Running Out Of Tape

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday December 30, 2002

Atom Egoyan.

While it may be tempting to update Krapp's Last Tape, it's difficult to view the new technology with the necessary tenderness, writes film director Atom Egoyan.

Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape is without a doubt the most influential dramatic monologue of the 20th century. Premiered at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1958, it was wildly ahead of its time in its observations of how recording technology could affect human memory.

In the play, an old man celebrates his 69th birthday by sorting through boxes full of ancient tape recordings, trying to reconcile his memories of events with notes he has scribbled on an old ledger. He settles on a recording made 30 years earlier. On this tape, he hears his 39-year-old self commenting on a tape he has just finished listening to, recorded 10 years before - a task he refers to as "gruesome", but helpful before he "embarks on a new retrospect".

With this passage - a man listening to his younger self commenting on his even younger self - Beckett is able to express the central paradox of personal-archiving technology: its ability simultaneously to enhance and trivialise experience. Krapp listens to these old tapes as a sad inspiration to continue his archive. By the end of the play, after an evening of listening to unbearably beautiful memories of a long-forgotten moment of romantic bliss, he is ready to start his final recording.

He is tortured, yet exhilarated; intolerant, yet forgiving. By the end of his recording, Krapp is almost paralysed with melancholy over the memory he has listened to earlier in the evening. In a long pause he becomes lost in a reverie of a physical moment he cannot remember, but whose evocation has been overwhelming. He caresses the machine like his forgotten lover.

Not so long ago, machines were large enough to hug. As the play brilliantly chronicles, there was a time when tape was wound, reels of film spooled, and images produced by the physical movement of materials. Etchings were carved in stone, lead and ink scratched on to paper, and silver oxide shifted on photographic plates. Matter was displaced so that ideas and images would place themselves in our minds. In the new millennium, we are in the process of losing our biblical attachment to an entire form of communication: the graven image.

It may seem strange to be nostalgic about any Old Testament concept, but the graven image had a lot going for it. From the carved tablets of the Ten Commandments to the boxes of ancient magnetic tapes that Krapp lugs on to his desk, there was a cumbersomeness to these archives that related to their human origins. They were handmade. They couldn't betray their origins. They were touching, because they were made to be touched. Their exchange required a physical transfer. They were made in the real world, to be read, played and absorbed in a physical space.

Some of the most emotional moments in Krapp's Last Tape show the physical effort the old man puts into taking the tapes out of the box, putting the spools on the machine and tenderly placing the tape into the slot of the playback head. This physical ritual prepared Krapp for the emotional effort of what he was about to embark on. With this simple gesture, both man and technology expressed something vulnerable. In the fallible system of communication and playback, something was expressed about the profound nature of the way that memory, experience and desire could find a conscious and material manifestation.

Compare this with our current state of affairs. We record images on digital cameras, download them on to computers, transmit them around the world and erase them with a few strokes on a keyboard. While it may be tempting to update Krapp's Last Tape to the digital age, it is difficult to view the new technology with the necessary tenderness. In the analogue world, if a piece of tape breaks or gets jammed, the problem has a physical manifestation. This evokes an immediate response. We have a sense of what has gone wrong. We can even imagine how we may be able to fix it. It relates to any one of a number of similar situations that we can imagine happening to our own bodies.

Our bodies are a magnificent fusion of the practical and the cumbersome. While there are an overwhelming number of things that our bodies are designed to do, there are an equally huge number of tasks we wouldn't dream of undertaking. We can make our bodies and our minds more efficient through education and physical training, just as we can make our technologies more efficient by making machines smaller, sleeker and faster.

A strip of microfilm is a quicker way of accessing years of newspaper copies than stacks of paper and ink. But a strip of microfilm still evokes a sense of material presence, and is still susceptible to the physical effects of wear and tear. In short, we can still relate this archival process to an organic extension of ourselves. There is no risk of losing the precious nature of physical evidence to a binary system that vigorously rejects the idea of decay.

My issue with digital archiving is not simply that we have to forgo the beloved collection of love letters wrapped in a bow. I am a practical person. Digital technology has saved me time, and given me the comfort that my work will last, if not for ever, then longer than it would have.

I am writing this essay on a computer, much as I edited my last few films on a digital system. I am not nostalgic about the ancient technologies of mechanical film splicers and the behemoth that was the editing machine - the mighty Steenbeck. I haven't edited a film on a Steenbeck for almost 10 years. But when I was invited to direct a film version of Krapp's Last Tape, I couldn't resist the possible confluence of form, content and process.

What better way to edit a film based on a play about a man obsessed with spools and tape than on a machine that uses reels and film? As I would edit an image of John Hurt, playing Krapp, staring at a spool of recording tape unfurling itself on an antiquated machine, I would be in a room staring at a reel of film as it unfurled itself on an equally ancient machine. My Steenbeck would form an alchemical synthesis with Krapp's tape recorder. As Krapp would delicately touch the tape that contained his treasured memories, I could touch the film that contained the image of Krapp. Both the tape and the film were physical objects that evoked the human frailty of the stories they contained. They could be scratched, stretched, and damaged. They could fade away, and possibly be restored.

In October 1969, Beckett staged a production of Krapp at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt in Berlin. Beckett's production notes were contained in a simple notebook, which he later donated to Reading University Library in England. The book consists of 71 leaves, of which 19 are blank. Beckett has noted, relating to Krapp's tape collection: "Since there is a reference in the text to box nine, and five reels of tape in each box, on the table there must be at least 9 x 5 = 45 recordings = birthdays = years. So, when he began making the recordings, he must have been at most 69 - 45 = 24 years of age."

A physical calculation of a man's age by a physical calculation of the material he used to record his life. We are not only the product of the experiences we have lived, and the stories contained within us. Just as essential are the containers we use to store that experience, and the way they hold our stories.

Atom Egoyan's film of Krapp's Last Tape, starring John Hurt, will screen at the State Theatre on January 10 and 12, as part of the Sydney Festival's Beckett on Film program. Bookings: 1300 136 166; www.sydneyfestival.org.au