- This is the first in a series of notes attempting to chart some possible relations between written texts, particularly poems, and the moving image.
- ME AND MY BIKE is an unfinished film script by Dylan Thomas, though it does not read like a conventional script. According to the foreword by producer Sydney Box, Thomas stated in relation to this text "I want to write the first original film operetta". As such most of the dialogue is intended to be sung, some of it by animal characters, for instance a stable full of horses with Yorkshire accents who sing about oats. Therefore the published text is not formatted as a script, but as a series of songs in verse form intercut with prose paragraphs detailing the rest of the movement of the possible film. These prose sections have a visual style which pushes in three directions.
The first direction is towards a static, pictorial, illustrative visual style, toward painting and drawing (which is helped along in the published version by illustrations by Leonora Box). This is evident in the first sentence: "We see, in half-darkness, a large country house". Subsequently: "Two candles are lit behind the two little curtained windows above the stables. A wooden stair reaches from the rooms above the stables to the yard". This is a neat picture of where the main character, Fred the stable boy, lives.
The second direction is a transition between the first and third, and is toward animation. The singing horses grin, roll their eyes and kick a sack of oats out of a stable boy's hands; though it was apparently not Thomas' intention to write an animated film, it's difficult to read these actions without that idea occuring. The movement to the third direction becomes clearer in the nature of the transitions between events in the text: "Fred scrambles through his washing, runs a horse-comb through his hair, and climbs another flight of wooden steps that leads from the yard to the granary". The picture of the setting created in the first direction is extended into comic motion.
The third direction, the one we are really concerned with, is towards a photographed moving image, but not in the simple, conventional relation a script normally has. Instead the writing is itself constructed of images in motion, cuts and transitions, producing a cinema which did not, perhaps does not, yet exist.
/not in an anachronistic way - not projecting later developments into texts from the past, but rooting a possible contemporary practice in the unfulfilled promise of various texts, finding possible new avenues from different points of origin. finding other examples of this kind of forward-moving writing as the basis for a series of notes/
An idea of the normal relation between script and image is still visible - a picturing of a production of the text in the style of Ealing films of the late 40s; a square black and white frame, slow camera movements, slightly scratchy overdubbed sound. Overlaid on top of this is a different picture closer to the text itself. This picture is faithful to the level of detail in the text, particularly the attention paid to sounds:
"As he opens the granary door, he looks around him at the park, growing lighter, at the wide frosty paddocks with their gate and water jumps, and at the great manor house, slow wisps of smoke coming out of its chimneys. A cock crows, far away, then its morning warning is taken up here and there from the manor house and the farms beyond."
This short passage presents an extremely sophisticated montage, featuring radical changes of scale and accumulative layering of different sounds.
/struggling to get at the idea here. imaginary films in the minds eye, slow survey of a park with ice on the grass, cutting to the curly smoke rising from the red chimney pot. the farms beyond, a way to make a picture of the sense you get from the word "beyond". a film that could show these movements in detail - not that some haven't been made. the point isn't that the older mode of production was inadequate, or that writing allows different transitions than moving images. is the point a possible film?/
- This third visual style, a possible-cinematographic style, is not simply the result of someone producing an imaginative film script. It's even more evident in an earlier story by Thomas, THE MOUSE AND THE WOMAN from 1936. There is a passage in this story where someone wakes up in the dark and can still see the carousel of images from their dreams. These striking pictures are linked by striking transitions that would be quite possible to achieve with a camera.
"... there were symbols he could not remember, they came and went so quickly with the rattle of leaves, the gestures of women's hands spelling on the sky, the falling of rain and the humming wind."
/wouldn't this make such a lovely sequence as an arrangement of pictures, cuts and noises?/
"The dream had changed. Where the women were was an avenue of trees. And the trees leant forward and interlaced their hands, turning into a black forest. He had seen himself, absurd in his nakedness, walk into the depths. Stepping on a dead twig, he was bitten."
/a double exposure of hands joining together matched with a natural arch of trees in motion, fading into the same setting at night. a figure walks down the middle, the sound of the branches moving in the wind is interrupted by the amplified noise of a snapping twig/
"Candle light threw the shadows of the room into confusion, and raised up the warped men of shadow out of the corners. For the first time he heard the clock. He had been deaf until then to everything except the wind outside the window and the clean winter sounds of the night-world. But now the steady tick tock tick sounded like the heart of someone hidden in his room"
/slow addition of overlaid sounds/
Particularly interesting is the final paragraph of the passage which features a cut accompanied by a long distance jump and change in scale:
"...he saw a block of paper and sat down at the table with a pencil poised in his hand. A hawk flew over the hill. Seagulls, on spread, unmoving wings, cried past the window. A mother rat, in a hole in the hillside near the holes of rabbits, suckled its young as the sun climbed higher in the clouds."
/maybe this series will be a series of ideas for adapting texts/
- Some of the sequences from L'ATALANTE (1934) approach the structure of these texts, for instance the double exposure sequence when the two characters are separated from each other.
