Play it again, Sam

What? Film. How? No. Why? It becomes infectious, this interrogative mode. The past week's immersion in Beckettland has provoked a series of questions about the potential of cinema, the challenge of transposing work from stage to film, and the differences between the two forms. Each director was confronted by these questions and the films that they have made serve to further the inquiry rather than provide definitive answers. The diverse directorial approaches taken to the works and the variety of audience reactions to the films during the week are testimony to the provocative nature of the issues raised. Cinema, obviously, depends on images, but do these have to be naturalistic and specific? Does the room in Krapp's Last Tape need to be visualised? Atom Egoyan decided that it did, showing the papers and files piled on the shelves and table surrounding Krapp (John Hurt) as he sits listening to his tape recorder. Yet, since the film focuses on Hurt's etched face, shown in intense close-up, Egoyan could arguably have omitted the background detail.

Ohio Impromptu, directed by Charles Sturridge, takes a more abstract approach to the same question with a stunning double image of Jeremy Irons seated at a horizontal white table, bathed in white light, floating in an ocean of total blackness. The devices of using the same actor for both Reader and silent Listener and of employing a constantly rotating camera make this a striking and highly cinematic adaptation. It is simultaneously pared back and visually expressive. Theatre director John Crowley's film debut, Come and Go, is an exquisitely realised miniature. The delicate, painterly image of three women (Paola Dionisetti, Anna Massey and Sian Philips) sharing a bench gives a deceptive gloss to the bleakness at the heart of the piece. As each of the ghostly figures in Edwardian dress and brimmed hats dissolves in turn into the background, the remaining two share a fatal secret about the absent one. By comparison, Rockaby, directed by Richard Eyre, and That Time, directed by Charles Garrad, seem much more static, recreating a theatre audience's experience. As an elderly woman (Penelope Wilton) sits in a rocking chair in Rockaby "in best black", she moves in and out of the shadows at the close of a long day, listening to her own disembodied voice. The camera movement is restricted throughout; only the final shot from the top of her head provides another perspective. Another question raised by the transposition to screen is the point of view of the camera. Is it a neutral observer, is it an analogue for the cinema audience, or does it provide an allseeing, God's-eye view (as in Patricia Rozema's Happy Days, which shows Winnie buried up to her neck in the middle of a vast desert landscape)? Beckett's characters - Winnie, Vladimir, Estragon - repeatedly wonder if anyone is looking at them and, if so, who? In the brilliantly realised Play, directed by Anthony Minghella, the camera is an aggressive protagonist ("And now that you are mere eye. Just looking. At my face. On and off"), swinging from one character to the next like a menacing surveillance device. The opportunity for subtle expression afforded by the use of close-up works to the advantage of the actors, notably in Michael Lindsay Hogg's Waiting For Godot, in which the superb performances (Barry McGovern, Johnny Murphy, Stephen Brennan and Alan Stanford) are foregrounded. Yet in What Where, directed by Damien O'Donnell, the recurrent close-ups fail to convey the terror expressed in Beckett's writing. O'Donnell's risk-taking film, set in a vast Borgesian library, seems almost baroque compared to the minimalism of many of the other films. The difficulty with his film is not its re-imagined visual world per se, but the fact that it misses the mood and spirit of the work. Beckett's writing for the stage is characterised by an impulse towards abstraction. Place is indeterminate; time is abolished. The stage pictures of his later works are increasingly unrepresentational. As he relentlessly strips away the inessential, he reveals the paradoxical absence at the core: nothing is essential, but some things - cerebrating, verbalising, breathing - are inescapable conditions of humanity. He presents us with the thinking human being whose thoughts are not significant and the incessantly talking human being who has nothing to communicate. We are confronted with consciousness without content, activity without effect, subject without object.

THIS severed link between subjective and objective may be fruitfully explored in film, and, as Anna McMullan observed on this page last week, Beckett's writing was influenced by the film techniques of separating sound and image and then re-imposing them. In a broader sense, he played with the separation of the "signifier" (the means of expression) and the "signified" (the content) in ways that profoundly affect the way audiences - and by extension, directors and critics - interpret his work. One of the most successful transpositions to film is Act Without Words II, a brief silent film in which two figures in succession emerge from sacks and enact their daily routine of dressing and grooming before returning to their sacks. Director Enda Hughes places the two clown-like figures within the confines of a sepia-tinted strip of film placed horizontally across the frame, and uses animation techniques to speed up their banal gestures. It's a clever, witty, cinematic correlative to Beckett's two-dimensional stage setting. Although every word of every text was filmed for this project, this did not preclude a variety of interpretations, reminding us that Beckett's texts are deliberately open-ended. As he wrote in his letter to Eisenstein, he was well aware that a film script is "a function of its means of realisation". When directing actors himself, Beckett instilled discipline of performance and tempo, and strict textual fidelity, but refused to provide any explanations. The meaning of his plays is what we see. The characters are what they are enacting or performing, for the duration of the performance. They have no pre-life or afterlife. These issues needed to be aired more rigorously during the festival. With some notable exceptions, the discussions with actors and directors over the weekend left a lot to be desired; they were casual and unconsidered. What the audience needs is more contextual material: a comprehensive printed programme with detailed critical interviews with the directors would be a valuable addition, plus, perhaps, a series of television interviews to accompany the forthcoming screening of the 19 films on RTE. One week was a very short run for this thought-provoking project. Let's hope the Irish Film Centre will screen the films again at a later date and that they will travel widely to festivals at home as well as abroad. While some of these films - Footfalls and Endgame, in particular - made us long to be back in the theatre, there was enough creative film-making on show to make the project worthwhile, and to suggest that, regardless of the status of the author, in film the image has the last word.