Cofiwch Dryweryn (keep in mind Tryweryn). The partitions exhort us in vibrant purple and white, from Llanrhystud in West Wales to Chicago. And the writing’s not solely on the wall: it’s on a sticker on a lamppost exterior Camden Market in North London, on posters and mugs and automotive bumpers and T-shirts, all the fabric media you may think about. Past its authentic referent, it’s been adopted and tailored and repurposed for various different ends, too. It rushes by means of the wires and over the airwaves, in defiance of all and any typical geography.
What does this contemporary mene, mene, tekel ask us to recollect?
In 1965, sixty years to this, the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn in Cwm Tryweryn, Meirionnydd, North Wales, was cleared and flooded, together with the agricultural valley by which it lay. The aim was to create a reservoir to supply Liverpool with water for quite a lot of functions, by order of the Liverpool Company utilizing means which, whereas authorized, totally bypassed native planning and democratic processes and left the individuals of Tryweryn disenfranchised and displaced. There was concerted, sustained protest over ten years from 1955 because the Tryweryn growth was deliberate, but ultimately, none might forestall it. Twenty years in the past, in 2005, the Metropolis of Liverpool provided its recognition of the ‘damage’ brought on a era since, and an apology for ‘any insensitivity’ within the actions of its predecessor metropolis council.
It was in response to these occasions of 1955-65 that the phrases ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ had been first painted within the early Sixties by poet, writer, journalist and scholar Meic Stephens on a ruined wall close to Llanrhystud in Ceredigion, in conjunction with the A487. This coast highway would possibly look minor to some eyes. Nevertheless, it’s a key piece of infrastructure, being one of many few foremost routes from North to South Wales (or South to North, relying on the place you might be and wish to go.) Right here, then, the daring slogan commanded – and nonetheless instructions, for it’s nonetheless there, albeit by now a lieu de mémoire with a wealthy, contested historical past of its personal – a large, cellular readership. It has lengthy since gone on the highway itself, taking up a transnational, materials and digital life, as partially documented as an illustration by the Cofiwch Dryweryn on-line mapping undertaking, and a current guide with phrases and color pictures. As such, this graffiti – and meme – now maintain multitudes of meanings which invite evaluation in their very own proper.
However at its origin, Cofiwch Dryweryn was a protest, and concurrently a name for important recollection of a selected historic occasion with emblematic dimensions. It might be overstatement to assert that the Tryweryn controversy alone modified the trail of contemporary Wales. Tryweryn, and Wales, and the very nature of historical past itself, are all extra multi-dimensional than that.
But there’s little doubt that the Tryweryn years are of nice significance for contemporary Wales – and all the opposite loci and histories with which it’s linked. The influence of Tryweryn lives on inter alia in politics and the regulation, and in cultural reminiscence, alongside the legacies of many different dam-building and related tasks, some extra controversial than others.
Certainly, it isn’t fanciful to recommend that an vital (if partial) fashionable Welsh historical past – all such enterprises are partial – could possibly be written through the historical past of its hydroengineering, by means of exploring critically the tales of its dams, its reservoirs and their afterlives. Such a undertaking would should be a cultural historical past too, drawing within the astonishing proliferation of Cofiwch Dryweryn graffiti, and a sustained physique of different works in lots of genres and media; it could hint a fancy cultural reminiscence.
Sixty years have flowed by because the submersion of Tryweryn in 1965, but the making of dams and reservoirs usually is not any bygone. In reality, developing large dams and reservoirs stays a really modern, and a really international enterprise. Way back to the 12 months 2000, the World Fee on Dams reported that by the top of the 20th century, some 45,000 main dams had been constructed all over the world, and that within the Seventies, some two or three new massive dams had been being projected someplace on daily basis. Amongst different profound environmental and political impacts, the Fee estimated that by the top of the final millennium, between round 40 and 80 million individuals worldwide had been completely displaced from their properties to create dams. One might write a historical past not solely of contemporary Wales however of the entire world by means of its reservoirs.
Right this moment, 1 / 4 of a century on from the Fee’s report, the planning and calculating and digging and carrying and constructing of dams proceed apace, primarily within the International South, but usually intertwined additionally with transnational contexts. Thus, lots of the individuals who occur to cross by Cofiwch Dryweryn graffiti from Nebraska to Nefyn to Brighton can have their very own reminiscences and tales of different valleys, in so many different locations, misplaced to the management and accumulation of water. Right this moment, then, any important cultural histories of reservoirs have to be comparative, dialogical and have interaction international connections.
