Fat Man on a Beach (1973) - full transcript

($ Scott Joplin: "The Entertainer")

(Narrator) This is a film

about a fat man on a beach.

Did you hear what I said?

This is a film about a fat man

on a beach.

Do you really want to sit there

and watch if?

Well, don't say I didn't warn you.

($ Ragtime piano music continues...)

(Seagulls screech)

A man taking pictures of

a man taking pictures.

There must be something in that.

(Ragtime music fades)

So... let's be comfortable, shall we?

Now then, why are we here?

Ah, the old questions!

You remember the old questions?

Why are we here?

Why are we here?

The old philosophical questions.

I'll have to go and think about it.

($ Ragtime piano music resumes...)

So, if we can't answer questions like:

'Why are we here?'

Can we answer any other sorts

of questions?

One, like say: 'Where are we?'

Where are we?

Well, it's a long story actually,

but I'm going to tell it to you

all the same.

Round the coast from here

there was a tribe, an aboriginal tribe.

This was several hundreds of thousands

of years ago.

Very little is known about them,

of course, except their name,

they were called the Hellawi,

and they lived in a marshy district.

And this marshy district

had enormous bulrushes

or sort of prehistoric reeds

which grew six foot tall.

This was a bit tough on the Hellawi

because unfortunately,

they were only five foot six tall.

So they spent most of their time

going around saying:

"Where the hell are we?

Where the hell are we?

"Where the hell are we?"

(Welsh man)

"What do you know of Lleyn?

You'll notice the weather changes a bit

in this picture from time to time.

Where the hell are we, though?

We still haven't decided where we are.

Can I start that again? Yes.

You'll notice the weather changes

quite a lot in this picture.

Where the hell are we?

Well, we're just about here.

Right on the end there.

I used to chew my nails,

but I couldn't live off it

and I only had 21 in any case.

We're just on the end here.

This is the Lleyn Peninsula

in North Wales, Caernarfonshire.

It sticks out like an arm

from North Wales.

And there's Anglesey up here.

Every school girl knows that.

It looks like a head of a diver

diving into the Bristol Channel,

the Irish Sea.

We're on a beach called

Porth Ceiriad Bay,

right on the end here.

This enormous lock-jaw like location

is called Hell's Mouth.

It was called Hell's Mouth

because any sailing ship

that got becalmed across here

was driven ashore by the currents

and inevitably wrecked.

The locals used to be very savage

at the time

and used to cut rings off people's fingers,

and things like that

if they foundered ashore.

There's a mountain here called

Garn Fadrun.

You can stand on top of that mountain

and see all around the peninsula.

You can comprehend this...

(Pop!)

...peninsula as a place...

Now one of the lights has gone.

So probably you can't see

very much at all now.

Why all these explanations?

Anyone would think we were making

a film for the mass audience.

(Welsh man) "What can an Englishman

know about Lleyn?

How did I find this place

in the first place?

Well, I was hitchhiking through

North Wales.

At the time I was

a rather elderly student at 26

and I'd been reading English, which is

a very bad thing for a writer to read.

A quite stupid thing for a writer

to read actually at university.

And I'd been besotted by Irish writers -

like Sam Beckett and James Joyce

and Flann O'Brien -

and I wanted to see the Dublin

that they'd all written about.

So I hitchhiked from London

on the Holyhead Road

through North Wales,

and I was given a lift,

not to say picked up,

by a man who owned a country club

at Abersoch.

And he, during a course of perhaps

three quarters of an hour car journey

along the Ab,

offered me a job as a student,

as a barman -

because I was a student, I was obviously

going to be cheap for him -

at this country club he ran in Abersoch.

I couldn't take the job then,

I went on to Dublin.

But after about a month my money

ran out then, naturally,

and so I rang him up and said,

"Is the offer of the job still open?”

And I came here. And that's the way,

one of those things...

if I'd been sitting in a different place

on that road,

or if I'd...

in some way just missed it

by ten seconds,

that man stopping at that point...

the whole of my life would have been

different subsequently.

I shouldn't for instance have written

the first novel I wrote,

which was about the experiences

of that summer here in Lleyn.

