Neil Jordan Not I an Adaptation for Film of the Play Not I 1972 by Samuel Beckett

7/27/2019 Neil Jordan Not I an Adaptation for Film of the Play Not I 1972 by Samuel Beckett

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Neil Jordan, Not Ian adaptation or flm o the play Not I, 1972 by Samuel Beckett


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Published on the occasion o

the Happy Days Enniskillen

International Beckett Festival

The Masonic Hall, Enniskillen,

Co. Fermanagh21-26 August 2013

Neil Jordan, Not I,

an adaptation or flm o the play

Not I, 1972 by Samuel Beckett

Curated by Johanne Mullan,

National Programmer, IMMA

We would like to grateully acknowledge

the support o Neil Jordan; Sarah Harte;

Edward Beckett, The Beckett Estate; The

Happy Days Enniskillen International

Beckett Festival, especially Sean Doran,

Director; Laura Mac Naughton, Festival

Manager; Ali Curran, Artistic Producer

& The Masonic Lodge, Enniskillen

IMMA exhibition team: Sarah Glennie,

Director; Christina Kennedy, Senior

Curator: Head o Collections; Johanne

Mullan, National Programmer;

Marguerite OMolloy, Assistant

Curator: Collections; Nuria Carballeira,

Collections Registrar; Edmond Kiely

& Antoinette Emoe, Technical Crew

This exhibition is kindly supported

by the Department o Arts,

Heritage and the Gaeltacht

Texts the Authors and the

Irish Museum o Modern Art, 2013

All images Neil Jordan and

Pat Redmond Company o

Wolves ire limited, Co. Dublin

First Published in 2013 by

Irish Museum o Modern Art/

ras Nua-Ealane na hireann

Royal Hospital, Military Road

Kilmainham, Dublin 8

Ireland

Tel: +353 1 612 9900

Fax: +353 1 612 9999E-mail: [email protected]

Website: www.imma.ie

ISBN: 978-1-909792-03-6

Editor: Johanne Mullan

Print: Print Library

Design: NewGraphic.ie

All rights reserved. No part o this

publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system or transmitted in

any orm or by any means, electrical,

mechanical or otherwise, without frst

seeking the written permission o the

copyright holders and the publishers.

Printed on Revive 100paperstock, made rom 100%

recycled waste.


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Reaching our second birthday as the worlds largest annual celebration o IrishNobel Prize writer Samuel Beckett, the Happy Days Enniskillen InternationalFestival is delighted to co-present with the Irish Museum o Modern ArtNeil Jordans visual art installation o the Samuel Beckett short play Not I

eaturing American actress Julianne Moore.Samuel Beckett attended the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen 1920-23,hence our choosing this island town amidst the still waters o Lough Erneas the venue or our late summer celebration. The Festival commissions andproduces across many art orms theatre, literature, classical music, visualart, comedy, cirque/mime flm, radio & television oering over 100 events in30+ venues across fve days at the end o each August.

The placing by curator Johanne Mullan o Neil Jordans Not Iinstallationin the Masonic Hall o our town is an inspiring one. Many in our localcommunity will not only be experiencing the artistic work or the frst timebut also the venue.

The Neil Jordan installation oNot Ialso plays an important role in ourDante inspired programming ramework this year, The Divine Comedystrilogy oInerno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Needless to say, Samuel BeckettsNot Iinhabits Inerno in this overarching scenario, not least recalling Billie

Whitelaws inamous response to learning the work It was like steppingback into hell. This programming conceit rises upwards rom Not Ithrougha series o international art installations Robert Wilsons video portraitinstallation A Still Lie is a Real Lie eaturing actress Winona Ryder asAnte-Purgatory; Tomoko Mukaiyama and Jean Kalmans live perormanceinstallation Falling(in the Servants Tunnel o the 18th century grandhouse Castle Coole) as Purgatory and completing with Romeo Castellucisperormance installation Paradiso atop Mount Lourdes school.

We are very thankul to IMMA and the Department o Arts, Heritage and theGaeltacht or their support to help bring this special artwork to the west-north-west, a Beckett description! But o course the Festivals gratitude andacknowledgement is best reserved or the artists Neil Jordan and JulianneMoore or creating such a beautiul piece in the frst place that we areprivileged to present to our audiences during the fve days o Happy Days2013.

Sean Doran

Founder-Festival DirectorHappy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festivalwww.happy-days-enniskillen.com


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In 2001 Michael Colgan, Artistic Director o the Gate Theatre, and Alan Moloneyo Blue Angel Films concluded the unique and ambitious project o committingall 19 o Samuel Becketts stage plays to flm, with the exception o the early andunperormed Eleutheria. The 19 plays each had a dierent director, charged with

adapting the demands o Becketts plays to flm while adhering to his exactingstage directions.

