Reservoirs and folk culture in Emlyn Williams’s The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949) and Elem Klimov’s Farewell (1983)

The Welsh film The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949) and the Soviet film Proschanie ( Farewell ) (1983) are inspired by similar historical events: reservoir construction that flooded villages and displaced rural communities. Both films intervene in emerging public discussions in their respective nations. Dolwyn registers the effect on Welsh-language communities of reservoir construction that increased water supply to English cities, an issue that would become the most contentious issue in Welsh politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Farewell emerges out of the relatively liberal period of the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’, which took place from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, offering a critique of Soviet technological modernity that became more widely heard in the glasnost period in the mid-1980s. Beyond these historical parallels, both films offer similarities in the way they represent reservoir construction and its effects on rural communities. First, both Dolwyn and Farewell register and resist the value shift from ‘waters’ that are integral to traditional ways of life in rural communities to ‘modern water’, a resource that is stripped of local features and made available for exploitation. Second, these representations are part of a broader critique of reservoir construction from the perspective of a residual indigenous folk culture for which such works represent an existential threat. Finally, both films explore reservoir construction through their portrayal of its effect on the institution of the family, registering its destructive power in the division of one generation from another. Obdurate opposition to the reservoir is personified in both films in the figure of an elderly matriarch, while younger generations are more conflicted, more susceptible to the attractions of urban modernity and even ambivalent about the destruction of their own culture.