Beckett’s Film: Perceiving Deleuze’s Time Film through Stiegler’s Negentropic Film

Gilles Deleuze argues that in Samuel Beckett’s Film the perception of self by self, though agonizing, opens onto a promising vision: for one confined to the personal reduction of life, it discloses a transcendental expansion of LIFE. In cinematic perception, this transformation marks the shift from the classical cinema of movement, where protagonists made films, to a modern cinema of time, where the camera becomes the protagonist, inviting actors, like the audience, to watch the film enriched by its transcendental perspective. This article shows what appears in Deleuzian time-cinema as a proliferation of life, by sustaining the audience’s belief in transcendental time as a horizon of perpetually emerging life-events, is, in fact, an entropic eventization of the audience’s memory, a process that, according to Bernard Stiegler, entails the loss of savoir-faire. Thus, the revelatory shock-images in Beckett’s Film signify an entropic loss of memory’s ground, becoming pathological shocks that require therapeutic care and invention of new life-therapies, anticipating a negentropic reinvention of time the transcendental camera must watch and read its film from. Here, E is seen as a therapeutic camera, healed out of transcendental time through O’s analysing the pharmacological shock.