One day in a small village along the coast of Wales, a fishing harbour that is surviving in coming modernity that is going to destroy it and later on transform it. The film enables the director to create a real world extracted from Dylan Thomas's words, and the general description of the historical heritage of the village can be uttered by some guide on a bus half full of old ladies touristing around the country and the conclusion is the village can get levelled down no one would protest. That was a long time ago. Since then these small fishing villages on the Welsh coast have become seaside resorts for all kinds of rich people. Dylan Thomas tries to recreate the life of the village the way he remembers it. The film shifts the observing eye from the author to first a couple of unnamed male strangers going through the village and saying absolutely nothing, hence being pure creations in this film to focus especially on one observer, through whose ears and blind eyes we can discover everything, Captain Cap. This is also a great shift in the point of view of the poem. The medium is the message and the camera imposes its own point of view. I will definitely say it is a good thing to visualize the poem that is otherwise difficult to follow, but at the very same time it is imposing one interpretation, one reading onto the poem, a linear reading that does not accept contradictions and multifariousness. Personally I think a poem should not be visualized on a screen. It must remain language. A recording of this language is already reducing the number of possible readings, but it cannot really reduce it to one reading. Images often do because no matter what you may say, it is them that will come out first and last, dominant, number one. You may call a fish a cat, it will be what the image says and if the image is that of a fish, it will not be a cat. Whereas the word can accept metaphorical transpositions and displacements and even distortions. Images do not accept metaphors very easily except through ellipses, which are more metonymies than metaphors, whereas words can easily express sleepless green ideas that sleep furiously. Yet the film is interesting because the editing makes us jump from one place to so many others with hardly one blink of one eye that we get a little bit dizzy and that is supposed to create in us a certain nostalgic feeling for the past, the long gone and forgotten and lost past.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne