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Sleep Furiously: A film by Gideon Koppel

“Sleep Furiously” is taken from a quote by Noam Chomsky “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” and the film, directed by Gideon Koppel, features the community of Trefeurig where he grew up with his parents, who settled in the village as German Jews, after the war.
The DVD sleeve contains an analysis by Mark Ford with his article from the Guardian and John Banville’s piece from Sight and Sound. In the densely written cover sleeve one of them quotes Thomas Hardy’s poem The Self-Unseen as an illustrative signpost to the core of the film (see road signs below!)

The Self-Unseeing

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day
Everything glowed with a gleam,
Yet we were looking away!

It’s a very good film. You can see the thread of life and connective tissue of people’s existence and creations woven through it, and at the end there is an image that conjures a pair of moth’s wings fluttering in the light. Translucent and ephemeral facts of Life. Through the course of the film the images used become less and less substantial until what’s left is something flickering. The final image is in fact a window which is steady and letting in the light and simultaneously offering a view looking out. What flickers is the fine thready membranous curtains around it, then even that is gone. There’s a lot of that: there and gone, and the context of things is never the same. Something is one thing one minute and woven through life into other scenarios and contexts the next. The film also looks fondly at the things that mark regularity.

Throughout you see ‘things’ being functional and in use, and towards the end types of those things having been turned into artefacts, eg for sale as part of a lot in an auction. When they become rusted artefacts instead of being used for their functional purpose, then it’s endgame. Something is over.

Road signs
There is also an amusing play on this in the little cameo about the road signs! This is lovely and illustrates a longing for something that was a modern metal replacement to become rusted and, in its turn, get replaced by the old-fashioned wooden type that preceded it! Won’t spoil the humour of that by going into detail.

The sleeve writers both pick out the Chomsky quote to illustrate the point of his (Chomsky’s) having alighted on something that while being grammatically or semantically correct, actually makes no sense at all in terms of meaning. I think Chomsky uses those words because in them he is speaking the language of the Soul, which unites apparent contradictions. Actually dissolves them, or if you want to reference Blake ‘Without [apparent] contraries, is no progression’.

The film unfolds something of the Soul, and the play of life which the Soul breathes through and motivates. Activity rolls along through perfectly constructed rituals which have no meaning in the eternal sense other than the Being from which they Become and then Return to, and that journey is illustrated as delightful, humorous and painful, all of a piece.

The gestalt of this film is really lovely and I can see entirely why it emerged and swam through the plethora of films of its kind to get our attention. There’s much about it, and with intelligent and integrated use of music sits very comfortably indeed with the explorations in Walking on Water at www.bernadettereed.co.uk
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I was actually lucky enough to see the ‘premiere’ of this film over at theauteurs.com a month or so back, and wrote a little piece about it for the blog. It’s been a while coming, but here we go…

Gideon Koppel’s debut documents the slow tempo’d day to day life of a small Welsh farming village, in a compassionate film of drudgery-cum-community strung neatly together by a series of little non-events. An artistic endeavor, the film is neither experimental nor commercial, simply a loose weave of tableau set against the rolling green hills of a very windy Wales.

The central interests of the plot are repeating sects of narrative linked together by cleverly implemented mise-en-scene; the uniform of school children in the strand relating to the shutting down of the local primary, the Librarian in his mobile library as he visits the towns residents, the flat caps and tractors of the farmers as they partake in sheep herding contests, Calving and plough fields; one scene attacks you out of nowhere, a straight cut into a shed where two farmers are yanking a new born out of a cow, no-holds-barred-national-geographic style. But for some reason, as a viewer you are not shocked by what you see; it’s all part and parcel of the life that you have been watching for the last half an hour or so, a natural occurrence that goes on regardless that we are watching. It’s not particularly entertaining, it’s not all that informing; it is a statement of the obvious, a document of modern times, albeit the dying legacy of a waning way of life.

