Samuel Beckett's talking mouth MACBA classics
Although cinema is one of Beckett’s lesser known facets, his forays into film are by no means peripheral within his body of work. Beckett began to take an interest in the use of radio, television and cinema in the mid-sixties. Not I is a thirteen-minute dramatic monologue that was written in 1972 and premiered that same year at the Forum Theatre, Lincoln Center, New York. In 1975 Samuel Beckett made a television version. The screen viewers see only a mouth flouting in the darkness, an element that becomes autonomous, emphasizing its status as a physical organ. It recites a fragmented monologue made up of syncopated phrases about an individual with a distressing past. The lips of the actress maintain their original state, but they also become a sphincter and a vagina. The monologue is spoken very rapidly, broken by desperate outbursts of laughter and shouts: an incandescent mouth that speaks about itself in third person while repeatedly denying its identity.
