For instance, directors often puzzle about the “Where are all these corpses from?” section in Act Two: What the hell are these guys talking about? What does it mean? Beckett’s notebook specifies that they have suddenly seen the audience and are horrified. It’s a gag. It’s a dig at the audience. What it’s not is an Intellectual Mountain. Much of the fog in the more mystical sections clears away when you can say, “Hello! It’s a joke!”- GODOT QUOTES & DIRECTOR’S NOTES (bozolisand.com)
Who is Godot? What does he Mean? Is he supposed to be God? The magic words: Who Cares? Godot is what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin – a plot device about which the characters care desperately, but the audience isn’t meant to give a damn.
- The Hidden Fortress: Three Good Men and a Princess (criterion.com)
The Hidden Fortress was Akira Kurosawa’s first hit after 1954’s Seven Samurai, four years and four films earlier. It won even bigger at the box office and scooped up a handful of Japanese and international awards, proving that its director was not merely an art-house auteur but could fill theaters as well. The film’s popularity in Japan was instrumental in securing financial guarantees for Kurosawa’s own production company, which supported all his subsequent films up to 1970. The pacing and characters of The Hidden Fortress, its landscapes and epic feel, make it a great action film, and as Kurosawa’s first use of widescreen, it is one of his most stylish movies. With this film, the director’s artistry and humanist ideology spectacularly fused with the entertainment values of adventure films and comedies.
- Waiting for Godot (Wikipedia)
Waiting for Godot (/ˈɡɒdoʊ/ GOD-oh) is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives. Waiting for Godot is Beckett’s reworking of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) “a tragicomedy in two acts”.