Nothing much happens in SLEEP FURIOUSLY except real life
SLEEP FURIOUSLY (Gideon Koppel, 2008)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, July 29
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.fandor.com
Gideon Koppel’s achingly beautiful, gorgeously photographed Sleep Furiously seems to take place in a land that time forgot. The Liverpool-raised Koppel and his small crew spent eight months in the rural farming community of Trefeurig in Wales, where his German-Jewish refugee parents lived for many years. Inspired by Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, which was set not far from Trefeurig, Koppel props up his camera and just lets things happen; there is no linear narrative, and he has adamantly claimed that the film is about nothing. Of course, that’s not quite true. It’s about real life, happening at its own pace. Children learn music in school. Tractors lift bales of hay. People bid at a sheep auction. A woman prepares the church for mass. Calves and piglets are born. A man reads poetry by the side of the road. Koppel’s mother brings her dog to the vet. And at the center of it all, John Jones drives his library van through town once a month, talking about literature and sharing books with the eager community. Koppel rarely moves the camera, letting the action direct itself, using natural light and sound and a glittering minimalist soundtrack by Aphex Twin as humans and animals saunter in and out of the frame. Filmed at the pace of real life, Sleep Furiously, which got its title from the Noam Chomsky quote “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” does not worship the past by condemning modernity and abhorring technological advances. It merely is (although its politics are inherent). It’s about nothing, and it’s about everything. But most of all, it’s about everyday existence and the truth. In conjunction with the theatrical release of Sleep Furiously, fandor is showing for free Koppel’s 2005 work A Sketchbook for the Library Van, a charming hour-long documentary that focuses on Jones and his traveling bookmobile and also features members of the community telling stories about their life in Trefeurig.