A Certain Tendency of the Irish Cinema
- The following appeared, printed, in a savagely circumcised form. I was never happy with it. The state of Irish cinema is disheartening. Having recently watched The Commitments, I felt the need to revisit the idea of an Irish cinema.
Addressing National Cinemas
To discuss any national cinema, one must first acknowledge that there is no such thing as national cinema. It is an elephant in the room that is film criticism. Indeed, enlightening exploration of ideas of national cinema demands a knowledge of the notion’s falsity. It is absolutely impossible to define. Nations themselves are purely based upon war provoking lines on a map, lines that divide the world into manageable sections for purposes that are mostly tax related. To take a film and put it firmly within those lines is an act of little to no merit. The practice of naming cinema as of a nation is obviously necessary in both common parlance and rigorous academic analysis though, as a descriptive tool and a means of identification. However, to grasp the picture, to settle the identification of a film as of a specific nation, or of the land or of the people is a teleological phenomenon to observe. This would be a matter of interpretation, thus leading to a consensus that Film A is of Country B and Film C is of Country D, seeing the films settle themselves as national cinema.
Looking at basic ontological criteria, if one is to look at what is a national cinema in that manner, there exist further hurdles in discussing a proposition of national cinema. On the most exasperating of levels, there are two kinds of cinema, neither of which are based on anything to do with a nation. Hollywood cinema is the first. By Hollywood cinema, I do not strictly mean that which comes from Hollywood. For all intents and purposes, Hollywood cinema includes all films that adhere to a reasonable degree to our usual expectations of what we are seeing within the temporal space; aspirational production values, psychological realism, specific character empathy and narrative fulfillment among other things.
These factors also define the other kind of cinema. That is, the other does not conform in one way or another to these conventions. There is alienation or questioning of some kind between the film and the audience. Over decades of film criticism, various names have been attributed to different types of films and different film movements but, to put them all in one basket, those films that have opposed Hollywood cinema are all part of the significant other. Across various countries and continents, even from within Hollywood, terms as loosely fitting as ART cinema, SECOND cinema, THIRD cinema, COUNTER-cinema and PORNOGRAPHY, to more specific descriptions of movements and styles such as the Nouvelle Vague, Neorealism, Film Noir and cinematic Expressionism are all terms of the other.
Even more practical issues complicate ideas of national cinema, especially outside of Hollywood. If one tries to narrow down national cinema to anything more specific than a seeming association with a particular country, factors such as financing, language, personnel, setting and subject matter often serve to muddy the water. Cinema, by nature (specifically as an interpreted, sensory medium) and construction, is always transnational. But the elephant remains.
Addressing Irish Cinema
For an example concerning ideas of Irish cinema, one only has to look back at the phenomenal achievement that is Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008). Look at the foundations. Hunger was funded and distributed by different groups from different European countries, the film is Irish and British in subject matter, it was directed by an Englishman (McQueen) and features mostly Irish talent (including the astonishing performance of Michael Fassbender as the enigmatic Bobby Sands) acting out a script penned by McQueen and Irish playwright Enda Walsh.
Despite the project’s transnational base, we claimed Hunger as our own, a masterpiece of Irish cinema. While we did not tag it as a nation, it is a collective interpretation. Crying out for something to hold on to and be proud of, green isle cinema enthusiasts took McQueen’s film to be Irish. There is nothing wrong with that of course. It is a testament to a fantastic picture. Crucially however, our need for Hunger was also a sign of just how poor Irish cinema, or cinema associated with Ireland, has been over the past number of years.
Our desire to see a succesful Irish cinema has seen many truly terrible productions in recent years. These pictures have, more often than not, tried to be distinctly Irish with a Hollywood shine at the same time. They are FIRST cinema. To say the least, the results have ranged from average to abominable. Fortunately, Irish cinema has flickered into life at different times with moments of the other kind of film. A frustratingly tiny minority of films have marked the rare highs of Irish cinema. There may be more but, to my admittedly fallible mind, I don’t think there are.
In 1967, Rocky Road to Dublin received a hostile reception at its press screening in Dublin and was quickly made inaccessible to the Irish public by their government. In 1968 it was acclaimed at Cannes and was notoriously well received by striking students and workers in Paris. Irish journalist Peter Lennon and French cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s collaboration could really have been something for Irish cinema were it seen.