That was how I came to Lleyn.

I remember leaving him

on the junction of that road in,

um... off the Ab.

He took me as far as, er...

I think it was just past Betws-y-Coed,

and he said,

"I'm going down there."

And I looked down there,

and it was a marvellously sunlit

glacial valley.

It looked like El Dorado.

It looked absolutely marvellous.

So when... This was probably one of

the things which made me remember

his offer of the job

and made me want to go,

because it looked like El Dorado.

It looked like a very special place.

And Lleyn is a very special

and a very curious

and a very strange place.

($ Welsh ballad,

"The Young Man From Lleyn")

(5 Ballad draws to a close)

That's enough of that! You're not meant

to be enjoying this, you know.

Someone's laid a fire,

isn't that nice?

Scull cap.

Skull cup.

The man who produced my first film

was called Bruce Beresford.

And he used this expression

whenever we got in trouble

on the film, which was often.

He said, "It'll be all right, we can cut away

to a bunch of bananas."

It was some time before I understood

exactly what this meant.

He'd worked

for some film unit in Africa

which belonged to the government,

and the only films the government -

who happened to be the people in power

at the time -

wanted to make,

were films about their own speeches.

So he used to have to

put together

these enormously long speeches

by African politicians

and try to make a film out of them,

And of course, there are jumps.

That is to say, film only lasts for

ten minutes in the camera, normally.

So every ten minutes

you have a jump.

You can demonstrate it very easily,

like his...

You see? If you take a bit out there

there's a big jump.

My head appears to jump about.

Now, if you slip in a shot between

those two things,

then the audience accepts it

more readily.

They think, while the thing

was on the screen

that then something else

happened.

It's one of the little deceits

that filmmakers practise.

Bruce Beresford in this...

in this African situation.

In the middle of

these politicians' speeches,

just used to cut away

to a bunch of bananas.

Hence the expression.

Now, the first time I came down

to this beach,

I was brought here by the man

who ran the club that I worked for

at um... at Abersoch.

He was a man who was about 60,

I suppose,

and he was trying to pretend

that he was much younger.

He had young girlfriends,

he dressed in a young manner.

And to me at the age of 26 -

I was a very young 26,

I was very much of a prig

and it seemed to me that

one ought to be one's age

and that one ought not to pretend

that the one was younger.

This man had brought me to this beach

with a young girl of about 20,

whom he was - in those days,

in those words - courting.

And I was, in a sense,

playing gooseberry

and was very ashamed of it,

in a sense.

He, as I say,

was courting her,

but he was trying to impress me

at the same time.

So when we came down here,

he showed me these

stratified cliffs behind me

and talked about them,

and then went back to her.

Later, I wrote a poem about this,

in which I tried to sort myself out.

It's called Porth Ceiriad Bay'

It's quite short, so don't go away.

Porth Ceiriad Bay

Descended to the shore,

Odd how we left the young girl with us

to herself

and went straight to examine

the stratified cliffs,

forgot her entirely in our interest.

You marvelled at the shapes

the clockwork sea had worn the stone,

talking keenly,

until the pace

of this random sculpture

recalled your age to you,

and then its anodynes.

And so you turned, pretending youth,

courting the girl

as if you were a boy again,

leaving the wry cliffs to their erosion

and me to my observant solitude.

($ Ragtime piano music)

($ Music fades...)

(Gulls screech)

One of the things

that happened to me down here

is something that stayed with me

a very long time.

The place is full of images,

of metaphors, of things happening.

This one could, in fact,

have taken place anywhere,

but it happened in Lleyn

and I think that's significant.

I was driving from Pwliheli

to Abersoch

and I happened on a road accident

very shortly after it had happened.

There'd been a crash between,

I think, two cars

and a motorcycle with

a pillion passenger as well as a rider.

The pillion passenger had gone

straight through the windscreen

of the car

coming in the opposite direction.

And the rider of the motorcycle

had been thrown across the road

and had hit a wire fence

of the sort which has

concrete posts with holes in them

and single wires through them.

