Even as a young and developing writer, Samuel Beckett was intensely interested in film. Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s he regularly went to the cinema in London and Paris. He read about film aesthetics in the periodicals of the time, such as the cinema journal Close-Up, which published several translations of the writings of Sergei Eisenstein. He would have known of Eisenstein's proposal to film the Night Town episode of Joyce's Ulysses. In 1936, Beckett wrote to Eisenstein to apply for entry to the Moscow State School of Cinematography: "I have no experience of studio work and it is naturally in the scenario and editing end of the subject that I am most interested. It is because I realise that the script is a function of its means of realisation that I am anxious to make contact with your mastery of these and beg you to consider me a serious cineaste worthy of admission to your school." Had 1936 not been such a tumultuous year for Europe, Beckett might now be known to us primarily as a film-maker. Eisenstein never replied to Beckett, and probably never saw the letter. However, Beckett remained fascinated by the possibilities of the film medium. Several decades later, he was persuaded by his American publisher Barney Rosset to write and work on a short film, which he entitled Film. Beckett's immersion in film aesthetics also had an important formative influence on his work in other media, particularly the television and stage drama.

Whether he was creating fiction, essays, poetry, drama for stage, radio, television or film, Beckett was always exploring and testing the nature, the languages and the limits of each genre. At the same time, his experience of one medium informed his investigation of the materials of the others. For example, the isolation and juxtaposition of body and recorded voice in That Time or Rockaby, written for the stage, can be traced to Eisenstein's theory of montage, where the narrative, meaning and impact of a film are conveyed through the cutting and juxtaposition of disparate shots.

This theory extended to the introduction of both sound and colour into film production. In a statement on "The Sound Film", Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov insisted that "the first experiments with sound must be directed towards its pronounced non-coincidence with the visual images. This method of attack only will produce the requisite sensation, which will lead in the course of time to the creation of a new orchestral counterpoint of sight images and sound image." (Close-Up, October 1928).

This principle can be applied not only to Eh Joe, Beckett's first television play written in 1965, but also to the late television and stage plays, which force the spectator into new modes of perception and response. Eisenstein warned against the likelihood of sound being used to naturalise the body of the actor through synchronising image and voice, thereby serving a commercially exploitable mode of viewing - the satisfaction of "simple curiosity" . These concerns were at the core of Beckett's Film. Film was written during 1963 and filmed in New York over the summer of 1964, but is set "about 1929", creating echoes of that earlier crucial era both in film history and in Beckett's own history - he was in Paris and had met Joyce there. Originally entitled Eye, the film is in black and white and has a silent soundtrack apart from one startling "ssh!".

It focuses on the relationship of perception to consciousness, and on the intolerable yet inescapable experience of self-consciousness, derived from Bishop Berkeley's principle of esse est percipi ("to be is to be seen"). It features Buster Keaton, though, to Keaton's grudging amusement, we only get to see the older version of one of the best known faces of silent comedy at the very end of the film. The film is structured around two points of view - which both turn out to belong to the central figure, played by Keaton. One represents the inevitable sensory fact or condition of seeing, the other, the need to escape being seen: so the bowed, great-coated figure of Keaton is pursued by the camera eye revealed only at the end to be a double of himself. Beckett and the director, Alan Schneider, both relatively inexperienced in the medium of film, puzzled endlessly over how to represent visually the split protagonist and ended up using image quality to differentiate between the pursuer and the pursued. In a series of pre-production meetings, Beckett stated that "Finally we are trying to find the technical equivalent, a visual, technical, cinematic equivalent, for visual appetite and visual distaste. A reluctant disgusted vision and a ferociously voracious one."

Beckett exploited the specific materials of the genre, using the camera as a character in its own right, much as he used the theatrical light in Play, which he was working on at the same time. The juxtaposition of perceiver and perceived, and the intense visual texture of the film which Beckett considered to be its best achievement, make particular perceptual demands on the viewer. The "eye" of Film offers neither visual mastery nor spectacle - it is closer to the "famished eyes" of Rockaby or Texts for Nothing: "Eye ravening patient in the haggard vulture face perhaps its carrion time." Film therefore foregrounds Beckett's interest in disturbing the usual habits of perception particular to a specific medium, a principle which recurs in his work in other media. The adaptation of Beckett's plays into films by major contemporary film-makers in the Blue Angel Beckett on Film season will therefore raise questions, not just about whether Beckett's drama can be made to work as films, but how his particular aesthetics, influenced by the avant garde film practice and theories he encountered in his twenties, is interpreted and mediated in the climate and practice of contemporary film.

Beckett on Film opens at the IFC tonight and 19 films will show in repertory for a week

Anna Mc Mullan lectures in the drama department of TCD