Planet Online - sleep furiously

Letting the Images Tell the Story

sleep furiously
Director: Gideon Koppel
94 minutes, UK, 2008.
Certificate: U

25.06.09
Noam Chomsky’s phrase, “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”, is an example of a sentence that, while syntactically correct, is ultimately meaningless. sleep furiously, however, is a more than appropriate title for Gideon Koppel’s debut film, a poetic, non-narrated documentary centring on the mid-Wales village of Trefeurig. The deliberately lower-case title reflects the gentleness of many of the film’s scenes – the ploughing of a field and the baking of a cake, for instance – and its speeded-up sequences, such as those of a child sleeping fidgetedly, and of clouds passing over windswept trees, suggest that this is a village that does indeed sleep furiously.

The film’s working title was The Library Van, which points to the importance of John Jones – a mobile librarian who delivers books from his yellow van to the village’s inhabitants – to the film. The van acts, in Koppel’s words, as an “actual and metaphoric vehicle of stories”, and Jones’s journeys to his customers’ homes are accompanied by a signature tune by Aphex Twin (this is the first time that Richard James has allowed his music to be appear on film) and have the effect of drawing the film’s disparate strands together. The other main “character” is Pip, the filmmaker’s mother. She and her husband, Heinz, were German-Jewish immigrants who moved to Trefeurig when Gideon was aged 12. In a moving scene, we follow Pip and her two dogs, Daisy and Jack, on their walk to her husband’s hillside grave to place a small commemorative stone.

sleep furiously brings to mind the all-too-familiar subject of rural dilapidation – the village school, for instance, faces closure – but, like any good storyteller, Koppel does not propagandise; he simply lets the images he has captured tell their own story. In fact, the film’s best scenes transcend political considerations. In one scene, for example, the camera focuses on two groups of sheep – one at the top of the screen, the other at the bottom – as they slowly cross a hillside in single file from the right to the left of the screen. The stillness and silence are captivating.

The film’s main language is Welsh (subtitled into English), and Koppel, a non-Welsh-speaker, has remarkably claimed that he filmed scenes in which his subjects speak Welsh, such as that in which a group of elderly women discuss the school’s impending closure over tea and biscuits, by following the melody of the spoken word, rather than through any understanding of what was being said. Combined with his finely-tuned ear, the director also captures moments of sweet-tempered humour; in one scene, a farmer struggles to herd his sheep, while, in another, Pip relates a taxidermist’s instructions on what to do before sending him a dead owl: “Freeze it and when it’s really frozen, put it in the post.”

Some reviews of sleep furiously have rather lazily referenced Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (1954) when discussing the film’s context, when more appropriate touching posts – from a Welsh point of view at least – are recent works that suggest the decline of rural Wales, such as Caryl Lewis’s Martha, Jac a Sianco (2004) and the photography of Illtud Llŷr Dunsford (featured in Planet 155). Koppel’s own comments that the film should be seen as evocative of childhood and that it depicts the passage from nature to culture cannot be said to ring entirely true either. Nevertheless, sleep furiously is a thoroughly impressive and affecting film, and the concluding, moving epigraph – “It is only when I see the end of things that I find the courage to speak. The courage, but not the words.” – provides as effective a summation as any of the previous hour and a half’s action.

Owain Wilkins