Austere at the extreme but fascinating and disturbing

Born on 13 April 1906 in Cooldrinagh, in the County of Dublin, Samuel Beckett chose, in 1936, to live in France. The commemoration of its Centennial on the French side the Ireland and England will not left is barely begun. It is from the fall that should see all of its theatre played in Paris, with big names such as Michael Lonsdale, Pierre Chabert, Eléonore Hirt; next year, the Centre Pompidou and the National Library of France he will devote a major exhibition... A Paris-Beckett-2006-2007 Committee, chaired by Robert Abirached, is formed to develop a series of events. This should be pending review "Godot", which dérouta the public to its creation in 1953 and which, has since become a classic taught in our schools, and go very far in the review of a writer also famous as secret, the prolific work. The Arte television channel is one of the first actors of this celebration. His evening "Samuel Beckett, master of silence" brings the novel to the French public. Beckett lived in Paris where he wrote in French and English, according to the inspiration. But he was often absent to create shows and unexpected in other countries, especially English-language films. Little is known about his collaborations with the Germany. This are they leaving today archives.

The filmmaker Beckett is not unknown. Its completion in black and white, "Film", where he play a Buster Keaton aged, is projected regularly in art and test circuits.

Disert with relatives

Beckett was a Director of mad theatre to detail, with its own design of representation and getting angry, when artists did not meet the indications contained in his plays. These two aspects, Director and Director of his own texts, found on film incunabula resurrected by Arte.

It was a man of silence that the recent James Knowlson biography, published in Actes Sud in 1999, made us the portrait of a disert man with his family, under the effect of the friendship and whisky. A man of the relationship between silence and speech, which goes to the core before you terminate, falling in the fragmentary, the inaudible or the imperceptible. The work advances, less uses of words. In one of his movies to ten minutes (in black and white), "Nights of dreams", there is more than words at all. A character listening to a Schubert lied. Of course, there is the Sung words of Schubert: "Return, sacred dreams", but will remain it silent, while a hand in the darkness comes to him and stroking her face. No action other than this mysterious embrace in a life of solitude and of immobility will take place. This is the maximum Beckett, at the height of the minimum... Austere at the extreme, but fascinating and disturbing. The author of "End of part" was a great reader of the Bible: if he saw no trace of God in the universe, he loved the biblical parables and refit, in his own way. Other parts data tonight, "Quad I & II", "Say Joe", play differently with this language, juggling with the movement and the non-mouvement, the living image and neutral image, sound and the absence of its.

In the first part of the show, the German Director Goggo Gensch queries characters who have been friends and collaborators of Beckett. Only people who are not more familiar with the French public: English and German Directors (Peter Hall, Michael Colgan, Walter Asmus), actors, the former head of the drama of the SWR, biographer Knowlson chain... As the relatives of Beckett can be encountered in France, the witnesses emphasize the generosity of the character, its quite misanthropic approach to love men in remote. These came lighting also participate in the setting in light of a face hidden and exciting of Beckett: his mastery of the audiovisual language and its brotherhood with some German artists.