How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an
eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it
to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.
Samuel Beckett
"How It Is" - is a novel by Samuel Beckett where the main character "Pimm" trudges through mud as he goes through the three stages of his life. This metaphor is especially apt for any artist who has been trying to emerge from the nothingness of life to make something. Beckett explained his strange text as the product of a " 'man' lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his 'life' as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him... The noise of his panting fills his ears and it is only when this abates that he can catch and murmur forth a fragment of what is being stated within
Over 20 years ago when I was reading Beckett's novel "Murphy", I was gobsmacked over a character who could stop his heartbeat and then start it back up at will. Apmonia, he called it. I was utterly amazed. This was before any Yoga craze. Who was this Beckett who could write this sort of thing, I wanted to know. So I proceeded to read all I could get my hands on and so it was that he became a huge influence in my life. So much so that I became a playwright.
Samuel Beckett knew the condition of humans in all their varieties and sorts. He nailed characters straight to the wall. The profundity of his writing...the searching through the nothingness for the everything...I knew I had found my man, my mentor. Decades later, I look for the same profound moments in all writing. Moments that tell of the deepest of human sorrows and joys. Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, the Irish writers all blew me away. And Fitzgerald, Hemingway in his own way, they all were masters of these moments as were novelists Dickens, Balzac, and Bronte, Emily, Charlotte and Anne and even in the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, Maupassant and Checkov could you plunge to the heights and the depths of the soul of being human. Characters that move us all.
I look for those characters in film today. Characters that are so seductive, we remember them in our sleeping hours as well as the wakeful. Who can forget Lucy Snow in Vilette? Or even minor characters like Uriah Heep. Good writing does not stray far. It encompasses everything and nothing, all at once.
Today Beckett would say there is nothing in the newness. It is how it is. It is always about the story and it is always about the writing. In the spirit of Mr. Samuel Beckett, we at How It Is Films search for such stories and characters.
vimeo.com/106302578
Excerpt from "How It Is" Read by Patrick McGee. Have a listen:
Samuel Beckett reads: "Watt"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOMDP5MFTNA
John Hurt in "Krapp's Last Tape"
A dialogue about a dying man. Like Dickens. Beckett was an absolute genius with names.
"Krapp. White face. Purple nose. Disordered grey hair. Unshaven". What a name for what a guy!
"Krapp. White face. Purple nose. Disordered grey hair. Unshaven". What a name for what a guy!
