Welcome Learners,
While studying ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’ and Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ in our Modern Literature Course, our professor discussed the film version of Beckett’s shortest play ‘Breath’ - thirty-seconds play and assigned us one of the most creative tasks to interpret this shortest play and shoot a small video.
Click on the link to navigate to Prof. Dr Dilip Barad Sir's blog on Interpretation Challenge: Breath: The Shortest Play by Samuel Beckett
Here is the script of this shortest play titled 'Breath'
CURTAIN Up
1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold about five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum - together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold for about five seconds.
3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in 1) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold about five seconds.
CURTAIN Down
Picturization of 'Breath' play
After watching this play the question may arise in our mind that is this activities are significant or meaningless? Well, To answer this question we can take help of different philosophies about life. If we apply Nihilism then it seems that all the things which we do in between these two ends is pointless just like the meaningless universe. Life has no purpose, goal or meaning. Our life is totally absurd.
On the other side if we look at the same question from an Absurdist point of view then it accepts the reality of incoherency of Human life and within that absurdities it seeks to find the ways to live within the meaningless universe.
The video end with the cry again it symbolizes a death of a person. So, It is a journey of human life from birth to death and in between what is the purpose of human life.
In this video Remote symbolize that we have control over our life.The remote of our life is in our hand.We can do whatever we wish..As Sartre said about existentialism,
“We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are — that is the fact.”
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
- Jean Paul Sartre
Another symbol is the thread reel.We all know that tread is used for join two clothes or any two things.In the same manner our life is also like a thread reel.We spend our days and nights in making our relationship stronger with people. And also time and again we motivate ourselves by making patchwork to do something new creative in life.We waste our life in connecting the relationship,maintaining the relationship.Like Sisyphus, we are doing that activities which are meaningless.
Doll is a symbol of human being.If we put the remote and doll together we can say that the doll has no choice to live its life.It is controlled by human beings.Somewhere We also are control by our society in one and another way.If we can’t do according to our choice so what is the meaning of life?
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