Five years before Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he made a film starring an aging Buster Keaton. The film is called Film. The script is basically a treatment for a very long chase scene (a little over 20 minutes) between two characters: O (object, played by Buster Keaton) and E (eye, played by the camera). Eye pursues Object but can catch him only glancingly, obliquely, from behind. This action perfectly embodies Beckett’s famous distrust for film and recordings of any kind (see Krapp’s Last Tape), and is essentially Beckett making a film about why film is awful. Which. Of course he did. The only thing more Beckett than that is the fact that Film has only one line in it, which is “Shhh.”

I knew Notfilm, Ross Lipman’s self-described documentary “kino-essay” about the making of Film, was leaning a little hard on its academic pleasures when early on Lipman aurally winks as he says that Beckett’s film essentially amounts to a philosophical critique of an 18th-century Irish philosopher named George Berkeley and his notions of perception.

Like Film, the best thing about Notfilm is the why-didn’t-I-think-of-them affinities between Beckett and Keaton. Film was Keaton’s last hurrah, and Lipman movingly lays out the pathos of a silent-film star on the cusp of a golden age of cinema that necessarily excluded him. Meanwhile, Beckett is staring down the barrel of a camera that’s about to marginalize the genre of his genius. Watching those dynamics play out is fascinating, as is seeing the never-before-seen backstage bleaknesses, but just make sure you bring a cup of coffee when you see the show.