In 2000 Neil Jordan, who was one o the frst directors invited to select a play,created a flm adaptation oNot I, one o Becketts most mesmerising anddisturbing pieces, which he wrote or the stage in 1972. Later that year hedonated the flm to the IMMA Collection.

Christina Kennedy, Senior Curator, Head o Collections at IMMA,

spoke with Neil Jordan about his adaptation o Samuel Becketts Not Iand more generally about Jordans own work.

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NJ: Michael (Colgan) wanted to put the entire o Beckett on flm ina project called Beckett on Film. He came to me and he asked me to

choose a play. Initially I wanted to do Becketts play called Play. Itsa very evocative piece. You know that Becketts stage directions areso specifc. His nephew Edward Beckett looks ater the Estate andthis project had to be approved by him. In the end, Edward Beckettdidnt think that what I wanted to do with Play would meet thedirections Beckett had let. So then Michael asked me whatelse Id like to do and I chose Not I.

Were each o the lm directors approached given their choice

o Beckett play to engage with?

NJ: I dont know. I think they started with me. I remember at the timethe thinking was that it would be Irish directors but I said to them,look, everybody loves Samuel Beckett. Everybody is interested.There is not one director or practitioner who has not been aectedby him in some way. For example, I said, Roman Polanski wanted tomake a version oWaiting or Godotyears ago. Im sure even i youasked someone like Andy Warhol, i he was alive today, youd get some

response rom him. Even i you went to someone like Stephen Spielbergyou would get some memory o Beckett in the guys brain. You shouldgo to serious flm directors. So then Michael went to (David) Mametand (Anthony) Minghella. I dont know i he every approachedPolanski but it was such a wonderul opportunity to engage withthis mans work.

Why Julianne Moore or this part?

NJ: I had just done a movie with Julianne Moore called The End o theAair and I asked her i she would be interested in doing the Beckettwork and she was. So I met her in New York and she read throughthe piece and rehearsed it. Ater reading it several times at dierentspeeds, we decided then to do it as part oBeckett on Film. So shecame to Dublin.

CK:

CK: How did you get involved with the project?

CK:

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Will you describe your approach to the play?

NJ: I wanted to shoot it on flm. The piece was about 12 minutes longand I wanted it to be done in one single perormance. We had to get

these extra long magazines so that we could record it all in one piece,in one single take. The camera man was Roger Pratt who had doneMona Lisa and several other flms or me. There was no set. The onlystage directions Beckett had given was that the actor be confned,their head be kept in a solid position so that the location o the mouthnot move and that there be no awareness o anything other than themouth or the audience. There was one other element in the piece itwas called the Auditor. It was this strange o-stage fgure, the listenerbasically, and I got Edward Becketts permission to exclude that.

...in keeping with Becketts own decision when he adaptedNot I or lmin 1977 to drop the part o the Auditor altogether...

The only other version o it Id seen, apart rom stage versions, is whatBillie Whitelaw did under the direction o Beckett himsel. Its quite aterriying image.

When Julianne entered she sat down in a rig intended to keep theactor in a static position or the perormance. I wanted to show that,to show the conditions under which the piece had to be read, thedirections that Beckett himsel had given to his actors and also theconfnement he put the actors under which always seems to be kind oodd, you know?

Basically, it becomes a flm about a mouth really. When I shot it wehad to shoot it three dierent times. I chose a series o six angles on

Juliannes mouth. Any more than six wouldnt have been possible asyou would have shown more than the lips.

When I fnished it I remember looking at it and saying toTony Lawson, we have a strange thing here, a strange object,six views o exactly the same perormance. Why dont we justreconstitute the separate takes and show them together. We dontnormally get to see the way flm operates in that way. So I put themtogether in one room on six screens presented in the round.

CK:

CK:

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Many o Becketts works fow out rom the idea o a divided sel. Is that

what you wanted to achieve in creating multiple views o the mouth?

NJ: The flm is about looking looking at somebodys mouth. I dont

think people look clearly enough at things you know? It was aboutdiscovering how many angles I could fnd on this womans mouth. Its assimple as that. Its also about i you look at something long enough whatit becomes weirdly sexual and elemental. It was just about that really.

CK:

Have you worked with any other Beckett material?

NJ: Ive never really directed or the theatre but years ago I directeda version oWaiting or Godotin America. Nobody saw it. Mysel

and Jim Sheridan had a theatre group and or some reason we werebrought to America by some Foundation to do a bunch o plays incolleges around the Midwest. So I did a version oWaiting or Godotwith whatever actors we had brought over there. Thats my only otherencounter with Beckett. Ive read all o Becketts work o course. Hisletters are extraordinary. In the 20s and 30s he was a great riendo Thomas McGreevy. McGreevy was one o Becketts ew riendsactually. In the letters you almost eel that his ideal job would havebeen as an art curator because he was travelling around Germany in

the 30s and in Paris and everything he wrote about involved art. Hisknowledge o Van Eyck and Flemish and Dutch painting was intense,quite extraordinary actually.

