| Two Dylan Thomas Documentaries |
Television Arts Feature |
| ‘Dylan Thomas: A Poet's Guide’ & ‘Under Milk Wood in Pictures. Peter Blake Does Dylan’ Mentorn/ BBC Wales , Bulb-Boom Pictures & Mentorn/ BBC Wales , October 15, 2014 |
The Dylan Thomas centenary has launched a thousand events. ‘Dylan Thomas A Poet's Guide’ is one with a difference. It is about the poetry. It is presented by an authoritative voice who knows the subject. A film about a poet gets to be actually presented by a poet, who meets a range of speakers who are also poets. Qualified people who know, and care about, the subject; it is quite a good idea for a documentary. Owen Sheers eschews hagiography. At the start he acknowledges the critical view of the verse that it is ‘showy…overblown…turbocharged”. His own view is forthright ‘the most original poetic visionary of the last hundred years.’ Producer-director Ian Michael Jones eschews all the fashion items that disfigure the documentary genre- no overblown score, no MTV-speed editing. He lets his presenter sit at a table with a copy of the ‘Listener’ of 14th March 1934. Sheers walks into the bedroom at Cwmdonkin Drive, speaks, glances across to the window with its view of a blank wall. He stands over the teenage notebooks that were to provide material for poetry that persisted long into the adult life. He gets the critique right. It is not about what a poem means but how it means. Thomas wants his verse to be ‘a sensory event’. Sheers identifies recognises the importance of the wartime service with the three poems on the bombing of British cities. Andrew Motion is reader and explicator for ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London‘. Sheers walks the Carmarthenshire lane to the farmhouse where ‘Fern Hill’ was written. John Goodby locates it in its time of writing. It is a poem of peace written in September 1945. Arriving eventually at ‘Do not go gentle…’ its accomplishment, says Sheers, is to ‘make people feel poetry has some use in the world ‘ The short last period of celebrity across the Atlantic casts a glitzy shadow over the life in Laugharne and London. ‘In February 1950 Dylan Thomas stepped onto a plane bound for America’ runs the script ‘and poetry stepped into the mass media age’. ‘The Chelsea Hotel and the White Horse are stations of the cross but the myth has obscured the verse.’ Thomas may have done one hundred and fifty public readings in the USA but he still had to schlepp his own suitcases. He was rude about his own performance voice calling it hammy and Charles Laughton-esque. He had not done badly at home, Sheers reminds us. ‘Deaths and Entrances’ had sold ten thousand copies when Thomas was only aged thirty-one. The music for ‘Dylan Thomas: A Poet's Guide’ divides; piano for Wales, a snappy jazz score for the USA. Poets read, comment and add texture. Gwyneth Lewis reads a poem that she confesses to finding difficult but is ‘so knowing about what is losing’. Clare Pollard: ‘he's so unembarrassed, there's a boldness to it.’ Paul Muldoon feels a sense of timelessness as if they had made themselves. but a lot of banging and sawing that have gone into their making. He looks at a worksheet that reveals the alteration from ‘sings’ to ‘spins his morning of praise’. Other illuminating comment comes from Menna Elfyn, Jo Shapcott and Simon Armitage. That shed, in its replica form, has been hauled to and fro across Wales this year. Just six poems were written in it, adds Sheers. Accuracy matters. The primary impression left by ‘Under Milk Wood in Pictures Peter Blake Does Dylan’ is that the production team has scant interest in either poetry or art. The script is lazy, the interviewees uninformative, the off-screen narration matey in tone tending to the gauche. ‘Peter’ the voice tells us, ‘will never know what Dylan thinks about his artworks.’ Well, no. The artist was only aged twenty at the time of the poet’s death. Jeff Towns, a voice of authority, becomes in this laddish script “the ultimate Dylan know-it-all.” The lack of interest in the art is established at the outset. In place of saying something about the art of Peter Blake the script, on autopilot, declares it ‘defined an era’. With a liking for the phrase it declares a few minutes later that he ‘defined a generation’. The choice of interviewees is a celebrity chase. Weathered rock greats provide an excuse to digress for a film clip of a sixties hit. ‘Dylan was the world's hip hop artist although he didn't know it himself’ opines a good singer but not so great a literary commentator. As for the art of Peter Blake, the subject of the film, the rapid editing of the pictures allows it a small fraction of the film time. The camera prefers to pan over the images so they are rarely seen in their entirety. In this view of this metro-centred script Laugharne is ‘remote and isolated’, ‘a town full of characters’, ‘a mad place.’ The researchers, if there were any, might have pointed out it is four miles from a railway line and close to the ancestral Thomas home. The whole uncertain, uninterested film is capped with a lot of over-insistent plinky plonky music that irritates. The Dylan Thomas centenary has launched a thousand events. This one is a fighting contender for the prize as the most half-hearted and indolent. As a footnote the script in its fawning Boy’s Own celebrity wallow omits all mention of woman artist Jann Haworth in the making of the ‘Sergeant Pepper’ cover. This article first appeared in Wales Arts Review. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
This review has been read 527 times There are 28 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
