Quad and Catastrophe

Gontarski, S. E.

doi:10.7135/upo9780857285805.029

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“…But a modernist aesthetic can be traced in Beckett's plays written for television, exemplified by the simultaneous reduction and enrichment of verbal and image textures, and the foregrounding of geometrical forms and music. This concentration and reflexivity has been noted by scholars such as Linda Ben-Zvi (1985), Enoch Brater (1985), Stan Gontarski (1983, 1986), Anna McMullan (1993 and Catherine Russell (1989). The audiences and viewing practices that might be assumed for art cinema, avant-garde theatre or painting, in which slowness and depth involvement are invited, mean that Beckett on television seems not to be like television.…”

Section: Viscosity and Valuementioning

confidence: 95%

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Bignell¹

2022

Beckett and Media

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This chapter analyses how the aesthetics of black in Beckett's dramas for television illuminate recent theorisations of the significance of texture in television and film, and how Beckett's television dramas reflect on histories of television production and reception technologies. These changing television technologies affect how viewers can make sense of the visual textures and spatiality of the dramas, since visual style needs to be understood in relation to the materialities of production. This chapter centres on Walter Asmus's 1986 television version of Beckett's play What Where (1984), transmitted in Germany as Was Wo, and his 2013 reworking of the same drama for the screen, making a comparison between the two dramas in terms of their spatial and textural aesthetics. Moving outwards from how black works in the two What Where programmes, the chapter explores the significance of light and dark screen space and texture across the much longer history of Beckett's screen work, produced at different times from the mid-1960s to the 2010s. The chapter argues that Beckett's plays can be regarded as explorations of, and commentaries on, television aesthetics, and especially that they use the apparent nullity of black to draw attention to the representational capabilities of the television medium.What Where was written for the theatre, and first performed in New York in June 1983. The play's structure is based on a series of interrogations by the figures Bem, Bim and Bom, led by Bam, whose voice, V, is presented via a megaphone separate from the actor playing him on the stage. Each figure is identically costumed in grey, with long grey hair, and one after another they appear in an empty, dimly lit playing area surrounded by darkness as Bam questions each of them. He asks whether information about 'what' and 'where' has been extracted from their victim, and the play alludes to interrogation and torture but without offering the means to place the action historically or geographically. The German theatre director Asmus, who frequently worked with Beckett and knew him well, helped Beckett to make

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Section: Viscosity and Valuementioning

confidence: 95%

Black screens

Bignell¹

2022

Beckett and Media

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Quad and Catastrophe

Cited by 1 publication

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