Directed by Alan Schneider and starring Buster Keaton

«Samuel Beckett’s first cinematographic experiment. Here again, even more explicitly, the camera’s ‘gaze’ and that of the play’s sole character coincide, in the form of a fixed image of his own face seen at the last minute in a reverse shot, after the character has struggled until the end to protect himself from seeing it. Here, literally, what makes the image stop, and the film along with it, is the subject’s visual recognition of himself in the encounter. A mesmerizing effect. The film, the unreeling of the images, stops when what constitutes its subjects is the subject him or herself; in other words, when the construction of the person who perceives becomes more important that the construction of the presentation of the perceived subject. Today, among a whole generation of artists, we find a king of development of the first formulations of this reversal interest.»

Excerpt from the essay «The Time of Re-departure: After Cinema, the Cinema of the Subject» by Jean-Christophe Royoux.

Book «Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader» (Edited by Tanya Leighton and Tate Publishing in Association with Afterall, 2008).

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