From the Negation to the Realization of the Gaze and the Real: A Lacanian Reading of “Film” by Samuel Beckett

Though Beckett’s name is closely associated with fiction and drama in the world of contemporary art and literature, a thorough understanding of his oeuvre seems impossible without the study of “Film,” the only film script he has ever written. The present research is a psychoanalytical study of “Film” within the critical framework of Lacanian theory. The study illustrates that both Lacan, in his theory, and Beckett, in his “Film,” differentiate between the concept of the eye and the concept of the gaze: in both masters, the eye stands in close relation to the consciousness, the subjectivity, and the representation; whereas, the gaze bears a close relation to the unconscious, the Object Petit a and the image. The concept of gaze occupies some different positions in Lacanian theory, corresponding to the different definitions the critic provides for his notoriously elusive notion of the Object Petit a: 1. the gaze as the lost object; 2. the gaze as the substitute object; and 3. the gaze as the feeling of strangeness, separation, captivation and lack of self-mastery. The present research, moreover, suggests that the subject’s avoidance of the gaze of the Other/other, on the one hand, and his attempt to escape from the dominant ideological discourses and regulatory norms, on the other hand, take place at the very crucial and unexpected moment of his short encounter with the Real, which is marked as a pathological symptom in the realm of the Symbolic.