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Abstract
This essay considers the inter-relations of aesthetics and politics in sleep furiously (UK, 2007). I examine whether, in this film at least, social concerns and visual beauty might not just coexist, and how each might be in some ways reliant on the other to be fully realised. The film might then be seen to instantiate a challenge to the frequently proposed polarity between the profilmic world and the creative interventions of documentary filmmaking, which are often reckoned to prevent viewers from making a valid connection with that world in political, social and/or ethical terms. Yet sleep furiously cannot escape another perennial issue confronting documentary: that of social class.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank those who listened to versions of this paper at the University of Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London, for their useful questions and comments.
Notes
1. For an excellent critique of aesthetic and political anxieties about ‘troublesome’ images in both classical and post-1968 film theory, see Galt, Citation2010. See also Jay Citation1993, Nichols Citation2008. For an overview of, and response to, iconophobia in the humanities, see Stafford Citation1996.
2. See, for instance, several of the essays in Grant and Sloniowski Citation1998.
3. In addition to studied framings and compositions of the work of building a ship, Rotha's Shipyard includes a striking use of slow motion and low angles in footage of workers racing their dogs on a Sunday. This temporary release from the disciplines of work is celebrated in particular via two slow-mo shots of a man swinging his dog around by the front paws. The brief profilmic moment of beauty (corporeal motion unshackled from the demands of capitalist production) is amplified and extended through film technique, obliquely offering a momentary counterpoint to the dominant theme of ‘heroic labour’ that Winston (Citation1995, 41) rightly locates in the film.
4. Winston also notes the Griersonians' unacknowledged debt to the nineteenth-century realist movement in French painting, which allowed them to claim social relevance without sacrificing artistic status: ‘Griersonian “anti-aestheticism”, upon closer examination, turns out to be little but a reiteration of realist pleas for the artist to be engagé’ (1995, 28).
5. ‘The title is a reference to Noam Chomsky, who in support of his linguistic theories famously offered “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that is nonsensical even though the grammar is perfectly correct. It is not clear what we are to take from this nudge in the ribs that Koppel delivers us’ (Banville Citation2009, 44).
6. I take beauty to be historically and culturally contingent, despite some parallels across different cultures. On the demotion of beauty in contrast to the sublime, see Scarry Citation1999, 82–5; on the demotion of the ‘pretty’ in contrast to beauty, see Galt Citation2010, 5, 8.
7. The acts of recreation included in the film (sheepdog trials, the village show, choir practice) all require the repeated efforts of work. It is tempting to follow the example of Elaine Scarry and write in every instance about ‘work’ and not ‘labour’, in so far as sleep furiously makes a deliberate attempt to represent work as taking place via the human body, and in concert with the earth on which such bodies operate. However, to do so would be to imply that all the work depicted here is unalienated and somehow beyond the capitalist system of exchange, which is not always the case. Instead, I argue that elements of alienation and self-realisation can coexist both in labour and in work, so I use the terms more or less interchangeably. Scarry summarises Marx's conception of work and labour in Capital: Volume One thus: ‘It is precisely because earth and tools are man's extended body that property, which severs the worker from his [sic] extended body, places him in the position of selling not his work but his now-truncated activity of labor [sic]’ (Scarry Citation1994, 85n11).
8. In the film pressbook, Koppel writes that music provides ‘the different “voices” of the key characters’ (2008, 8). The privilege of a musical theme is extended to John Jones and Pip Koppel, but not to anyone else.
9. Koppel shot the film on 16 mm, and has written: ‘a video image of a magnificent landscape […] says “great landscape” loud and clear, but little else. The same landscape shot on film may allow the audience to “fall into” the image, to engage with it through their imagination’ (2008, 5–6).
10. The enigma quietly raised here (Who is this man? Where is he going, and why?) is never resolved. He is neither seen nor heard of again.
11. This despite the traces of CitationKoppel's own personal investments in, and detachment from, the place where his mother lives; and despite also the unfortunate and inappropriate title given to a reprinting of extracts from the sleep furiously pressbook in Sight and Sound, which trades on the clichéd assumptions of a metropolitan idea of remote countryside: ‘The land that time forgot’ (2009, 44–5).
12. ‘We needed the wind and rain to be almost omnipresent in the film, as if constantly hearing the albeit changing sounds of a protagonist's heartbeat and breathing’ (Koppel Citation2008, 8).
13. Koppel describes his earlier hour-long pilot on Trefeurig, A Sketchbook for The Library Van, as ‘an antithesis of the proposed film [sleep furiously], one in which the inhabitants of the community were isolated from the landscape which is integral to their lives and stories’ (2008, 5).
14. But see also Worrall Citation1994 on contradictions evident in Repton's writing, around private property, aesthetics and the economic function of land.
15. For a further consideration of the complex relations between aesthetics, morality, economic activity and privilege in Gilpin's writing, see Copley Citation1994. See also Janowitz Citation1994 for later Chartist responses to, and appropriations of, the picturesque, especially in representations of Wales.
16. Reviewing the film in Sight and Sound, novelist John Banville called Jones ‘the male lead’ and Pip ‘the female star’ (2009, 44).
17. The repetition of both musical themes and framing in these landscape shots emphasises the two characters' status. Jones' theme is used three more times, over footage of him eating in, or driving, the van. Pip's theme is used twice more, as she hangs out washing and walks past the same trees in the snow.
18. Neither of these two naturally occurring horizontal lines is entirely straight.
19. Corner outlines two key aesthetic devices in what might be called ‘art documentary’, as discussed in documentary studies: pictorialism and an emphasis on ‘the satisfactions […] of narrative, documentary as story-telling’ (Corner in Austin and de Jong Citation2008, 21–2, italics in the original).
20. For instance, one man stands by a metal signpost to read his comic poem in praise of its wooden predecessor. Another jokes about eating pork belly while watching a sow and her new piglets.
21. A Welsh translation of ‘The Blue Bird’, composed in 1894 by Charles Villiers Stanford. The performance is credited to Cor ABC, a choir from the Aberystwyth area. The lack of subtitles empties the lyrics of representational meaning for non-Welsh speakers.
22. The choir sequence is followed by footage of the village show (judges inspecting a summerhouse, a man carefully arranging sticks of rhubarb on a white tablecloth, etc.). This is an event that could be easily mocked or used for bathetic effect, but here it is filmed with the precision and quiet respect that characterises the vast majority of the film.
23. Koppel's production notes are more explicit (2008, 3): ‘It is a landscape that is changing rapidly as small-scale agriculture, which characterised the area, is disappearing and the last generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out. What was once a community cut off from the world has now learned to adapt to modern times: the quad bike has replaced the pony; the mobile phone has spared people the need to shout across the valley; and exotic creatures like llama are starting to make a claim for residency, alongside sheep.’