The Films of Lenny Abrahamson

A Filmmaking of Philosophy

Barry Monahan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501316128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Films of Lenny Abrahamson: A Filmmaking of Philosophy s of provides a comprehensive study of the films of contemporary, highly critically-appraised Irish director Lenny Abrahamson. As well as considering the aesthetics, cultural reflections and philosophical concerns in the better known work of this dynamic and profoundly original Irish filmmaker, it also looks at his short film – 3 Joes – and his little-seen student film Mendel. As the first sustained study of Abrahamson's engaging and cinematically rich work, Barry Monahan's book sheds light on the aesthetic wealth of the artist and connects his stylistic innovations to the context of his projects' socio-cultural background, to his own influences in modern cinema – going beyond Irish film, to reflect upon the works of auteurs such as Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, and Kaurismäki among others – and to a broader reflection on what his canon has to contribute to the philosophy of cinema, art, and questions about human existence in the 21st century.

1

3 Joes

The young filmmaker and the first short: Mendel

The circumstances of Lenny Abrahamson’s birth in Dublin on 26 January 1966 to Max and Edna (née Walzman) might not have been striking for a boy who only twenty-five years later would have begun to establish his credentials as one of Ireland’s most interesting internationally recognized filmmakers. With his two older sisters Lynn and Gail, and his younger sibling Emily, from his early years what he saw of cinema was mostly on television, which he remembers watching keenly (‘DP/30 @ TIFF: Room, Lenny Abrahamson, Emma Donoghue’, 2015). Indeed, with both maternal and paternal grandfathers having immigrated to Ireland from Eastern Europe, he was as likely to have been born in Poland or East Poland/West Ukraine and to have been a prominent contributor to the canons of either of those countries. However, by his late teenage years, his attention was drawn towards alternative cinema – first, through a season of art house films shown by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC2) and then by virtue of constant conversations about non-mainstream films with a group of close friends who were dedicated cinephiles. Two of these – Stephen Rennicks and Ed Guiney – would be collaborators with whom Abrahamson would work for over three decades.

Abrahamson finished his secondary-level schooling in 1983 and started his third-level studies in October of that year at Trinity College Dublin. Although he began an undergraduate programme in Theoretical Physics, after two years in the area, he took sabbatical leave and then returned to study Mental and Moral Science in the Department of Philosophy, where he remained until 1990. His considerable academic accomplishment there won him a TCD Scholarship, and later led him to complete an MA in Mental and Moral Science; a qualification that earned him a PhD bursary at Stanford University, California. All the while he was drawn towards creative film work during his student years. Unlike the two main third-level film colleges in Dublin in the 1980s – the Institute of Technology Rathmines and the Dun Laoghaire School of Arts – there was no practical film studies programme at Trinity at the time. Not fazed by this lack of facilities, he co-founded the Trinity Video Society (also known as the ‘Trinity Video Club’) with Ed Guiney, and with his friend Stephen Rennicks they shot a short film with his maternal grandfather as the subject.

Under their surname acronym GRA Productions, this 1987 short film was titled Mendel. Shot on reversal stock which they had acquired as reject film from the national television broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann, the piece was an interview montage of biographical reminiscences by Mendel Walzman. Although Abrahamson was later to comment unfavourably on the quality of the celluloid – noting that one half of the film was tinted with a blue hue and the other too orange – the film was technically competent and innovative in subtle ways. On the most basic level, the twelve-minute film is a talking-head style recording of a series of recollections by Walzman on his time growing up in Poland, his recruitment into the Polish army during the First World War, and then his emigrations to Belgium in the 1920s and ultimately to Ireland where he would settle in a move to evade the rising Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s.

