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Slideshow

PREVIOUSLY PLAYED

FILM & NOTFILM

7:00

Monday, March 6

Film (1965, Alan Schneider): Absurdists unite, as Buster Keaton meets Samuel Beckett: wordless first part of a planned trilogy, as Buster, seen mostly from the back, hurtles about beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, bundled up in a heavy overcoat. Following Film, Ross Lipman will present his own Notfilm (2015), a feature-length documentary on the Beckett film and its philosophical implications, utilizing interviews, out-takes, and other rare archival materials. Both DCP. Approx. 154 mins.

Audience Q&A following screening, plus Skype interview with actor James Karen, who appears in both Film and Notfilm.

Reviews

Notfilm is enthralling.”
– Film Comment

“A charming, earnest, sometimes ungainly mixture of history, criticism and high-minded gossip, Notfilm testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema…finds a hitherto uncharted dimension of human and cinematic experience.” 
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times 

“[Notfilm is] studious, rigorous, and surprisingly tender….Access to the process only richens Film itself — and Beckett as well. Lipman finds insight and pathos in the gulf between what Beckett aspired to in Film and in what he actually achieved. Lipman is attentive to the technical practicalities of filmmaking, devoting much time and many interviews to Beckett's crew, which included On the Waterfront cinematographer Boris Kaufman.” 
– Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice

 “A frequently wonderful symbiosis, with both films functioning as perfectly disparate examples of how striking, stimulating cinema can emerge from any number of different backgrounds…while many of the superordinate concerns that crisscross Notfilm—authorship, materiality, perception, to name just as a few—could come across as lofty, Lipman's gloriously egalitarian approach to culture means that his complex argumentation never becomes inaccessible.”
– James Lattimer, Slant 

“ONE OF THE TEN BEST FILMS OF THE YEAR!”
– Dana Stevens, Slate 2015

Film Forum