Irish National Cinema

Ruth Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134468195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

From the international successes of Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, to the smaller productions of the new generation of Irish filmmakers, this book explores questions of nationalism, gender identities, the representation of the Troubles and of Irish history as well as cinema's response to the so-called Celtic Tiger and its aftermath.

Irish National Cinema argues that in order to understand the unique position of filmmaking in Ireland and the inheritance on which contemporary filmmakers draw, definitions of the Irish culture and identity must take into account the so-called Irish diaspora and engage with its cinema.

An invaluable resource for students of world cinema.

Part I

From the Silent Era to the 1960s: A Historical Overview

1

Irish Cinema – National Cinema?

From Nationalist Politics to Identity Politics – Conceptualising Irish Cinema

When, in 1993, the Irish government announced a series of measures designed to place Irish filmmaking practices on a secure, professional basis, it seemed at long last that Ireland would be able to boast a film industry of its own. After years of failed schemes, many of which foundered in the face of official hostility towards an entertainment form associated with loose morals and the corruptions of modernity, Ireland’s choice was, in the words of the Labour minister, academic and poet, Michael D. Higgins, ‘whether we become the consumer of images in a passive culture or whether we will be allowed to be the makers of images in an active culture, in a democratic society’ (Irish Cinema – Ourselves Alone, 1995).

Underlying the minister’s words lay an anxiety that was anything but new to debates around the cinema and Ireland. His concerns for the survival of indigenous cultural traditions in the face of the global mass-marketing of the image would have been met with a familiar nod from the policy-makers of the nascent Irish State of the 1920s onwards. If the issues are now less about protecting the good Catholic Irish from secular temptations than about gaining control of representation in the face of hegemonic multinationalism, the battleground is much the same. Caught between the two is the Irish public. Reported to be amongst the most enthusiastic cinema-goers in Europe^1,2, they have consistently sought out the pleasures of popular Hollywood film and have been aided in doing so by a trade that has viewed restrictions from above with little sympathy.

Threaded through Higgins’ words is another supposition, that an Irish film industry will create an Irish film culture, and that this will, in some way, reflect, interrogate and enrich the national culture. We may now look back and question whether this indeed did occur in what we might call the ‘Second Film Board years’, namely the period following the re-establishment, after several years of dormancy, of the Film Board in 1993 under Minister Higgins. The chapters in the second half of this book are largely concerned with that period, one that saw the establishment of a commercial environment for multiple modes of filmmaking practice from Irish-language, to documentaries and short films to arthouse and commercial releases.

Writing on Australian cinema, Tom O’Regan proposes that:

A national cinema is made of the films and film production industry of particular nations. National cinemas involve relations between, on the one hand, the national film texts and the national film industries and, on the other hand, their various social, political and cultural contexts.

(1996: 1)

In the Irish case, the absence of a local film production industry for most of the twentieth century means that if we are to talk of a national cinema, or a national film text even, we have to engage in a series of acts of creative bricolage; that is, to see how an image of Ireland on screen emerged out of the national industries of other countries. This is not a new strategy – representations of Ireland created from both the British and Hollywood industries have been thoroughly explored in the seminal, though now out of print publication, Cinema and Ireland (Rockett et al., 1987). This book proposes to build on that work by including in its frame of reference the films of the early twentieth century that fictionalise the experience of emigration and immigration (in particular the latter as seen from the point of view of the host countries of Britain and America) and by reappraising the work of directors such as Brian Desmond Hurst who attempted to make Irish films from within the British film industry (Chapter 3).³

It is now commonly accepted that the new desire to include the so-called ‘diaspora’ of Ireland within the parameters of the national may be dated from the moment of Mary Robinson’s election as President of the Republic in November 1990. Obviously this is a simplistic rendering of a gradual shift in the concept of the nation but the president’s announcement that she would be burning a candle in the window of Áras an Uachtaráin (the presidential residence) for those Irish abroad seemed to crystallise that development. This further coincided with an international embrace of all things Irish, from popular cultural artefacts (U2, Riverdance, ‘boybands’, Maeve Binchy and the many pretenders to her title) to high cultural representations: the plays of Brian Friel, the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the output of a younger generation of (mostly male) writers. The Irish ‘imagined community’, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s classic formulation (Anderson, 1983), is not considered as being contained within one geographical space but as including the Irish within Ireland and those now domiciled elsewhere. Since many of these are now fourth or fifth generation immigrants and, as a consequence of interracial marriage, boast multiple ethnic affiliations (Alba, 1990; Byron, 1999) it is perhaps simplest to leave it that you are Irish, or ‘hyphenated Irish’, if you say you are (such à la carte ethnicity is not so acceptable in Ireland where new immigrants have yet to be incorporated within the national self-image). Many do indeed choose this option since, as Diane Negra wrote in 2001, ‘it would be difficult to overstate the positive currency of Irishness in US popular culture . . . . As Irishness has surged into a globally marketed identity, Irish-American ethnicity has emerged as a particularly nostalgic point of connection with this phenomenon’ (2001b: 229). An Irish national cinema is thus defined here firstly as a body of films made inside and outside of Ireland that addresses both the local and diasporic cultures. This is not to suggest that local and immigrant visions of Ireland are one: on the contrary, as Roy Foster discusses in the literary context, immigration entails erasing memories of the actual conditions that forced the initial act of emigration – famine, debt, lack of opportunity – and re-imagining the homeland as Edenic. Exile literature ‘becomes more and more of a reflex-action, bearing less and less similarity to the emigrant existence as lived in the second and third generations, and simultaneously diverging more and more from life as lived in the old country’ (Foster, 2001: 97).