Shirking the electric pace of his contemporaries, Koppel slows the pace of his documentary right down, far removed from the sharp editing and bouncy graphics apparent in a Moore or Spurlock. This is much more Nouvelle Vague, much slower, much more about the look and texture of the places and people. The events are unimportant, Koppel is guiding us to an analysis of who and what the people are, archiving them so that future generations don’t forget about the simpler ways of living. It acts as a true social commentary, not inflicting or inviting judgment, simply showing what it is to be these people.

Sleep Furiously has been described as a poetic and profound journey into a world of endings and beginnings. In Gideon Koppel’s film, this theme is reflected through the uncertain future of a village school, a mobile librarian’s reluctant move from a paper to digital process of cataloguing and the various time-honoured life cycles of rural existence.

Given the way that Koppel has arranged and presents his material, an audience could be forgiven for imagining that what we’re experiencing is the demise of human life in a particular part of north-east Aberystwyth. The film concludes with ghostly images of a deserted dwelling already succumbing to the ravages of the elements. Reality provides a different picture. After dipping in the 60s as a result of declining industry the region’s population has risen consistently through recent decades and overtaken even the demographic highs which accompanied the mining boom of the 19th century. To be fair, Koppel has refuted any labelling of his film as documentary and so cleverly avoids the medium’s contextual responsibilities. Like the acquiescent signpost in the middle of his film, the filmmaker seems to point rather nonchalantly towards other documentaries – lanes which even a hands-off Direct Cinema documentarian wouldn’t have resisted investigating. Koppel however seems less interested in probing, more in observing.

In an interview with Jason Wood, Koppel shares fragments of inspiration from themes in Peter Handke’s play Kasper: internal and external landscapes; questions about belonging; a sense of what is possible rather than what is or was. More insightful is a reference to Kaspar’s struggle for language. Koppel’s titles refer us to a specific predicament: finding the courage to express oneself in the face of change but not the words to accompany that courage. The form of Sleep Furiously feels very close to this: stunted utterings of anxiety and indignation amidst a prevailing climate of stoicism. The film itself seems to embody the position of a villager at one of the community meetings held to discuss the council’s plans for the local school, and it’s here that Koppel’s titles begin to resonate. Set against a barrage of music practice we focus on individual attendees listening anxiously to announcements of the changes that are to befall them. Occasionally, someone summons the courage to express concerns but never with the fluency that shapes ideas and sustains confrontation. These episodes are sparse and fleeting. Koppel quickly quits the politics for the quietude of daily village practices – art and music teaching, cake-making, restoration, dairy farming, berthing, hay-binding, tilling, sheep herding. Here his camera lingers, almost longingly, as if embodying Kasper’s desire to “be someone like somebody else once was.”

Wood’s appraisal of the work as “lyrical filmmaking at its very best” unnecessarily over-rates the film; seasoned cinephiles will need to moderate that claim. Sleep Furiously requires stepping down a gear in much the same way that sub-Saharan African cinema often does, and once in sync with its languid pace, what is conveyed most distinctly are things already known but always worth being reminded of: the staggering beauty of natural landscape; the simplicity and serenity of rural existence; the enduring spirit of small communities.

http://picturehouseblog.co.uk/2009/05/27/gideon-koppel-talks-about-his-debut-film-sleep-furiously/

I could have lived perfectly without watching this film. It misses a lot of economy in the way of telling things. Trimming the footage at least 25-30min would have made the film more bareable.
Although in some cases the photoography is simply beautiful, the director uses in excess the same filming resources (never ending long shots, fast motion shots, lower angles shots, shots from inside/outside of the van). This makes the film repetitive and the cinematography techniques used extremely obvious. The way it has been shot makes you to not feel close to the people you see in the film and therfore not very interested about what is happening to them. The inclusion of text at the very end of the film, break the consistency of the language used during the whole film. It should have been used more or not at all.