He'd been thrown against

this wire fence

and the wires had gone through him

like a cheese cutter through...

through cheese.

You...

They don't have many of them

these days -

a piece of wire on a board,

or a piece of marble.

And the wire is simply pulled

through the cheese.

It's a very good way of cutting cheese.

I expect the machines which package

cheese use the same method.

But we don't see that,

we just see the plastic packets.

Thank God.

This... The way this motorcyclist

had been cut up

by these wires...

I passed it only fleetingly.

I just drove past

and saw this man

in a motorcyclist helmet -

and a fat lot of good that did him -

lying by the side of the road

having been thrown against

this wire fence.

And it's stayed with me,

that image, that metaphor -

wires going through a man

like a cheese cutter through cheese -

for a long while now.

It's a metaphor for the way

the human condition

seems to treat humankind.

The body as a "soft machine”

as William Burroughs said.

The soft machine,

thrown against a wire fence,

is just cut into pieces.

I passed that image

just in that fleeting time

with that man's life ebbing away.

I learnt later he'd been killed.

They said instantly.

But there his life was, ebbing away,

and it happened in Lleyn.

(5 Jolly ragtime piano music)

(Music stops abruptly)

The word 'gull' comes from

a Welsh word 'gwylan' to wail.

So a sea 'gull' in English

is really the sea wailer.

Wailer - I've got to use English

when I talk to you.

Wailer.

W-A-I-L-E-R.

It's a wonder we can talk at all,

communicate with each other

with these sort of words

that have several meanings.

It reminds me of a joke -

everything reminds me of a joke,

if I'm lucky.

There was a girl

who'd been taken

to the pictures -

remember the pictures? - by a man.

And he said, "We're going to see

a film about whales."

And she said, "I'm not terribly

keen on Taffies, as you know."

He said, "No, no, no, no.

Not that kind of 'whales'.

"This is a film called 'Moby Dick'

And she said,

"I don't like sex films either."

But the seagull, the wailer,

the sea wailer,

is a word which has different meanings

in different languages

very closely connected with English.

For instance, in old Dutch,

the word gulle, G-U-L-L-E,

means a great wench without wit.

This is all genuine stuff, you know.

That's why I've got the script here.

And there's a bloody aeroplane now.

(Drones overhead)

A Folland Gnat, if I'm not mistaken.

...and in old high-German,

gull without an 'e',

or rather low-German...

I'm not making this up, you know.

It's all here in the script.

Gull is a soft, mild,

open-hearted,

good-natured sort of person.

Is that your idea of a gull?

(Screeching)

The great Welsh poet,

Dafydd ap Gwilym,

wrote a poem about gulls,

called 'the Seagull"

I have tried to translate

the first stanza of it.

Erm... except,

translate is the wrong word.

You can...

You cannot translate.

You lose everything -

as someone said - except the poetry.

I mean, you can translate everything

except the poetry.

This is my attempt at the first stanza

of Dafydd ap Gwilym's 'Seagull"

Gull, all grace on the flood tide

Mailed hand of sea salt

Moonlight white, reflected snow

Perfect lily of the wave's valley

Fish fattened, cork-like coaster

Shining sheet of paper

Gull, gwylan, wailer

Gull, all grace

Oh! I've driven him off. He can't take

my version of Dafydd.

($ Ragtime piano music)

(Music fades)

If I hit these stones,

will it be an accident, do you think?

You can't deny that that's what

I'm trying to do, and I did it.

But is it an accident?

Why can't a film be

a celebration of accidents?

Why does it have to be

neat and tidy and logical?

Because life isn't neat

and tidy and logical.

Why can't a film be

a celebration of the accidental?

Do you have to be told a story

every time?

Do you have 10 be, em...

do you have to have all the ends

tied up so neatly?

"Telling stories', if you remember,

is a child's euphemism for

'telling lies'.

Telling stories is telling lies.

Because life doesn't tell you stories,

life is accidental.

If you tidy life up,

you have to admit

that you're falsifying it.

See? Was that an accident?

I think it was, actually.

The thing is, telling stories is

tidying life up

in a way that it may not be...