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On this world, with its horrible ledgers of thirst and deluge, its tensions between outdated and new energies, discovering the proper phrases to embody the curious results and impacts of engineered lakes won’t appear, at first sight, to be our best precedence. Neither would possibly making shut readings of artworks about reservoirs look like an particularly pressing problem, as waters rise internationally.
However the Anthropocene calls for we expect concurrently on each planetary and molecular scales; about deep time and about proper now, and all of sudden. That is exhausting to do, very exhausting: too exhausting, maybe, not less than more often than not. Maybe desirous about the tales we inform about dramatically altering worlds may also help.
So, on this second of jeopardy, there is likely to be actual worth in contemplating critically our narratives concerning the management of water, and the language and pictures we’ve at our disposal for this work. On this mild, a important exploration of our histories of reservoirs, dams, and of properties misplaced to flooding, of the displacements of those that lived there all of the sudden begin to look well timed – and very important.
It’s not too quickly, then, to make notes in the direction of a reservoirian aesthetics, a reservoirian poetics. Right here, I don’t imply aesthetics or poetics within the sense of a theorization of magnificence however methods of understanding how visible and verbal artworks, and discourse extra usually, about reservoirs work, what they may imply. And I say reservoirian, as a result of we’re positively going to be needing an adjective.
This important examine of representations of deliberately drowned worlds joins arms inter alia with newer disciplines in language and cultural research: vitality humanities, blue humanities, environmental humanities amongst others. Research of language justice will play an element too, as a result of usually, the creation of reservoirs usually disproportionately impacts linguistically minoritized populations, alongside those that are marginalized in different methods, influentially characterised by scholar Rob Nixon as ‘unimagined communities’.
For reservoir humanities, language issues in additional methods too, as a result of we may have new phrases for brand spanking new issues. In the beginning of our parched, flooded century, thinker Glenn Albrecht coined a time period for a selected, modern sense of loss: that of a well-recognized panorama erased without end resulting from local weather change. ‘Solastalgia’ is little doubt a phrase of which we might be making use in future; and it might apply, too, to the way in which we really feel the erasures of environments by grand hydroengineering tasks.
However are there phrases but for picturing, for these obscure feelings across the lack of a panorama which disappeared earlier than our time; for the painful disappearance of a location the place we’ve by no means lived, which we’ve by no means even seen? And is there a glossary for submerged homes and villages, these topsy-turvy mirror worlds the place every little thing that ought to be above water is under it? (These are by and huge areas of the creativeness, as a result of incessantly when reservoirs are created, buildings within the path of the water are demolished, or partially demolished, earlier than it will possibly stream in.) What can we name that peculiar feeling we get from unexpectedly seeing ruins re-emerge from depleted reservoirs in scorching summers? Typically, creators of reservoirs fastidiously protect some spectacular artefact, like a church tower, to stand up from the floor by which it’s so knowingly mirrored. Such sights are vertiginous. Who will write a lexicon for these loci and issues, their photographs in our minds, in and on water?
Reflecting, mirroring, doubling: these rank among the many traditional figures of das Unheimliche, the Uncanny, as recognized by Sigmund Freud in an essay of 1919. Freud describes the peculiarly unsettling results produced by one thing which is concurrently as acquainted as it’s unusual, and which factors obscurely to some horrible, occluded loss. However is the language of the Uncanny the (solely) idiom we’d like for a reservoirian aesthetics and poetics? It’s harder, I feel, to jot down on water than on a wall.
Curon Venosta, South Tyrol, 1962. Picture by Charles01 through Wikimedia Commons
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The geographer Erik Swyngedouw has tracked the course of water by means of dams and reservoirs, by means of miles of pipes, over viaducts and canals, alongside the treacherous paths of twentieth-century historical past and politics in Spain. His guide Liquid Energy: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain explores “how water turns into enrolled within the tumultuous technique of modernization and growth, and the way the qualities and powers of water fuse with social, political, and financial processes within the pursuit of social goals and fantasies”. Swyngedouw says, too, of water within the fashionable period:
It’s the stuff of visionaries and dreamers, bankers and builders, engineers and scientists, employees and peasants, states and industries, peoples and natures. But, the transformation of nature and society can also be impregnated with vitriolic energy struggles, entrenched territorial conflicts, overt or hidden processes of empowerment and disempowerment, of glory and defeat, of life and demise. Films usually seize this tumultuous course of in ways in which scholarly writings not often achieve doing.
Swyngedouw presents for example German director Werner Herzog’s epic movie Fitzcarraldo (1982) by which the eponymous protagonist seeks to construct an opera home within the Amazon jungle, funded by extracting its pure sources. These efforts culminate within the extraordinary and in the end failed undertaking of pulling an enormous steamship over a mountain by hand, so as to open up an inaccessible waterway for delivery the merchandise of the forest to market.
Swyngedouw’s argument can productively be prolonged to different types past movie, to literary works, and past. However as an preliminary foray into the delicate, topsy-turvy world of the reservoir in artwork, I take his cue and mirror on two seemingly very totally different photos concerning the flooding of rural communities. The primary is the The Final Days of Dolwyn (1949), directed by Emlyn Williams, the celebrated actor, author and theatre director from North Wales. This UK-made, English and Welsh-language film is about in an imagined, historic Wales. My second film is Elem Klimov’s Russian-language movie Proshchanie (Farewell) (1983), from the Soviet Union.
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In 2024, The Final Days of Dolwyn turned 75; it could be good to see this anniversary celebrated, if solely on this essay. This was the one movie Williams ever directed, and to the (restricted) extent that it’s in any respect remembered now, it’s because the younger Richard Burton’s display screen début. Filming befell on location in Rhydymain in Meirionnydd – not far, because it occurs, from Capel Celyn the place works on the Tryweryn dam had been quickly to begin. The film had its Welsh grand première on the Plaza Cinema, Bangor, after which one other in Caerdydd.
Six years earlier than the announcement of Liverpool’s plans for the Tryweryn valley, for a few of these première-goers, the movie, whereas totally fictional, would have evoked the historical past of different, earlier instances of communities drowned to create reservoirs. An instance is Llanwddyn in Powys, mid-Wales, near Meirionnydd, which needed to make method for one more Liverpudlian undertaking, Llyn Efyrnwy, in 1888.
The Final Days of Dolwyn opens with a present-day body narrative, by which vacationers go to a scenic lake and skim a memorial plaque to the village of Dolwyn beneath its waters. The primary physique of the movie then flashes again to point out the story of the reservoir’s formation, in 1892.
At the moment, Dolwyn lies just under an current reservoir, within the shadow of a large dam on greater floor above the village. On the outset, this totally Welsh-speaking neighborhood is stuffed with life and full of individuals, transferring cheerily, busily between chapel and pub, Eisteddfod and flower-show and hymn-singing competition, poaching and theologizing and taking a sly drink on Sundays (a most surprising factor within the Temperance tradition of nineteenth-century Nonconformist Wales, and for mid-twentieth century viewers in that custom too). However one thing new is afoot: a plan to accumulate, clear and flood the village, so as to route water from the reservoir to Lancashire. Different methods of reaching this finish are doable, however flooding Dolwyn is the most affordable.
It’s proposed that the villagers might be housed in a brand new property within the Liverpool suburb of Hagton (nomen est omen), erected by the wealthy industrialist behind the undertaking, Lord Lancashire, performed by Allan Aynesworth. They are going to then work in his cotton mill close by, in order that the absent lord is not going to solely pay money for the Dolwyn valley and its water however new tenants and employees, too.
Lancashire’s worker Rob Davies (Williams himself) pitches up in Dolwyn, tasked with shopping for all of the land this undertaking requires. For essentially the most half, it’s owned by widowed Woman Dolwyn (Barbara Couper), who might stay in a grand nation home however is so desperately deep in debt incurred by her profligate late husband, that reluctantly, she feels she should promote.
Concurrently, Rob places stress on Woman Dolwyn’s tenants to surrender their leases in change for some monetary compensation. After soul-searching, ultimately all agree, but doubt and worry stay. Gareth, Richard Burton’s character, has simply returned to Dolwyn after a depressing interval working in Liverpool, a transfer made in actual life after all by many younger individuals from poor North Welsh backgrounds within the nineteenth century and after. Town, he tells his foster mom, is insupportable, with ‘fog all day, and nothing inexperienced, mam, not a flower besides on ladies’s hats, and them false, and all of the individuals strangers to one another.’ On Gareth’s account, there may be no flower reveals in Hagton.