It is common in definitions of national cinemas to stress the link between filmmaking and nationalism. The creation of a sense of national belonging, and its obverse, of exclusion, has traditionally taken place within the cultural domain. Timothy Brennan reminds us that, ‘Nations . . . are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role. And the rise of European nationalism coincides especially with one form of literature – the novel’ (1990: 49). For all this, however, he is forced to recognise that:

under conditions of illiteracy and shortages, and given simply the leisure-time necessary for reading one, the novel has been an elitist and minority form in developing countries when compared to poem, song, television, and film. Almost inevitably it has been the form through which a thin, foreign-educated stratum (however sensitive or committed to domestic political interests) has communicated to metropolitan reading publics, often in translation.

(ibid.: 56)

Despite signs in the early years of the twentieth century (discussed in the following chapter) that cinema would play a vital role in the cultural dissemination of Irish nationalism, this was not to be. Irish nationalism followed the trajectory of so many other such movements, namely of starting out as a modernising project and ending up as a regressive and conservative force. We shall be discussing this in more detail in the forthcoming chapters, but for now it is enough to remember that cinema had little part to play in the nationalist agenda. This has primarily been the terrain of Irish literature.

It is only when we turn to the ‘incomplete’ project of Irish nationalism, the reintegration of Northern Ireland into the body politic, that we can see any sustained intersection between Irish cinema and politics. This brings us to a second question of terminology – the extent to which representations of Northern Ireland on film belong to the history of Irish cinema. Many of the films made about Northern Ireland have, as we shall be discussing, emerged out of the industries of other countries and operate on a generic basis that has little to do with understanding the politics of the Troubles and much to do with finding new turf on which to play out the tensions of the international political thriller. Local efforts to represent the Troubles are documented here but the wider history of filmmaking within Northern Ireland has only, regrettably, been touched on briefly.⁴

Arguably, Northern Ireland’s screen history belongs equally to the annals of a British national cinema. This book is criss-crossed with references to films that have represented Irish nationalism from the point of view of a conservative British film culture, just as many more have been concerned with labelling the Irish as hilariously infantile and backward. Britain, Richard Kearney writes, emerged as ‘a narrated community which invented itself in dialectical opposition to its ‘‘others’’ and most especially to Ireland, its first, last and most intimate rival’ (2002: 98–9). Ireland being Catholic, a colony and an ally of revolutionary France, became the mirror into which Britain must look in order to establish its own identity which ‘was in fact constructed upon the screening of its forgotten ‘‘other’’ in both senses of ‘‘screen’’: to conceal and to project’ (ibid. 99). British popular culture’s more recent embrace of Irish writers, broadcasters and comedians might thus be considered an antidote to the imperial mindset in a new era of regionalism and multiculturalism. It may equally be ascribed to an entrenched tradition of exoticising the Celt. Prompted by a viewing of Into the West (Mike Newell, Ireland, 1992), Robert McCrum in a Guardian article speculated:

Partly it’s because the Irish seem to the grim, colonising English altogether wittier, more charming and, yes, more likable. We are the oppressor, yet we envy the oppressed. They have been invaded, yet they remain, maddeningly, free . . . . Then again, our fascination is to do with the language, not merely the sense of words translated from another tongue but a rhythm and a music that takes us, in folk memory, back to the English of Milton and Pope. Shakespeare, we know, would have sounded Irish, as indicated by his rhyming of ‘sea’ with ‘say’ and ‘stale’ with ‘steal’. It is hard, for instance, to explain the popularity of broadcasters such as Terry Wogan, Anthony Clare and Henry Kelly except in terms of their appeal to a style of speech that has been lost in the tide of Standard English and its thin, clipped, grey vowels.

Partly, again, it’s to do with Ireland’s ability to seem in touch with an intense personal lyricism, a forgotten way of life, a past we desperately want to believe in, a place of storytelling and eternal verities, a country in which mother and father double with Mary and Joseph, where magic and prayer can change your life, and in which the truth is found in fire and water.

