Pennebaker/Hegedus Documentary:
Billie Whitelaw in
Rockaby
“The great documentary veteran D. A. Pennebaker and co-director Chris Hegedus have offered up a genuine gift with their film covering the premiere staging of Samuel Beckett's Rockaby. We're intimately shown the leading American director of Beckett (Alan Schneider, whose recent death gives the film added poignancy) and the finest living Beckett actress (Billie Whitelaw) wrestling the difficult text to life, from rehearsal and reflection to performance” (Robert Koehler, Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1984). “The central image is spellbinding in Samuel Beckett's new play, Rockaby...an old woman, played by Billie
Whitelaw, dressed in a black sequined gown, sits in a spotlight in a rocking chair and rocks herself back into memory. Memory is life and when the river of the woman's subconscious runs dry, the chair stops....” (Mel Gussow, New York Times). “Beckett's genius, of course, lies largely in his ability to create metaphors at once unutterably simple and profoundly resonant, but the glory of this film...is in showing that these metaphors are better understood by intuitive probing than by analytic posturing” (Ross Wetzsteon, Village Voice).
• A film by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus. With Billie Whitelaw, Alan Schneider, Daniel Labeille. (1983, 57 mins, Color, Print from Pennebaker, Inc.)

Paul Joyce Directs:
The Goad
(Act Without Words II) Samuel Beckett's mime for two players, directed by Paul Joyce, won Beckett's approval. In the mime, two men emerge from sacks to perform corresponding motions of living, one slowly and despairingly in contrast to the other's senselessly busy locomotions.
• Directed by Paul Joyce. Written by Samuel Beckett. (17 mins, Print from Grove Press Films)

Alan Schneider Directs Keaton in
Film
“Samuel Beckett meets Buster Keaton in a controversial one-character drama filmed by Alan Schneider (photographed by Boris Kaufman, Dziga Vertov's brother and partner). It is certainly no accident that Beckett, like Garcia Lorca, wrote his only film scenario expressly for Buster Keaton.... (In) its stony acceptance of the most absurd and terrifying catastrophes, Keaton's face reflects a profound vision of man's need to adapt to a hostile and alien environment...to concentrate with prodigious energy on one's immediate condition.” PFA's Tribute to Grove Press
• Directed by Alan Schneider. Written by Samuel Beckett. Photographed by Boris Kaufman. With Buster Keaton. (1965, 22 mins, 35mm, Print from PFA Collection with permission of Grove Press Films)