A date is about for everybody to depart. In a service marking the closure of the chapel, the eloquent minister imagines together with his congregation the village filling with ‘waters crawling with the toes of a thousand serpents … below the doorways, into the homes, in on the home windows, up the steps, over the roofs, over the nests of birds within the chimneys, over the chimneys. Dolwyn might be drowned.’
But, since this movie is actually a melodrama, occasions take an unexpected, miraculous flip, hinging on the selections and actions of its protagonist, Gareth’s foster mom, Merri. She is performed by the distinguished actor Dame Edith Evans, then in her sixties and taking her first movie function since 1916. Merri is the chapel caretaker and lives in an historical cottage within the centre of Dolwyn. She is heartbroken on the prospect of drowning the village and dropping her dwelling, to an excellent extent as a result of her son who died in infancy is buried there, below a headstone which options prominently.
Grief-stricken Merri, unable to ponder leaving, delays packing her belongings till late within the evening earlier than Dolwyn is because of be flooded. However when she lastly makes a begin, she and Gareth come throughout an historical doc written in English which Gareth, because of his time in Liverpool, is ready to learn. It proves to be a deed, fully forgotten in household reminiscence, which reveals that Merri isn’t Woman Dolwyn’s tenant in any respect, as she had all the time thought. In reality, certainly one of her forebears was way back gifted the household’s cottage and plot of land in perpetuity by an ancestor of the landowner’s, in gratitude for saving his life.
This growth is kind of the spoke in Lord Lancashire’s wheel, as he can’t pressure Merri to surrender her property, and subsequently can’t flood Dolwyn. He descends on the village in individual to place issues to rights and bend her to his will. However as Merri receives him politely but confidently for tea in her own residence, one property proprietor to a different, he quickly realizes she is not going to be moved, and develops respect for her. Lancashire realizes, too, the unanticipated human prices of his money-making scheme, for at this level we be taught that Rob had deceived him by claiming that no-one lived in Dolwyn. And as soon as Merri has managed to alleviate a extreme rheumatic ache which afflicts the industrialist by manipulating his shoulder, the 2 turn out to be one thing akin to pals. Lancashire is satisfied that he ought to spare Dolwyn by deciding on a costlier however much less harmful methodology for acquiring the water from the reservoir, and everybody celebrates.
Everybody, that’s, besides Rob. Despite his splendid London garments and much more splendid London English, and his insistence that he’s a cosmopolitan, it transpires that he was as soon as a neighborhood lad. A few years in the past, as a poor, homeless orphan, Rob stole cash from the chapel, and was pushed out of Dolwyn in ridicule and disgrace by different boys. Now he’s again for vengeance.
Lancashire’s affordable, humane volte face is subsequently a extreme blow for Rob. Wildly, at evening, he tries to open the floodgates of the dam to drown the village anyway. When this plan fails, he units about burning Dolwyn down as a substitute. Gareth intervenes, and tries to cease him, and Rob assaults him. Within the battle, Rob is by accident knocked down by Gareth and killed. Merri, fearing that her son might be arrested for homicide, herself opens the dam in order that the water rushes into the village and Rob’s physique – and therefore, the proof of his violent demise – disappears without end. Thus, ultimately Merri drowns her beloved village and the house for which she had fought so as to save Gareth. The movie ends because the residents of Dolwyn run for security within the hills, displaced without end.
The Final Days of Dolwyn is of its time and doesn’t draw back from stereotypes. In accordance with Stephens, some modern reviewers expressed scepticism about its ‘Celtic exaggeration’ and its efforts, in accordance with one, to be ‘extra Welsh than Wales itself’. The influential reviewer Dilys Powell, in Stephens’ abstract, criticized The Final Days of Dolwyn for ‘too many harps harping, shepherd-boys singing and women hopping’. There are certainly sheep on the village excessive road; a younger shepherd, Huw, who barely speaks, however sings fantastically. Burton gambols like a lamb himself by means of fields and woods, improvizing with Huw a beautiful duet of the normal track Y Deryn Pur (The Pure Hen, recognized in English generally as The Light Hen, The Dove, or The Light Dove), and reads psalms in Welsh together with his mom on the kitchen desk. And because the flood involves Dolwyn, a harp floats on the water for an on the spot earlier than sinking; the villagers sing Hen Wlad fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers) in excellent concord whilst they flee for his or her lives earlier than the lethal torrent.
