becket, and started exploring the multiple facets connected to that summer 1965 shoot in Manhattan. By the time we realize that the cinematographer of Film is the brother of the filmmaker behind 1929’s classic Man with a Movie Camera, and that a teenage Leonard Maltin showed up on set to meet Keaton for the first time, we’re far past the point of wonderment. Becket being from the literary/theatrical world, we have an opportunity to talk about Grove Press and theatre in addition to film. Such an expansive approach to a topic means that Notfilm is often unwieldy. It’s certainly not focused (some information is repeated a few times; the introduction does not introduce Film properly yet spoils much of Notfilm’s later impact), and it’s inconsistently interesting—I was enthralled by matters about Buster Keaton, for instance, but not that interested in explorations of Becket’s oeuvre. My interest varied quite a bit, but at the end I had the impression of having been exposed to a hurricane of trivia, some of it uninteresting but others absolutely fascinating. It’s also refreshing in how it keeps blasting ideas at the viewer and daring them to keep up.