In terms of the film’s inventiveness and in some traits that can be seen to resurface in his later features, Mendel shows remarkable maturity for the first-time directors Abrahamson and Rennicks. Its visual restraint displays a confidence and faith in the medium to carry the most moving aspects of the central character’s personal story. It opens with a montage of shots framing its protagonist from different angles, and at varying distances from the camera, so that his face becomes the immediate and clear focus of the piece in a direct way. Not dissimilar from the framing of Anna Karina’s face in Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962), the opening shots alter successive angles on Mendel’s face as he recounts his personal experience in Poland between the wars. The position that he occupies within the framed space alters less rapidly as the film unfolds, but always does so in respectful observation of the biographical tales that he offers. The film closes with a trucking back from the interview chair on which he sat – finally empty – slowly fading with the seat in a long shot set within a door frame; a stylistic decision that leaves the viewer contemplative of the enormity of the narrated story and allows a gentle winding down of the film marking Walzman’s position liminally as both outsider and insider in the filmed space and, by implication, within and beyond his contemporary Irish society.

In a variety of ways, Lenny Abrahamson’s later feature films present similarly marginalized characters. Positioning them on the fringes of mainstream society facilitates his exploration of not only contemporary social and political situations but also more existential questions that transcend their immediate contextual circumstances. Abrahamson’s work thus stands in various ways both inside and beyond the political realities of Ireland and the indigenous cultural and industrial cinematic developments at the time of each film’s production. In terms of personnel, he would continue to work with Guiney and Rennicks on every project, right up to the Academy Award-nominated Room (2015). His first short film gave him important experience – even still as an undergraduate student – in institutional negotiation, which began with discussions with the management of RTÉ in the acquisition of film stock, and would be honed with several years’ work in advertising from the early 1990s. In rendering a personal narrative cinematically, Mendel was a frank outsider story that invited its audience to consider a character with a fascinating background, told in an accessible and subjective way. From an aesthetic perspective, it bore a few elements that would become characteristic of Abrahamson’s feature-length films. He and Rennicks employed a simple, pared back way of shooting that allowed the story to emerge through character, without directing the spectators with cinematic point of view shots. In the film, they allow an unforced connection between the content and its execution; without heavy-handed formalism or gratuitous stylistic decorations, Mendel, like Abrahamson’s later productions, was cinematically candid and unadorned, and showed confidence in the medium to facilitate for the spectators an absolute ‘being with’ the character. In the Irish cinematic context of the 1980s and 1990s, Lenny Abrahamson stood as both insider and outsider, who was simultaneously involved in the burgeoning industry yet all the while critically removed, equally benefiting from contemporary developments but not caught up in activist policy debates.

A new context for Irish film production and 3 Joes

The greater part of Abrahamson’s success was due to how it refuted simple categorization along lines of national or international cinema. His work accomplished an address to locally recognizable settings, but within a framework of stylistic inheritance of global cinema with transnational financing, positive critical reception and recognition, and distribution. In the first wave of Irish productions, marginalized, disenfranchised and disadvantaged social outcasts were identified as groups somehow relegated socially because of their position within an inflexible nationalist cultural and political hegemony, and rigorously confined by its social consequences (economic, welfare, educational and the ideological stronghold of the country’s religious institutions). The focus of the first-wave filmmakers in this regard was manifest in their narratives of exclusion, and the formal configurations of their films. Especially true to this were films such as Reefer and the Model (Comerford, 1987), Exposure (Hickey, 1978), Criminal Conversation (Hickey, 1980), Our Boys (Black, 1981), Pigs (Black, 1984), Down the Corner (Comerford, 1977), Traveller (Comerford, 1981) and Eat the Peach (Ormrod, 1986). Also contemporaneous with these formally innovative films were others that set protagonists in conflict with the constraints of the narrative – as objective correlative of their social circumstances – and allowed tensions to be presented through the more complex formal and aesthetic arrangements of the films. Examples of this type are Pat Murphy’s Anne Devlin (1984) and Maeve (1983), and Bob Quinn’s Lament for Art O’Leary (1975) and Budawanny (1987).