These extravagant imaginings of nineteenth-century Welsh life might have been partially chargeable for the truth that Williams’s movie made comparatively little impression in England: launched in London’s Leicester Sq., it was in cinemas for under per week. Nonetheless, this movie richly rewards examine immediately, not least as a result of it types an vital chapter in each the lengthy historical past of representing Wales on display screen, and the cultural historical past of Welsh and international reservoirs, and shows sudden, important complexity.
If many options within the movie may be learn because the enthusiastic software of a very heavy layer of native color, they might even be learn in opposition to the grain. Conventional artforms similar to dance and track introduced within the movie mirror some real creative modern observe and experience within the arts in Wales, albeit in unlikely context and type.
Language in The Final Days of Dolwyn is fascinating too. Aimed because the movie was at predominantly Anglophone audiences, a lot of the key dialogue is, unsurprisingly, in English. But it additionally makes in depth, totally unsubtitled use of Welsh. The English actor Edith Evans, not a Welsh speaker, delivers her in depth traces in Welsh immaculately. Thus, the seriousness of the movie’s remedy of Welsh by Williams, Evans and their collaborators is way faraway from what one would possibly count on of mere native color; such emphatic bilingualism, unmediated by subtitling, appears daring and placing immediately. Within the body narrative, the English vacationers comment of the Welsh-language inscription on the memorial plaque, most nonplussed: ‘not a bit like English, is it?’ Taken alongside the assertive, constructive deployment of the Welsh language as a given in the principle diegesis, this opening remark is likely to be a refined problem to a non-Welsh-speaking viewers’s expectations.
Seen in that method, I ponder, too, whether or not we will’t even learn all these harps harping, shepherds singing, sheep bleating, mams chapel-going and tea-pouring in a relatively totally different method. May or not it’s that the movie’s ostentatious effort to be ‘extra Welsh than Wales itself’, its extra of stereotypes, at some stage attracts important consideration to them? In line with its body narrative, by which guests admire the bogus lake, does it invite viewers to marvel what lies in actuality beneath the overly picturesque floor?
On a distinct tack, The Final Days of Dolwyn, made because it was in the course of an excellent dam-building century, expresses one thing of the fears and fantasies surrounding its subject. On the floor, we see right here a nostalgic idealization of rural life within the face of a threatening modernity and industrialization, as embodied by Lord Lancashire’s adventures in hydroengineering.
But, just like the scenic lake, there’s extra to this story than first meets the attention. The movie’s imagined previous isn’t uniformly idyllic, as Rob’s backstory of poverty and violent ostracization reveals. Certainly, this merciless previous resonates by means of and types the movie’s current. The villains of the piece prove to not be the landowner Woman Dolwyn, or the industrializing plutocrat Lord Lancashire, however Rob, one of many valley’s personal sons; and, extra not directly, the unnamed villagers who prior to now didn’t take pity on him as a weak boy. Thus, it isn’t encroaching modernity and modernization which destroy Dolwyn as a lot as one thing from a merciless previous: an outdated, unresolved resentment and hatred, expressed within the current as nocturnal, all-engulfing fireplace and flood. The result’s a extremely fractured picture of village life.
If the movie has a super, then, it’s a extra advanced fusion of custom and enlightened modernization, briefly embodied within the entente between Merri and Lord Lancashire. As soon as Lancashire realizes the human price of his plan, and that the rights of the individuals it impacts are protected by regulation, he’s eager to hold it out in much less harmful methods (although the likely important environmental implications usually are not explored). Lancashire additionally acknowledges that much less fashionable sorts of information, within the type of Merri’s therapeutic talents, are helpful. And naturally, for the entire movie’s old style air, actually, as a transferring image, it’s an instance of the quintessential artform of technological modernity, telling its electrical story at twenty-four vibrant frames per second. The previous is darkish; the longer term is mild, and someplace within the conflict between them, Dolwyn is misplaced.
The identical ambiguities usually are not essentially current after all in all our narratives concerning the formation of reservoirs. But the popularity that their depths are tough, even the place they’re apparently easy on the floor, is a vital one.
