JULIAN MURPHET Beckett’s televisual modernism In 1964, after the shooting of his (first and last) Film in New York, Samuel Beckett found himself deep in post-production technical discussion with the sound adviser Andre ´ Hodeir. At issue was the matter of silence on the film’s soundtrack – a point with profound resonance for Beckett’s aesthetics, and especial relevance to this belated Buster Keaton vehicle with only one ‘uninsistent’ hssh to interrupt the perfect soundlessness. Or, as a matter of fact, the imperfect soundless- ness, much to Beckett’s alarm (in a letter to the director, Alan Schneider): So no more about it beyond this one point raised by Hodeir (who by the way now agrees there should be no sound): the sound made by the silent sound track which he describes as a kind of faint crackling getting more audible and disturbing as the copy gets more worn. If this is so I think we should consider sacrifying [sic] the ‘hsst!’ and having no sound track at all. 1 Here is a conundrum for a writer who had once written desirously of ‘that silence that underlies All’. 2 What is to be done if the medium to which one has committed the responsibility of silence, as a result of its irreversible degradation, instead transmits ever greater levels of noise? What if here, on the dumb spools of film, it is not silence but noise that ‘underlies All’? It is a question provoked by Beckett’s curious, anachronistic decision to make a more or less ‘silent’ movie on 1964 monochrome film stock – for ‘silence’ here is a wager against the medium’s inbuilt sliver of optical noise at the left edge of each frame, sensitive to the inadvertent and stochastic impression of the apparatus on the print, and thus in some sense an acoustic access to the very Real of film as a medium. As Paolo Cherchi Usai reminds us, ‘cinema is the art of destroying moving images’, and for that matter, recorded sounds on film as well; since each exposure of every frame to the exigencies of projection is an irreversible passage of destruction. 3 Film death is the passage that both soundtrack and image will duly take into the crackle and murmur of indistinguishable white noise. Beckett’s anxiety about the noise of attrition and material degrada- tion is connected to his equally uncharacteristic foreclosure of the dimension of sound altogether in this instance. It is not a foreclosure that took place all at once, in conception. Beckett’s preliminary notes for Film contain the direction: ‘Throughout Film sounds of things (feet,