CK:

Did you ever meet Beckett?

NJ: I never met Beckett. Hes almost become a secular saint now hasnthe? Its impossible to be an artist now without having some awareness oBeckett. Hes written some incredibly beautiul things. I always eel quite

uneasy about Beckett in a way. I think the reverence in which he is heldis at times almost insuerable. But yes, there is an extraordinary purityto his work. When I was doing the piece with Julianne, it was a strangething that happened to me. At times it seemed that everything becameunbearably long to endure because the reduction o the piece wouldactually be silence, yet its only 12 minutes long. So theres a curiousthing that goes on with Beckett but he creates these extraordinaryimages on stage. The piece itsel is quite impenetrable you know? I youtry to put together a narrative rom it, it is almost impossible. But it does

seem to be the experience o being thrown into lie somehow and beingmaddened by sound and then vanishing. Its as obscure and impenetrableas that. But it was ascinating working on it.

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It is sometimes noted in your own work that you seem to speak rom

a emales perspective as narrator. Is it just a coincidence that Not Ieatures a womans voice?

NJ: that was part o the attraction though its hard to defne why really.But Beckett did that quite a bit didnt he? Take Winnie in Happy Daysand wasnt Play narrated by a woman?

CK:

Well, women are the main protagonists in both cases. You mentioned earlier

that Play was your rst choice to adapt or lm, why was that?

What had you in mind?

NJ: There was something quite cinematic in Play, the act o threefgures, in urns, in a triangular relationship. In many ways its one

o the most conventional stories Beckett ever told, you know? Whenthey suggested the idea o doing Beckett on flm I said okay this issomething I could really make a flm out o and I suggested it toEdward Beckett. He said he didnt want any radical departures romthe stage instructions that Beckett let.

NJ: I would have liberated it rom the stage entirely. It would be

possible to do that with Play. It was like one o those three wayrelationships that I examine in The End o the Aair, you know? Butthe brie turned out to be dierent so I couldnt do it. I would havetaken them out o the urns.. right out o the earth ..

CK:

CK:

Beckett pares his stage sets to the minimum. The ew objects he includes seem

ordinary yet are also highly metaphoric such as a suitcase, a rope, a mound o

earth, an urn, even just a mouth. How do his stage constructions strike you?

NJ: The main thing Beckett does is that he confnes actors. I thinkeverything he does is to remove the element o chance rom what theactor will do which oten places them in an agonising position. It mustbe horribly uncomortable to play Winnie in Happy Days. In Play,sticking those characters in urns, their very immobility, reminds usthat everything has been stripped away rom the human condition.The way the actor has to be confned in order to deliver Not Iis almosterocious. Thats why I showed Julianne sitting down in a kind o torturebox necessary or her to keep her ace still to deliver the piece. It was a

remarkably eective thing that Beckett did. He created extraordinaryimages but he robbed the stage o movement.

CK:


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Writer Sinead Mooney identies themes in Becketts works such as

incarceration, impotence, the alienated wanderer, characters suspended

between existence and non-existence, which she sees as residues o 19th

century Gothic tropes. A lot has been written about the Gothic in your

work, do the themes she mentions have any resonance or you?*

Mooney attributes such themes in Becketts work to the sectarian-

cultural claustrophobia elt by him and the Protestant Irish class in post-

Independence Ireland

What about the Gothic in your work and the theme o the doppelganger

or double which occurs requently in your writing and lms? Many o

your characters wrestle with inner demons, they reveal irrational sides,

their identities interchange. Your treatment o time seems to echo this

with cuts between the present and remembered past, coincidence, dj vu.

Where do you think these traits may come rom?

NJ: I you read Beckett, particularly his prose and his description o thesel as being inside this lascerated skull, immobile, I think a lot o it isa very accurate description o the state o being severely hung over, youknow? In a strange way, it is. You cant move and every movement makesyou aware o your being, your sel. Maybe theres a voice in Beckett thatis common to Sheridan, Maturin or le Fanu but I think Beckett was artoo clever to write the huge 19th century Gothic fctions that they wrote.

NJ: Becketts is an Irish Protestant voice without a doubt and there isa huge alienation rom his perspective in the landscape he grew up in.Unlike Joyce who wanted to get away rom what he belonged to, there

is a sense o non-belonging through the whole o Beckett but I think itwould be a mistake to call it Gothic. Thats just my perspective on it.

NJ: You get obsessed with things or reasons you dont understand andIve always like ghost stories, you know? Part o what attracts me to NotI, as well, is the concept o things that push explanations o characteror events beyond realism. The movies Ive made are the perect mediumor that kind o thing, like the Company o Wolves or Interview with aVampire. Its a kind o a statement o flm-making in a way..

