The gaze of things and the perceived object in Samuel Beckett’s <i>Film</i>

Traditional interpretations of Samuel Beckett’s Film tend to operate within an anthropocentric framework, often overlooking the crucial agency of the nonhuman elements that saturate the work. Drawing on the theoretical developments of the twenty-first-century ‘material turn’, this article reconsiders Film through the lens of the ‘gaze of things’ – the perceptual pressure exerted by nonhuman entities. Focusing on three distinct modes of object-oriented perception – the mechanical gaze exerted by the technological object of the camera E, the presence-induced gaze of animals and inanimate objects in the room, and the historical gaze embodied in photographs – this study reveals the ontological predicament of O as a ‘perceived object’. His desperate struggle to escape objecthood only reinforces it, culminating in the harrowing revelation that the most inescapable perceiver is the self’s own material embodiment. O’s entrapment is thus revealed to be not merely psychological but profoundly material and relational, highlighting Beckett’s pioneering engagement with a posthuman condition defined by the entangled coexistence of human and nonhuman.