I'll tell you a poem.

Mary had a little lamb

She put it in a bucket

And every time the lamb got out

The bulldog tried to put it back again

You see,

life doesn't tell you stories like that.

That's tidied life up.

It is really all chaos.

It is chaos.

I say it is.

I can't prove it is chaos

any more than anyone else

can prove there is a pattern

or there is some sort of deity.

But, even if it is all chaos,

and you say, 'Let's celebrate the chaos.

Let's celebrate the accidental.'

Does that make us any the worse off?

Are we any the worse off?

There's still love. There's still humour.

Umm...

Mary had another lamb,

she also had a duck

She put it on the mantelpiece

to see if it would

fall off

That's wrong, actually.

Mary had a little lamb,

she also had a duck

She put THEM on the mantelpiece

to see if they would

fall off

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Cut.

(5 Ragtime piano)

(Music continues...)

(Music fades)

One can learn lessons from anything...

Anything.

One can probably even learn lessons

from eating apples.

Learn lessons from anything.

Cheers.

I'm going to read

some more poems now. Erm...

It may be that if you want to go

and have a cup of tea,

this would be a good time.

I know that's what

you masses are like.

The mention of poetry

and off you go.

This one's a Welsh one, of course.

It's called 'Independence'

Rhiain the Gas,

the Welsh introduced her -

a girl who so much looked like her

on whom my life had foundered,

that I could not help but offer her

a kind of love at sight.

Rhiain once received me

in her office at the Gas Co.

opposite the college,

to show the male

her independent state

and corner him

on her own territory.

The trouble was that just as

She appeared so much like her,

So she behaved the same.

"Ah, yes," said lolo,

some weeks later,

"We should really have fold you

about Rhiain.”

There's something primeval

about a beach, isn't there?

The first poem I ever wrote

was about a beach.

I'm not going to recite that one though.

(Gulls screech)

During the time I was, um...

Gregynog Fellow

at University of Wales,

I wrote some englynion,

or, I tried to write Welsh poems

that were...

(Crack of explosives)

World War Ill has broken out.

As I was saying

before I was so crudely interrupted,

I tried to write englynion,

Welsh poems,

which are very difficult

to do in English.

However, here are my poor attempts.

This first one is called Fern'

Hookheaded hairy young fern,

springy, curled,

coy greeny thruster

set on its own spread revelation

'Broom'

Common broom confused

with whin, gorse, furse,

finds its own-ness

in ternate leaves,

coiled styles

and jet black seedpods:.

Yet it is kin.

Beech'

Beech, from which book:

like learning,

pellucid leaves' late turning

Slows ending, adds adjourning.

(5 Ragtime piano)

The third summer I spent down here

was the strangest of all three,

in many ways.

I'd been asked to come down

this time

by a man I'd better call Henry,

who...

...believed that the treasure ship

of the Spanish Armada

was somewhere out there.

You're remembering

the peninsula like this,

the treasure ship would be about there

off Abersoch.

Now, you remember

the Spanish Armada, 1588,

it had a punch up in the Channel,

and couldn't get back

through the Channel to Spain,

so they had to go all the way round

northern Scotland past Ireland.

And this man Henry's idea was,

or belief it was -

a religious belief almost...

One of them

had come down through Ireland

and had run for shelter

in Abersoch here

and sunk in the bay.

And that this one was carrying

all the, er...

...all the treasure to pay the mercenaries

in the Spanish fleet.

The whole Spanish army.

So he got me here...

Ahem, can I have your attention, please?

Just a moment, come back, please.

This is an interesting story.

This man Henry got me here

for the whole summer

with the promise of skin-diving

down off Abersoch

with the promise of untold millions

of gold doubloons and pieces of eight

and all those romantic things.

When I actually got here,

I found that he hadn't got a boat

and he hadn't got any sort of

skin-diving equipment.

There was nothing we could do.

It was just a romantic story.

Do you mind! This is an interesting

story I'm telling you.

You keep wandering off.

Anyone would think we were making

a film for the masses

where they have to be entertained

every second.

This man Henry had a cottage.