All of these films were concerned with national narratives or an address to earlier depictions of Ireland by US and UK filmmakers. While Abrahamson is consistently interested in representing similarly socially marginalized characters, he is not motivated first and foremost by local questions, and works at one remove from parochial situations in favour of presenting universal themes. Unlike many of the Irish filmmakers who made their feature débuts in the mid-1990s, Abrahamson was not educated by any of the first-wave directors and had no formal institutional training in filmmaking. He was not bound by the same discourses that concerned these earlier directors, nor by the need for inspirational revolt – formally and aesthetically – which motivated many of their students in the 1990s. His focus was both national and international, being neither bound nor oppressed by the discourses of a limited national/international binary that many either endorsed or rejected. He denied any arbitrary separation of commercial success and aesthetic and philosophical rigour in his films. This germinal notion is of critical importance in our consideration of even his first short film. Any grounding of his films within a limited Irish context or reading of his themes and characterization as foremost ‘Irish’ is something to which Abrahamson does not relate. In a 2008 interview with Conn Holohan, Abrahamson rejected the possibility of ambiguity about any national focus in his work by stating: ‘Irish in a broader sense, in terms of some programmatic idea or thematic idea of a national cinema, I don’t understand that’ (2008, 164).

The serendipitous coincidence of the release of Educating Rita in Irish cinemas on Friday 7 October 1983, shortly after Abrahamson had enrolled at Trinity College Dublin, played an unexpected role in the first steps of his career. The film was an adaptation of Willie Russell’s play by British director Lewis Gilbert, and because some of the film was shot on location on the campus and in the buildings of Trinity College, the university was offered remuneration that was used to set up the Trinity Visual Arts Fund, also known as the ‘Fund for the Visual and Performing Arts’. The new resource made money available to students who were interested in developing film projects while attending the university. In the final year of their study, Abrahamson, Rennicks and Guiney applied to the fund committee for financial support to make their first semi-professional short film. Their application was successful and the trio received £2,000, which they augmented by fund-raising and borrowing. 3 Joes was completed with technical help from friends who had been studying film at Rathmines. A number of these crew members would continue to work in the film industry and related areas. John Moore, who was its sound editor, went on to direct the Hollywood blockbusters Behind Enemy Lines (2001), The Omen (2006) and A Good Day to Die Hard (2013). Assistant Camera Operator, P. J. Dillon, subsequently had a successful career as director of photography on Kings and 32A (both 2007), Zulu 9 (2001), as well as the television series Vikings (2013–present) and Game of Thrones (2011–present). Hugh Linehan, who was the film’s First Assistant Director, later became the culture editor of the Irish Times. The film also starred Gary Cooke, Mikel Murfi and Dominic West, all of whom followed the venture with hugely successful careers in theatre, television and film. By the time Abrahamson had begun doctoral research at Stanford University, the short film was already running the festival circuit to great acclaim. While in California, Abrahamson received news from back home that 3 Joes had won the Best European Short Film at the Cork Film Festival (1991), and the Galway Film Fleadh Audience Selection Award in the same year. It would go on to win the Organisers’ Award at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival (1992).

Abrahamson would later discuss how with the film he had hoped to disregard the typical concerns of films made in Ireland at the time. He expressed this in interview: ‘I couldn’t wait for Irish people to see it because it was such a finger up to what was going on in Irish cinema, which was this really earnest, meant, terrible socially aware cinema’ (Holohan 2008, 164). There is a notable difference between this approach and sentiment, in breaking away from his precursors’ cinema, and their philosophy which, by trying to deconstruct the shibboleths of cultural nationalism, frequently remained all the more shackled to them. The respect for a new cinematic simplicity, with a verbal and visual silence moving from dense and complicated classical cinematic language, was also very much a part of the desires of young French filmmakers in the 1950s’, when the nouvelle vague broke with the traditional cinéma du papa. Dudley Andrew summarized François Truffaut’s aesthetic in that auteur’s rejection of the earlier, more decorated style. He quotes Truffaut’s critique of contemporaries using ‘“scholarly framing, complicated lighting effects, polished photography,” and countless other correct formulas which make the sets and costumes “just so,” and allow Frenchmen to feel both comfortable with, and proud of, their literary classics’ (2011, 202). Exactly the same rejection of an earlier Italian generation’s cinematic and literary output was evident in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose realist and pared back approach bares many similarities to that of Abrahamson. Maurizio Viano summed up Pasolini’s revolt in this way:

First, Pasolini’s decision to make films originally antagonized the Italian literary establishment and, in a sense, Italian culture tout court. Second, he was part of the cinema d’autore movement, which meant that his cinema, by definition, followed in neorealist, antispectacular steps. And third, the cultural industry looked at him with political expectations. Once inside the film industry as a director, Pasolini occupied a position of his own which in a way reflected these three factors. (1993, 52)

All of these qualities – avoidance of verbal intricacy in dialogue, an antispectacular aesthetic and stylistic influences from international directors – can be found in Abrahamson’s early short film.