I dont know where this obsession with doubles comes rom. I wrote

a script called Johnny Montana about a person who ound there wasanother version o himsel in the world. I never did anything with it.Then I wrote a short story and the same theme crept in. When I wrote

CK:

CK:

CK:


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the novel Mistaken the notion o a double obsessed me or a ew years.

In the flm, Byzantium, based on a script by an English writer MoiraBufni, when I came to try solve some problems in her script, rather

than ollow her more traditional explanation o how the charactersbecome vampires, the central idea is that each character as theyturn into a vampire, has to go to this strange space, an ancientkind o beehive hut on an island o the west o Ireland, where theyare met and killed by an undead version o themselves. So the ideao the double crept in there too. It seemed to make sense. Its beenhappening or the past fve or six years and I dont know why.

In the novel, Mistaken, I was describing Dublin. Since fnishing

it I fnd it very hard to be here, I dont know why. Its as thoughI have written it out o my system or something. Maybe iyou spend so much time building an image o the way a placewas, you fnd it very hard to be in the place as it is.

The thing that has always attracted me to the Irish imagination isthe Gothic element. I dont think weve ever had a realist tradition.There was never the equivalent o the Victorian realist novel here. Itwas always to do with the imagination, to do with the unreal as

in Sheridan, Le Fanu, Maturin, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wildes airytales. I dont think the Irish imagination can deal with realismsomehow. It doesnt unction very well with attempts to do that.Perhaps thats why the Gothic is so much in my work. I dont knowwhy it is so strong in what I do, Im not the kind o person whocan rattle o every vampire movie ever made. But I do rememberas a kid being absolutely terrifed by Bram Stokers house. Eachtime I had to pass it it fghtened the lie out o me and maybe itsthose memories rom when I was very young. Going to Fairview

Cinema you had to cycle past the Crescent, past his house and thehouse was very run down at the time, white and ghost like.

* Ghost writer: Becketts Irish Gothic by Sinead Mooney, Beckett and Ireland,

Edited by Sean Kennedy, Cambridge University Press, 2010, , ps 131-149


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What are your views on contemporary artists who work with lm and video?

NJ: Lately there are fgures like Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Johnson who have entered into flm and the technical sophistication

o what they do is becoming much more marked. I dont know omany video artists but I think a lot o the work is so technically inept ina way, that it sometimes shocks me. That some people who do this workknow so little about photography, about the creation o an image. Itsalways puzzled me, you know, the naivety with which peoplewho are quite well known artists approach the camera. However,I dont know a lot o their work or that world really. Its quite aninteresting one in many ways. Sometimes it puzzles me, what is thedierence between what I do and what like say Matthew Barney

does or Tacita Dean or example? Were all creating images andwere all questioning images in some way. The only dierence isthat I have to engage so much with narrative when creating movies.Your psyche as a viewer demands a beginning, a middle and an end.I see the reedom that certain video artists have in doing what they do.

I remember being in New York or the opening o a movie, I orgetwhich movie it was, mid morning, and you wonder how manypeople are going to be there and you resist the temptation to wait

so I went to the Whitney where Bill Viola was showing and therewere crowds around the block, right down Madison Avenue. And Ithought my god this is obviously entertainment. And the audienceor this probably ar exceeded that or whatever flm it was.

I you did what I do, in other words i I ceased to have to tell a story asit is told in the cinema, the kind o reedom that would present wouldbe incredibly sweet but I dont know i it would be liberating or not.I would like to do more work like this. I just dont know how to do it.

I dont know what one does, rankly. Its so interesting when peoplelook at something not as a piece o entertainment but as a piece o art.

For example on the flm Ive just done, Byzantium, there is a sequencein it shot at a waterall in Cork, quite a huge waterall actually, andwe had to dye the waterall red, its a vampire movie you know? So wehad to set it up, build steps up the waterall, arrange a whole series ocables, get hired climbers to go up there up there with red dye that wasvegetable-based so it doesnt harm the livestock o the river and local

area. Then they stay up there, put in the dye, wait and seven minuteslater the whole thing turns red, you know? Photographed in dierentways that could be like an art piece. Yet when I do it its part o a movie,a piece o the story. Its interesting, just dierent.

CK:

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Images

Neil Jordan

Not I, 2000, an adaptation or flm o the play Not I,

1972 by Samuel Beckett, 2000Directed by Neil Jordan, produced by Blue Angel Films.

6 screen installation with sound

Dimensions variable

Collection Irish Museum o Modern Art

Donation, the artist, 2000

Production still by Pat Redmond,

Company o Wolves ire Ltd, Co. Dublin


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Documents

Neil Jordan Not I an Adaptation for Film of the Play Not I 1972 by Samuel Beckett