But it was very full up with his wife

and children and things,

so he put me in a sort of caravan

at a field called Dwyran.

Now Dwyran is a very strange place.

As I've said before, again and again,

this is a...

The whole of Lleyn is a strange place.

Dwyran is a place where you had to be

very careful what you did

with your toenail cuttings.

Now I used to cut mine

and keep them in a little pile

and eventually I buried them

in a stone wall.

That seemed the safest thing to do.

That third summer seemed to mark

some sort of a climacteric in my life

and I wrote a poem about it.

In the ember days

of my last free summer,

here [ lie,

outside myself

watching the gross body

eating a poor curry:.

Satisfied at what [ have done,

scared of what I have to do

in my last free winter.

A bit portentous.

You could charge people to watch this,

25p a head.

Anyone with two heads, 40p.

Cut away to a bunch of bananas.

($ Ragtime piano music)

Come along, this way.

Curious things to see.

Curious things to see. Come along.

Ah! Not so fast. Not so much.

Down boy.

Down, down.

That's a good boy. Sit.

Now, very gently, come and see

the curious things.

Curious things, well worth seeing.

Look, one there,

and another one there.

I think they've been making

all these footprints.

Do you see them all?

And what's that thing?

Is anyone at home, one wonders?

Hello?

Hello? Anyone at home?

No.

Ah, a sliver of the moon.

A representation of the moon.

Here's a light...

Another sort of light.

Isn't it good? Look.

And here are heels. Perhaps

they helped make the footprints.

That one's been ground into the ground

by another heel.

And here, a paperclip! My favourite.

Look, a paperclip.

A lovely paperclip.

And here a Schweik. Here's what

you've all been waiting for.

It's Schweik in his bunker.

The good soldier Schweik.

Isn't he sweet?

We all love him.

And over here,

careful not to trip now.

Don't trip on the banana skins.

There! Did you enjoy that?

Did you enjoy seeing

the curious things?

Here's a little present for you then.

Good boy, good boy. Sit!

Sit!

Right, off you go and have a run round

by yourself.

Off you go. Bye bye.

(Ragtime music continues...)

(Music fades)

Some things can only be said indirectly.

They can only be...

One can only reflect the truth

of what they were.

I'm not quite sure that I know the truth

about this particular thing

that I want to talk about indirectly.

There's a mountain

called Garn Fadrun on Lleyn.

It's the last mountain towards the tip

of the peninsular

which can be called a mountain,

that is, it's over 1,000 feet tall.

I found myself one morning at dawn

on top of that mountain,

almost not of my own volition,

and stripping off all my clothes,

and making what I can only think of

as religious gestures,

worshipping some sort of female deity.

Now, I'm not a religious person,

I can't explain how that happened,

or why I felt the need to do it.

It's... That's the sort of place Lleyn is.

I feel like I feel nowhere else on earth,

here in Lleyn.

And doing that sort of thing,

that archetypal...

Jung calls the archetype.

Something that we do

despite the last two

or three thousand years of civilisation.

There's a much longer period

with archetypal patterns of behaviour

inside us

that we respond to sometimes,

in certain places.

And Garn Fadrun must have been

the same way

for hundreds of thousands of years.

Lleyn, in many ways,

has been that sort of place

for many hundreds of thousands of years.

Cut.

(Piano music resumes...)

I think that will probably be

enough of that.

(Drone of helicopter)

(Director) Go ahead.

I think there have probably been

at least two films

trying to get out of this one film.

And if you feel that

you don't really know much more

about the Lleyn Peninsular

at the end of it,

well, that's probably because

I don't know much more about

the Lleyn Peninsular either.

One has to live here and be born here

for a long while

before one can begin to understand

the strange sort of place it is.

But at least we haven't pretended

to be doing anything

than making a film about it,

about that problem.

And we have, at the same time,

tried to be honest to film itself.

But, in the end, Lleyn ought to be left

to the Welsh, to them.

We ought to go.

You can go.

Off you go! Up, up up,

up, up, up...

($ Scott Joplin: "The Entertainer")

(Music fades)