If I Fall, Don't Pick Me Up

CountryIreland Year2024 Duration116 min. Projection formatDCP LanguageEnglish DirectionDeclan Clarke FestivalsFID Marseille (International Competition), FIDBA, Doc Lisboa, Cork IFF.

Spanish premiere

 

The working relationship between the Irish author Samuel Beckett and the German theatre director Walter Asmus. Beckett and Asmus met in the early 1970’s and worked closely together for the last fifteen years.

On the first day of rehearsals for a staging of Endgame in Berlin in 1967, Samuel Beckett, fearful of the emphasis that the German actors might place on the metaphysical aspects of his work, told them to “Keep it simple, everything simple”. If they kept it simple, we could imagine, the rest would fall into place. Decades later, when making this film, Declan Clarke follows that same principle: keep it simple, hold back. To tell the take of Beckett’s time in Berlin and Stuttgart while working on the staging of his works, Declan needs nothing more than places, documents, events, a body. The film seems as plain as an Irish moor. However, little by little, thanks to that simplicity, things begin to crystallise. Firstly, the routines kept by Beckett: every day after work, he takes walks in the same places and has dinner in the same restaurant every night. Later on, the relationship with Walter Asmus, a young theatre director at the time, who helped him stage Waiting for Godot. That professional relationship is maintained. They work together time and time again. Soon enough, without us realising it, a friendship has emerged. Then we see Asmus today. His silhouette, his face, his eyes. It is emotional to see him and know that he was the young friend of Beckett. We might wonder about the extent to which our own friendships are not unlike those walks and the restaurants frequented by Beckett, a routine, a beautiful routine. But there is something more. Did the friendship between those two men not perhaps emerge from looking in the same direction? Did their work not perhaps consist of attentively looking together at a stage, as others might have looked together with melancholic attention towards the moon? The routines and the friendship crystallise around the theatre. The little trees and rocks on the Irish moor crystallise into a small tree and a rock of the theatre. One man, alone, standing before that tree of the theatre. One man, alone, sat on that rock of the theatre. The memory of another man. The moon. After all, this film —without forcing the plot— makes us see something that it has not really shown us: two men together, their friendship, their frailty. Without emphasis, emotion has appeared. It has taken us along simple paths to a point that, while remaining simple, we can not fully unravel.

Pablo García Canga

Promoted by
Gobierno de Navarra
Organized by
NICDO
With the aid of
Con la financiación del Gobierno de España. Instituto de la Cinematografía y las Artes Audiovisuales Acción Cultural Española Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia Financiado por la Unión Europea. NexGenerationEU
volver_arriba

We use our own and third-party cookies for the following purposes:

To change the cookies settings that are installed on your computer, check or uncheck the different options and then click the "Save preferences" button.
By clicking the "Accept all cookies" option, you consent to the installation of all cookies.
Likewise, by clicking the "Reject cookies" option, you reject the use of all of them.
Click here to obtain more information about our cookies policy.