Only Your Eyes Are Unclosed is a 2008 film by Anthony Shapland, duration 60 minutes.
The film depicts sixty urban locations around Swansea city in the hour before sunrise, radiating from a geographical centre point. The hour begins in the dead of night with a due north location in Mount Pleasant, and each subsequent location moves around the city like the hands of a clock, with a minute spent in each place before moving ever closer to dawn.
The locations featured span a large area of Swansea. They begin with empty streets in Mount Pleasant, lit only by the glow of streetlights, and move on to the deserted train station entrance where a lone zebra crossing flashes in the dark.
Moving on to the brightly lit high‑rise car park off New Cut Road, the calm surface of the River Tawe, and the distant, steel works viewed from Port Tennant, with continuous plumes of smoke rising into the early morning crimson sky.
The journey continues across the iconic Sail Bridge, to the Maritime Quarter, where flats overlook the quiet marina. Followed by the former GWR stone Revetment Wall on the north side of Victoria Quay, and the coastal steps swallowed by high tide, travelling on to an unusually still Oystermouth Road lined with parked work vans.
Locations across the road feature the prison’s barbed‑wire‑topped walls, the stately Brangwyn Hall, and the very steep, cobbled street of Constitution Hill.
As the sun rises through St James Crescent Park and the residential streets of Sketty, the film ends with views across the city from Mayhill and Townhill as dawn breaks.
A silent semi-fictional narrative is conveyed through subtitles that accompany each scene, for example:
“A fox finds a curry carton.
It licks the polystyrene clean before walking away.
Carl Seers reminds himself to take the blue wrench tomorrow.
Mrs Watkins’ sink is set right back against the wall.”
Despite the romantic construction of the work these texts are only part fiction, built on real names, occurrences and observations.
The title of the film is a nod to Under Milk Wood by Swansea born, Dylan Thomas, which was published in 1954, shortly after Thomas’s death in 1953.
In an in-conversation with curator and writer, Lisa Le Feuvre, Anthony Shapland once said about returning to the period between night and day throughout his practice:
“Early morning in a city before normal activities take place - it feels as if you are experiencing ‘non-hours’. In the city the streetlamps extend twilight which creates a situation where anything can happen, where possibilities are infinite. It’s as if the entire rules of engagement for the day have been replaced and new rules are waiting to be made up....
“I grew up in a rural area and moving to the city opened up a new sense of the night. There is a certain point in the city at night when you can feel as if you are on your own - you can possess the space in some way. The urban early morning can be incredibly peaceful. There is a sense that everything has stopped for a while, that everyone is sleeping. You can rest in that waiting moment before it all starts again. When I was filming in the city I discovered there is one hour when it is OK to be polite to people - when you can say ‘good morning’ to strangers and it is acceptable. It is that moment when it starts to get light - the first time I experienced it I was really taken by surprise, and I realised that the healthy dog-walkers and workers were assuming I had got up early, rather than stayed out late.”
Anthony Shapland is a Welsh artist, founder of artist-led space g39, and novelist. He grew up in Bargoed in the Rhymney Valley. Within his writing and artistic practice, he blends documentary and fiction, drawing on his lived experience of rural queerness and growing up performing straight.