There’s a wierd, haunting second afterward within the movie between Gareth and Margaret (Andrea Lea), Woman Dolwyn’s niece. We understand that these two, all the time separated by class and language and tradition, have cherished one different silently, from afar, for a very long time. It’s certainly no coincidence that the pure chicken of Gareth’s track is imagined, in highest Welsh literary custom, as a messenger from a lad to his distant ‘angyles’, his angel or beloved.
However within the three quick, stolen days between the saving and drowning of Dolwyn, an enchanted time the place nothing is because it could possibly be earlier than, or after, Gareth and Margaret are collectively. In a dreamlike sequence set within the woods with Gareth at evening, Margaret, in a quiet, faraway voice, observes that if Dolwyn had drowned, ‘by now these timber would have been below water. Shadows. Shadows of hedges. Doorways swinging gently on their hinges. However no noise, as a result of it’s water.’ And Gareth says, his tone matching hers, ‘Shadows of individuals, strolling below the water. You and me, on the lookout for one another.’ ‘Don’t.’
On this inconceivable second, stolen from the irrevocable onward march of historical past, Gareth and Margaret image one other, underwater world, the identical and but reworked: acquainted shadows below the darkish waters. They usually relay their imaginings to us by means of movie, itself at occasions an Uncanny medium, because it preserves the ghostly doubles of its actors on celluloid. The Uncanny submerged world right here is itself doubled in flip, within the strangest traces of sunshine on the silver display screen.
Thus, The Final Days of Dolwyn speaks not solely to dam and reservoir building, and associated displacements, their results and legacies on a thematic stage. It’s also, I argue, attribute of a selected, distinctive aesthetic of the reservoir. On this, as an illustration, the movie resonates astonishingly with the late W.G. Sebald’s traditional German-language novel Austerlitz (2001).
Right here, in an usually missed passage, Sebald’s protagonist learns of the drowned village of Llanwddyn. He thinks of it in startlingly related phrases to Margaret and Gareth’s imaginings of Dolwyn, as a shadowy, spectral world the place villagers stroll without end in silence below the water. Misplaced Llanwddyn is, like Dolwyn, imagined as falling sufferer to a form of violent retribution, watery and fiery, for previous sins or crimes. To my data, there isn’t a proof within the public area that Sebald knew Williams’s movie. Nonetheless, the language of intertextuality permits us to talk of their similarities as comparable refractions, as in water, of one thing vital. That is the reservoirian Uncanny.
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Proshchanie is predicated on a novel of 1976 by Valentin Rasputin, which was probably influenced by his personal expertise of seeing villages in his dwelling area, Siberia, cleared within the Sixties to create reservoirs. Initially, this movie was deliberate by director Larisa Shepitko. Nevertheless, following her premature demise in 1979, together with 4 colleagues, in a automotive accident whereas scouting for places, her widower Klimov took the undertaking ahead. The Soviet authorities’ response to this work appears to have been at greatest hesitant, most likely due partly to its depiction of the anguish of a neighborhood destroyed within the identify of Socialist progress, and what we would immediately name its eco-critical stance. Proshchanie was solely launched in 1981, two years after its completion, after which solely on a small scale. International audiences needed to anticipate an extra three years, and glasnost, earlier than it could possibly be proven exterior the USSR.
Proshchanie depicts the final days of Matyora, a village on an island in a big river or lake, in an unnamed countryside. The inhabitants convey of their final harvest and comply with the orders of native Soviet official, Vasily Vorontsov (Aleksei Petrenko), to clear their properties. They then are required to raze these elaborate, historical wood buildings to the bottom, as a result of not a single home or tree ought to nonetheless be standing when the waters rush in. The plan is to create a reservoir for a brand new hydro-electric energy station which is able to serve a number of latest crops and cities. The residents of Matyora might be displaced to fashionable, but flimsy-looking, apparently barely completed residences on the mainland. Presumably, similar to the individuals of Dolwyn, their future employment will lie in fashionable, heavy business, relatively than farming life inherited from generations of forebears.
The plot focuses on some villagers and their responses, primarily the aged Darya Pinegina, performed by Stefaniya Stanyuta, and her son Pavel Pinegin (Lev Durov). Whereas Vorontsov makes highly effective appeals to a greater future within the wake of modernization, Darya can’t bear the considered leaving Matyora and her mother and father’ graves, and grieves too for its pure setting. Pavel has been appointed, in opposition to his needs, by Vorontsov to handle the clearing of the village, and within the course of mom and son are painfully torn aside.