(1992: 7)

Even if, however, the fictional construction of the Irish on the British screen belongs in part to the narration of British identity, in the absence of a history of indigenous, Irish counter-images, it has passed into the greater archive of the cinematic imaginary. This archive of images forms what I would like to consider the second constituent element of an Irish national cinema. Thus, the much used shot of John Wayne apparently holding Maureen O’Hara at arm’s length in The Quiet Man (John Ford, USA, 1952) or of the father and son caught in silhouette in Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, GB, 1934) enjoy an iconic value that far exceeds the narratives from which they arise. In the Irish context, the extraordinarily picturesque and photographic quality of the landscape has combined with an immigrant culture predicated on nostalgia and a history of tourism to endow the romantic vision of the landscape and its people with an enduring potency. Cinema has seized on this tradition, alternatively affirming it and negating it, replicating these visuals and subverting them with counter-images – of the corrupt city, the menacing countryside. Alongside this repository of images is a range of themes that recur within these films – of rebellion and sacrifice, of departure and return, of spiritual voyages, and these in turn are animated by a panoply of characters, many of them borrowed from the repertoire of early stage and vaudeville representations – the fighting Irishman, the buffoon, the long-suffering mother, the feisty colleen, the rebel son. Taken together, these images, themes and characters form the foundation of an Irish cinema and have, become, for each new generation of filmmakers, a way of defining their own work, whether they chose to reject them, incorporate them or rework them. As Thomas Elsaesser reminds us, ‘a strong national cinema must feed on its predecessors and thus stand in a vampiric relation to what has gone before. Identity and pleasure in the cinema remain connected to questions of narrative, the art of repetition, and recognition’ (1993: 60). Part of the process of creating a national cinema has been predicated on wresting the powerful practice of image-making from the control of other filmmaking traditions whether hostile or otherwise. This imperative formed the polemical basis of Cinema and Ireland which was conceived just as that process appeared close to being realised by the new wave of independent, deconstructive and avant-garde Irish films of the 1970s and 1980s.

Since the reformation of the Film Board, official policies and the greater availability of funding saw Irish filmmaking abandon low-budget practices in favour of participation in the international circuit of distribution and exhibition. More recently something of a strategic about-face has occurred with the Board committing itself to micro-budget digital production practices aimed primarily at a local market (see Chapter 6). This leads us to a third factor in defining an Irish national cinema – as an industry. Irish cinema circulates within a nexus of filmmaking practices that are now largely defined by multinational finance. Whether it can retain its own local cultural identity within this configuration is an all-embracing issue. In creative terms, the strategy of the periphery ‘writing back’ to the centre, discussed by Salman Rushdie in terms of the refashioning of the English language by post-colonial writers (Rushdie, 1982: 8) has given Irish producers the impetus to grasp the language of dominant cinema, tailor it to reflect a local idiom (through the appropriation of genres such as the gangster film, the road movie and the historical epic) and direct their product back at the home territories of that dominant cinema. Irish film and television have conventionally attempted to write back to two centres – Britain and Hollywood. This triangular relationship has provided the locus of much debate on how indigenous filmmakers in particular should orient their product – towards Hollywood, towards Britain, inwards, or in all directions at once. Indeed, this controversy has emerged each time it has seemed that a sustained period of filmmaking was about to occur. At a thematic as well as an industrial level, we find this ‘writing back’ complicating and underlining the practices of the early ‘Abbey Films’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s (discussed in Chapter 4) which positioned themselves within both the local and British film culture and attempted to address both audiences, and recurring throughout contemporary Irish cinema.

By the time of the publication of Martin McLoone’s Irish Film, The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (2000), another key text in the academic critique of Irish cinema, the local versus the global debate had moved centre stage. McLoone’s publication was informed by a considerable ambiguity, mirrored by Irish society at large and echoed in the minister’s words quoted at the beginning of this chapter, over the Irish film and media industry’s participation in global production practices.

For many commentators, the dynamics of funding have combined with a dilution of the local culture in the wake of its infiltration by global capital to create a new situation of cultural dependency. We need to be wary, however, of establishing a simplistic binary that offsets the local against the global, little Ireland battling against the giants of multinational enterprise. As Tim Bergfelder reminds us, as a matter of pragmatism Hollywood has always financed other national cinemas, including those of Europe (Bergfelder, 2000). Indeed, if one of the requirements of a national cinema is that it respond to the local culture, then the embrace of globalisation by certain sectors of Irish society has been well reflected in cinematic product. In other words, for large sectors of Irish society, globalism is a liberation from the old orthodoxies of nation and State.

This leads us to the fourth point of definition crucial to the understanding of an Irish national cinema, which is its dialogue with the national culture. Terry Eagleton has elegantly traced the concept of culture from a tool of enlightenment to a practice of self-definition: ‘It [culture] now means the affirmation of a specific identity – national, sexual, ethnic, regional – rather than the transcendence of it’ (2000: 38). ‘Culture’ is now ‘cultures’, most of them antagonistic in some sense...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: From the Silent Era to the 1960s: a Historical Overview
• Part II: Issues and debates in contemporary Irish cinema
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index