Figures in a landscape: work and beauty in 'Sleep furiously'

This essay considers the inter-relations of aesthetics and politics in sleep furiously (UK, 2007). I examine whether, in this film at least, social concerns and visual beauty might not just coexist, and how each might be in some ways reliant on the other to be fully realised. The film might then be seen to instantiate a challenge to the frequently proposed polarity between the profilmic world and the creative interventions of documentary filmmaking, which are often reckoned to prevent viewers from making a valid connection with that world in political, social and / or ethical terms. Yet sleep furiously cannot escape another perennial issue confronting documentary: that of social class.