Households depart one after the other, burning down their stunning homes as they go. Boats fetch first the kids, then the livestock. And people who keep in Matyora till the very finish start to lose themselves. Pyotr Zotov (Leonid Kryuk) takes to drink and units fireplace to his home, though a museum has provided him a beneficiant sum for it as a heritage artefact, and plans are in place for transporting it to security. Others, too, begin to present indicators of a form of derangement.
Darya, 5 different ladies, a bit boy who’s mute, and one outdated man ignore all orders to depart by the appointed date, and refuse to board a launch despatched on the final minute to gather them. Within the movie’s remaining scenes, early the following morning, when the village ought to already be totally empty and able to be flooded, Vorontsov, Pinegin and Zotov take a ship to Matyora seeking these resisting villagers. (This sequence recollects, to my eyes, one thing of the hallucinatory remaining sequences of one other movie by Herzog, Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) – and which, set as it’s on a river of insanity and no return, has highly effective affinities with Fitzcarraldo, referenced by Swyngedouw.)
In fog and the half-light of daybreak, the three males fail to search out Matyora in any respect, though they know precisely the place it ought to be. Worry and a way of weird uncertainty set in: has the flooding taken place early, the lads marvel; is Matyora already submerged? Or has it vanished? Vorontsov lights a torch, shouts wildly. And within the movie’s remaining, nightmarish frames, he and his companions males see fireplace, darkly – is Matyora’s final home, Darya’s, burning? What has turn out to be of Darya, the kid, the ladies, the outdated man? The movie ends.
Proshchanie is in some ways a fairly typical realist drama. But to me, not less than, a strangeness in its storytelling and its nonetheless, sluggish, prolonged photographs of singular objects and unexplained occasions render it recalcitrant, proof against interpretation, tough. Certainly, it was solely on my third or fourth viewing that I felt that I used to be starting to know one thing in its enigmatic vignettes.
For instance, within the opening moments, earlier than the viewer has any bearings in any respect, we see from far a gaggle of figures travelling in a small boat by means of mist. Every one wears a wierd cloak with a excessive, pointed hood, and all of it appears like a Symbolist or mythological portray, or an absurdist movie, someplace in between Alfred Böcklin’s sequence Die Toteninsel (Isle of the Lifeless) (1880-1901) and Samuel Beckett’s tv mime Quad (1981). It’s solely a lot afterward that we understand that these figures are actually a staff despatched to assist demolish Matyora and fell its timber – sporting very strange raincoats.
(A number of days after first drafting the above paragraph, I realized one thing about this scene from Kathleen Parthé’s foreword to Antonina W. Bouis’s English translation of Rasputin’s novel. Parthé notes that whereas there are 5 figures within the boat within the opening sequence, solely 4 of them later reappear as employees on the island. The fifth has disappeared. In accordance with Parthé, that is Klimov’s tribute to Sheptiko and her colleagues who handed earlier than the movie was made. So, on watching and re-watching, layer after layer come to mild. Maybe this, too, is a part of a reservoirian aesthetics, by which issues reveal themselves solely fitfully, often, dependent totally on climate and light-weight situations.)
So, to my thoughts, Proshchanie is a tough movie which insists that watching is a strenuous matter, that understanding artwork is labour: it calls for work from its viewer, the work of wanting, of ready to see. Pertinently maybe, there’s appreciable emphasis within the diegesis on the act of watching, which turns into a form of Leitmotif. Usually, one character or group of characters simply stands nonetheless, and appears on at occasions. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, observer extraordinaire of staring, joins Herzog and Beckett alongside me, within the auditorium of my thoughts.)
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Any comparability of those two movies, The Final Days of Dolwyn and Farewell to Matyora, calls for warning. For one factor, (perceived) variations and similarities may be contingent, mutable; they rely, too, on who’s watching. For a viewer who, like me, grew up in North Wales, The Final Days of Dolwyn for all its unlikely harps harping, et cetera, leans into some extremely acquainted, legible fantasies of the previous. Against this, my first impression of Klimov’s Proshchanie was certainly one of startling novelty. But to a distinct spectator, one who is likely to be much less excited than me on the prospect of an Eisteddfod, much less despondent when one is cancelled, one who won’t know that ‘Y Deryn Pur’ is a few blue chicken on the wing and an unattainable love, Williams’s movie may appear extra alien than Klimov’s. Nonetheless, distinction and comparability of those two movies show remarkably intriguing.
