Janusz Pyda OP: … but the clouds … is a script for a television play. Before it there was the film script Film, written in 1963 and filmed in New York the following year with Buster Keaton. Then, in 1965, there was Eh Joe, a monologue, released almost simultaneously on British and German television. Finally, after a break of about ten years, there was Ghost Trio, shown on BBC in 1976. So … but the clouds … is Beckett's fourth television script. What attracted Beckett to film?

Antoni Libera: Film techniques were had already interested Beckett before the war. In the 1930s he dreamed of working with Eisenstein, the director of The Battleship Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible. He even wrote to him. Eisenstein never replied to the letter; possibly it never reached him. This was just as well, for nothing good would have come of their collaboration. For Beckett it might have had dreadful consequences (many Western idealists who went to Russia at that time never came back); at best he would have ended up with a sort of moral hangover, given that at the time of the Ribbentropp-Molotov pact Eisenstein was appointed by Goebbels head of the commission for cultural cooperation between Russia and Germany and put on a lavish production of Wagner's Valkyrie at the Bolshoi. However, I digress.

It's hard to say what attracted Beckett to film in the 1930s; we have no direct testimony about it, and it's hard to deduce anything from his work at the time, which certainly did not have film potential. But his post-war work did.

J. P.: What work are you thinking of?

A. L.: Just the general fact that after the war Beckett concentrated, especially in his prose works, mainly on the subjective sphere – the problem of mind and consciousness. That sphere can be expressed in images as well as in words, and especially well through the techniques of film. I think film techniques were for Beckett an excellent medium for expressing abstract ideas.

The act of filming, like the act of perception, provides rich opportunities for seeing the object-subject relation in a new light; and that relation was, of the fundamental problems of philosophy, the one that interested Beckett most.