3 Joes was written with Michael West, who would later collaborate on a majority of Annie Ryan’s Corn Exchange Theatre Company productions. Established in 1995, the Corn Exchange group devised ensemble pieces characterized by a Commedia dell’arte style often infused with Beckettian themes of absurdity, the banality of daily existence and exaggerated expressionistic movement and choreography. Even though 3 Joes is not as stylistically decorative as the kind of productions that West would subsequently produce on stage, it does bear similarities to them in some of its Beckettian simplicity, its situations, events and backdrops, and in a slightly cartoonish, wry humour of performance and characters’ behaviour. The film presents an average morning in the life of three male characters who cohabit a suburban house in an unspecified Irish city. As their morning unfolds, the characters emerge from the uniformity of their eponymous positions – all identified as ‘Joe’, but never diegetically named – and in line with the actions and activities that they perform and through which they interact: credited with the designations ‘Smoker’, ‘Washer’ and ‘Sleeper’. At first, they are even stripped of clothing and of props that might otherwise provide shorthand information that might guide the spectator in interpreting them. We discover the three characters raw and without backstories and experience them as they are presented in their white-walled space. Their personalities and relationships unfold not because of what they say, think or believe on some existential level, but by what they do and how they interact; a set of connections for the most part presented in silence. It is hard not to find Beckettian undertones in the banality of the action, the repetitive diurnal activities of waking, working at menial tasks, and the lazy meandering through domestic routines, which the three Joe characters undertake. Around the time of the film’s production, Abrahamson had seen Jim Jarmusch’s feature Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and had been taken with its austere aesthetic, beautifully paced editing and slow burning characterization and narration. Several of Jarmusch’s stylistic influences are evident in 3 Joes, employed by the Irish director both in homage to the American’s film and also out of a fascination with how the medium could work when trusted with an enriching simplicity of capturing the world with observational stillness. Foremost in Abrahamson’s endeavour was his desire to place characters in uncomplicated circumstances, resisting dialogue and revealed in their situation as if accidentally discovered. He noted his penchant for such cinematic silence when he invoked his reaction to the Jarmusch film: ‘I’d watched Stranger than Paradise and I thought, I love these black and white scenes where three people sit at a table for 10 minutes and don’t say anything’ (Holohan 2008, 164).

This narrative simplicity is a useful component of the medium that was identified by Andrew Klevan in his book Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film. There he noted:

Films allow extraordinarily refined methods of narration, ironically often overlooked precisely because of the roots of that refinement: the medium’s direct and immediate manner of communication. It is a fascinating paradox that the possibility of subtlety in film’s authorial narration depends on embracing the medium’s blatancy. (2000, 60)

This quality was achieved by careful and meticulous planning through improvisation techniques that paradoxically had as their ultimate objective, their own effacement. By rehearsing characters’ interactions in the minutest details, performers could sustain narrative action and achieve the desired effects through spontaneous, innovative acting. The method was constantly used by another of Abrahamson’s favourite independent directors, John Cassavetes, about whose modus operandi Robert Kolker explained:

He takes a direction away from the tidily plotted narrative of heroic endeavor and melodramatic longings, so much the core of American film, toward a more loosely observed structure in which the director, his players, and his mise-en-scène create a process where the telling of a story becomes subordinate to the moment-to-moment insights into character and situation. (2000, 19)

This approach, which Abrahams...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. 3 Joes
• 2. Adam & Paul
• 3. Garage
• 4. What Richard Did
• 5. Frank
• 6. Room
• 7. Interview with Lenny Abrahamson (Dublin, 1 June 2014)
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Imprint