On the floor, past the shared theme of reservoir-making, these photos appear fairly totally different. The individuals of Matyora are significantly extra rebellious, extra carnivalesque than the relatively (if not totally) sedate inhabitants of Dolwyn. Their wood properties burn a lot extra simply than heavy gray stone. In type too, the movies differ. The Final Days of Dolwyn is filmed in black and white, whereas Proshchanie appears subtly to shift between color and monochrome. Klimov’s depiction of a village’s final days and its residents’ preparations to depart their properties is extra detailed and expansive than Williams’. And but, his storytelling and visible model slip between a form of realism on the one hand, and one thing extra experimental, avant-garde on the opposite (Bertolt Brecht takes a seat subsequent to Fassbinder; I begin to marvel why I haven’t invited extra ladies to hitch me in my imaginary cinema.) The diegesis of The Final Days of Dolwyn is typical, straightforward to comply with, at occasions comedic. Proshchanie has extra tragedy about it, laced with moments of absurd humour; its ending is open and ambiguous, whereas that of The Final Days of Dolwyn is – apparently, not less than – closed.
And but, these two movies shadow each other in curious methods; once more, mysterious reflections and refracted doublings start to emerge. Each movies open with photographs of flowing water; each have catastrophic remaining scenes, shot by means of with water and fireplace which present, in half-light, burning villages on the verge of being flooded. Alerted by this consonance, it’s astonishing to comprehend what number of additional tropes and themes they share, above and past the story of a conventional, rural village drowned within the identify of progress, industrialization and modernization.
As an example, each movies function an unnamed boy or youth, who observes, however barely speaks, or doesn’t communicate in any respect, in addition to aged ladies protagonists who can’t bear to depart their properties, or their family members’ graves. Each Merri and Darya embody and defend an outdated lifestyle, and their homes are lined with photos of their ancestors: a cloud of witness. These ladies take tea ritually: in a single dwelling the teapot, within the different, the samovar, is their talisman. In Proshchanie, the significance of the samovar as the logo of the house is underlined sarcastically when a departing lady from the village, weeping as she closes the door of her home without end, is suggested to comply with what appears like a conventional customized: to not cowl up the samovar in her baggage, in order that it will possibly discover its method again dwelling.
Generational themes sound loud and clear in each movies, and their clashes between older ladies and youthful males are notably placing. Right here, aged moms symbolize continuity, household, neighborhood, reminiscence; youthful males, Rob Davies and Pavel Pinegin, are their opponents, albeit unwillingly, in Pavel’s case. Rob’s hostility in the direction of Dolwyn is linked to his destitute, outcast childhood. Not having a mom of his personal, but probably figuring out that Merri took in two different orphan boys, Gareth and his brother, he appears to be incandescent with rage and envy, to the extent that that determine of speech turns into fairly literal, as he makes an attempt arson. Pavel’s place and ache in Proshchanie are totally different, for he suffers not less than partly as a result of his mom suffers.
However in each instances, a battle between mom and a youthful man, her son or a son-figure, lies on the coronary heart of the matter. In each instances, then, there’s a narrative about matrilinearity, maternal figures, the female in battle with a modernity which is coded as masculine that calls for our consideration. The implication is that representations of constructing reservoirs could also be gendered in highly effective methods.
***
So we glance again at Dolwyn and Matyora; so as, actually, to recollect and to know what has been; to begin to grasp, too, the world immediately. We’d even be clever to look again at Llanwddyn and Capel Celyn, at Riano, Narmada, Hasankeyf, Altamira, Vitória do Xingu. At Curon Venosta / La Carun / Graun within the Venosta Valley, Ada Kaleh, and lots of extra.
We would achieve this maybe, too, as a method of wanting forward, nevertheless partially. Like Vasily Vorontsov, who’s dropping his thoughts on the darkish water, flaming torch in hand, within the twilight and smoke. In direction of the day after tomorrow, the place waters might stream below doorways, into the homes, in on the home windows, up the steps, over the roofs, over the nests of birds within the chimneys, over the chimneys. What toes will crawl serpentine by means of the waters then; what silent ghosts will transfer by means of them?
Mene, mene, tekel.
