Samuel Beckett, Alain Resnais and French Modernist Cinema

This article situates Beckett within the context of the French modernist cinema of the 1960s, with a particular focus on the overlaps between Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad, which Beckett saw on its release in 1962, and the film of Comédie, which he made a year later. Both films narrate the banal story of a bourgeois love triangle through a radical experiment with form; both are animated by similar concerns in their exploration of the presence of the camera, the use of non-synchronous sound and gesture, and the relation between cinema and theatre. Beckett's refined awareness of film technique suggests a heightened awareness of Resnais's recent experiments in film form. I argue that Beckett's late aesthetic of non-synchronicity, its dialectic of the live and the recorded, of presence and absence, is fundamentally altered by his work for the screen and by his formative encounter with the modernist cinema of the period.