Rent Film / Notfilm (2015)

3.4 of 5 from 67 ratings
2h 31min
Rent Film / Notfilm (aka Notfilm: A Kino-Essay by Ross Lipman) Online DVD & Blu-ray Rental
  • General info
  • Available formats
Synopsis:
Film, Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's lone work for projected cinema, is a beguiling experimental short film in which a probing camera pursues a character named "O", played by silent screen legend Buster Keaton. In his Kino-Essay, 'Notfilm', Ross Lipman explores the history surrounding the production of 'Film'. Citing the work of Bufiuel, Vertov, Vigo and Eisenstein, and featuring interviews with cinematographer Haskell Wexler, Billie Whitelaw, producer Barney Rosset and others, 'Notfilm' examines Film's genesis, production, themes, and philosophical implications.
Actors:
, Judith Douw, S.E. Gontarski, , James Knowlson, , , , Steve Schapiro, Jeannette Seaver, , , , , , Milton Perlman, , , Dick Seaver, J. Schneider
Directors:
Ross Lipman,
Producers:
Dennis Doros, Amy Heller
Voiced By:
Ross Lipman
Narrated By:
Ross Lipman
Writers:
Ross Lipman, Samuel Beckett
Aka:
Notfilm: A Kino-Essay by Ross Lipman
Studio:
BFI Video
Genres:
Classics, Documentary
Collections:
inema Paradiso's 2023 Centenary Club: Part 2
BBFC:
Release Date:
22/05/2017
Run Time:
151 minutes
Languages:
English Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono, English Dolby Digital 5.1, Silent
Subtitles:
English Hard of Hearing
DVD Regions:
Region 2
Formats:
Pal
Aspect Ratio:
Full Screen 1.37:1
Colour:
B & W
Bonus:
  • Film (David Rayner Clark, 1979, 26 mins): rare British remake starring comedian Max Wall
  • The Street Scene (6 mins): a lost scene reconstruction from the Film outtakes
  • The Dog and Cat Takes (8 mins): outtakes from the 1965 version of Film
  • "What if E's Eyes Were Closed?" (7 mins): audio recordings of Beckett, Kaufman and Schneider
  • Buster Keaton and FILM: James Karen in Conversation (42 mins)
  • Memories of Samuel Beckett: An Afternoon with James Knowlson (8 mins)
  • Jean Schneider: Memories of Alan Schneider (11 mins)
  • Jeannette Seaver: Beckett and Godot (4 mins)
  • Photo Galleries
  • Photographing Beckett (7 mins)
  • Notfilm Trailer
  • The Music of Notfilm: downloadable MP3 recording by Mihaly Vig
Disc 1:
This disc includes the following episodes:
1. Film (1965)
2. Film (1979)
3. Not Film
Disc 2:
This disc includes special features
BBFC:
Release Date:
22/05/2017
Run Time:
151 minutes
Languages:
English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, English LPCM Mono, Silent
Subtitles:
English Hard of Hearing
Formats:
Pal
Aspect Ratio:
Full Screen 1.37:1
Colour:
B & W
BLU-RAY Regions:
B
Bonus:
  • Film (David Rayner Clark, 1979, 26 mins): rare British remake starring comedian Max Wall
  • The Street Scene (6 mins): a lost scene reconstruction from the Film outtakes
  • The Dog and Cat Takes (8 mins): outtakes from the 1965 version of Film
  • "What if E's Eyes Were Closed?" (7 mins): audio recordings of Beckett, Kaufman and Schneider
  • Buster Keaton and FILM: James Karen in Conversation (42 mins)
  • Memories of Samuel Beckett: An Afternoon with James Knowlson (8 mins)
  • Jean Schneider: Memories of Alan Schneider (11 mins)
  • Jeannette Seaver: Beckett and Godot (4 mins)
  • Photo Galleries
  • Photographing Beckett (7 mins)
  • Notfilm Trailer
  • The Music of Notfilm: downloadable MP3 recording by Mihaly Vig

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Reviews (1) of Film / Notfilm

Film? Not Much Of Anything, Really... - Film / Notfilm review by Count Otto Black

Spoiler Alert
01/01/2019

To be fair, one star is less than "Film" deserves. It might perhaps merit as many as two. Legendary silent movie star Buster Keaton gives as good a performance as an arthritic old man who hides his face from the camera for almost the entire run-time can be expected to in this, his silentest movie ever. It's so silent that only once is there a briefly audible sound, which I assume was included to reassure baffled audiences that the total silence wasn't due to a faulty projector. It's minimalist in other ways too. Apart from Buster, the only characters are three people with bit-parts near the beginning, unless you count animals and furniture. And other than the opening scenes, all the action takes place in a shabby room furnished only with things that have to be there because the script says Buster will do something with them. It's only twenty minutes long, but that's more than enough time for it to run out of material, forcing it to ruin its few half-decent jokes by telling them all at least twice.

The plot, such as it is, follows Buster's desperate attempts to avoid being looked at by anyone or anything, including mirrors, kittens, and holes in furniture that vaguely resemble eyes. This paranoid slapstick reminded me of two things: Jack Nance's weird interactions with the objects in his room at the start of "Eraserhead", which may have been inspired by "Film" but if so, David Lynch did it far better; and some of Terry Gilliam's cartoons from the Monty Python TV series, except that Gilliam would have done it in two minutes rather than twenty and it would have been funny. The impossibility of Buster achieving his goal in a situation where by definition he's constantly being watched by a camera, and at a further remove by everyone who will ever see the film, is so meta-fictionally ironic that it seems more like a Pythonesque parody of pretentious arthouse cinema than the genuine article. And if the punchline surprises you, it can only be because you didn't think it could possibly be that predictable.

And then there's "Notfilm", a two-hour documentary I didn't watch very much of, but which seems to consist, as such things usually do, mainly of dull interviews where old people talk about dead people, interspersed with archive footage of dead people talking about themselves. Yes, that's right, the tedious making-of featurette you don't really need is six times as long as the actual film!

Oh, and you also get a completely unnecessary remake of "Film" without Buster Keaton but with sound and colour they didn't think they needed in the first place, which is so very, very Pretentious Seventies Arthouse Cinema that I half expected the camera to pan away from the action to John Cleese saying "And now for something completely different..." I wish it had. There are many films which wouldn't be improved in the slightest if they suddenly abandoned the plot and cut to an embarrassed chat-show host awkwardly interviewing a man with three buttocks. This is not one of them.

4 out of 7 members found this review helpful.

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