Specially for Television?

Bignell, Jonathan

doi:10.1163/18757405-03201004

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…With the exception of a brief opening scene featuring Joe’s walk around the room, the entire teleplay consists of the camera zooming gradually in on Joe’s face, while a woman’s voice, with no physical source, addresses Joe, with every detail of his facial response shown. As Jonathan Bignell demonstrates, this minimalist mise-en-scene, which signifies human interiority, effectively incorporates many of Beckett’s previous techniques and motifs from other art forms, including theatre, prose, film and radio (Bignell 2020: 41–54). Based on Bignell’s observation, I want to emphasize that the performances of these different medial elements also present a human subjectivity undergoing an imminent crisis.…”

Section: Disjointed Interiority In Eh Joementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Meanwhile, the camera regularly zooms in on Joe’s face during nine intervals in the woman’s speech. This ‘gradual shrinkage of the frame from wide to extreme close-up shots’ (Bignell 2020: 45) was previously employed in Beckett’s film, Film (1965), but whereas in Film the shrinkage is edited from several disconnected cuts at the very end of the film, in Eh Joe , the camera moves in an uninterrupted flow with Joe’s face occupying the screen for most of the play. This reflects Beckett’s conscious efforts to adapt to the medium of television.…”

Section: Disjointed Interiority In Eh Joementioning

confidence: 99%

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Intermedial Performativity and the Human Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Teleplays

Chen

2023

European Review

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Samuel Beckett’s corpus centres on the characterization, examination and imaginative exploration of the human mind, encompassing the realms of consciousness, cognition and perception. In his teleplays, this focus is distinctively achieved through the performances of different media, which this article refers to as ‘intermedial performativity’. This term not only designates the semiotic contents of performance in intermedial forms, but also highlights the cooperative performances of the material media themselves, along with their uncharted possibilities and effects. This article delves into the ways in which intermedial performativity in Beckett’s teleplays realizes several unique configurations of the human mind, such as its split state and its transfiguration to a posthuman condition. This exploration not only sheds light on Beckett’s artistic vision and cosmic ontology, but also brings attention to the reverberations and implications of intermediality for humanity and its potential transformations.

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Section: Disjointed Interiority In Eh Joementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Disjointed Interiority In Eh Joementioning

confidence: 99%

Intermedial Performativity and the Human Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Teleplays

Chen

2023

European Review

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“…Many of Beckett's screen dramas are intermedial in these ways, inviting analytical approaches that address their borrowings, reworkings, transgression of boundaries and questioning of medial identity (Bignell, 2020). The title of Beckett's first screen work, Film (1964), designates the specificity of celluloid as a production and exhibition medium, and a surface separating one space from another as the screen does in a cinema auditorium.…”

Section: Intermediality and Medium Specificitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Black screens

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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Specially for Television?

Cited by 2 publications

References 13 publications

Intermedial Performativity and the Human Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Teleplays

Intermedial Performativity and the Human Mind in Samuel Beckett’s Teleplays

Black screens

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