Lennon’s intelligent and biting documentary depiction of a nation retarded by decades of Church and State oppression coupled with Coutard’s introduction of Alexandre Astruc’s camera stylo ideas to a new audience was something so stark for Irish audiences of the time. Or, at least, it would have been had the established hierarchy not stubbed it out like a cigarette that nobody had a chance to smoke. One can only wonder how Rocky Road to Dublin could have influenced Irish films over the following decades, or even 1970s Ireland itself. It certainly wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.
In more recent years, it took two Dublin heroin addicts mugging a boy with Down’s Syndrome to light up Irish cinema. Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O’Halloran’s Adam and Paul (2004) is a bleak and tragic story bringing the plight of those who were forgotten by Celtic Tiger Ireland to the screen, those who still desperately cling to the bottom rung of the social ladder. The film follows Adam and Paul’s attempts to get by and survive a single day including the painful aforementioned mugging. Inspired by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Adam and Paul are writer O’Halloran’s Vladimir and Estragon, aimlessly surviving the plight of their own existences.
Figure 5.1: Gogo and Didi, Adam and Paul
Incomprehensibly lost, Adam and Paul brought the forgotten back to the minds of the growing ranks of the middle classes. The absence of those more comfortable from the picture implicates them in the demise of the unfortunate minority and their disappearance from the social radar in a manner that is often as amusing as it is brutal and unsentimental.
While lacking the same quality as Adam and Paul, Abrahamson and O’Halloran’s 2007 acclaimed collaboration Garage (2007) is also a progressive picture of the other, shunning the broad culture of Hollywood-ism or, the fetishisation of cash for want of a better phrase. The film goes someway to picking at the frailties of the community structures of rural Ireland while proving that Pat Short can, much to my own amazement, act in a genuine role. The problem is though, that if you look at Adam and Paul, Garage and Hunger in relation to Irish cinema as a whole, these three films are some of the only serious contributions Ireland has made to world cinema over the past decade. And I’m probably being generous with Garage.
Some will remember Colin Farrell. John Crowley’s Intermission (2003) and Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2008) have hardly lit up the world, or have they? More commercial enterprises, movies (Hollywood cinema), than noble, commercially viable cinema (the other), the two films are mildly amusing and full of Irish charm but further than that it is difficult to argue that the films hold much substance with regards to a progressive, dynamic Irish cinema.
Intermission, a star vehicle for Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy, does little to dispel internationally recognised Irish stereotypes, in fact it merely updates old ones; likely lads and likely ladies, a few tough charmers, a nation of people who are brought together by a drink or two. It would be difficult to argue that In Bruges would have done as well at the box office if Farrell had not played his usual plucky but flawed rogue character. It isn’t Farrell’s fault that he plays to that loveable stereotype so well but it doesn’t make it right. In Bruges is perhaps the most internationally successful (profitable) Irish film of recent years not due to artistic merit but the exploitation of an international audience that indulges in cute stereotypes and wants to love the antics of an Irish misfit rogue (Farrell), a Brendan Behan character (Brendan Gleeson) and a mysterious European beauty (Clémence Poésy) in a picturesque European city (Bruges). Postcard cinema.
Some may focus on English man Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006). As far as beginning criticism, it is difficult to know where to start. It is an abomination of historical revisionism, apologetic and shameless, insulting and misguided, simultaneously. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes which – to take a positive from the award – proves itself a reminder not to assume that festival awards and awful films are mutually exclusive. Romantic idealist Irish men and women fighting for their freedom in the face of the sadistic British soldiers, an altogether despicable and regressive interpretation of Irish history that has somehow become a flagship “Irish” film. The only positive, to really stretch, is the film’s inclusion of the socialist program of many of the Irish revolutionaries, but even that is overshadowed by the dehumanisation of the British, the glorification of murder for what is rather explicitly championed as a noble cause and the portrayal of anybody with money as an inherently evil person.
A multitude of poor comedies have also coloured what is known as Irish cinema. About Adam (2000), The Snapper (1993), The Van (1996), When Brendan Met Trudy (2001), Man About Dog (2004), and Goldfish Memory (2003) are all among the attempts at filmmaking that have ignored artistic merit in favour of a Hollywood narrative and feel with varying faux-working class interests, pandering Irish stereotypes that, one must admit, we as an Irish collective indulge in. The results are all too forgettable.
When you get past the music, Once (2007) is perhaps the only internationally renowned Irish film of recent years that we could and should be even remotely proud of. Capturing a changing city and the budding personal and musical relationship between a European immigrant and a downtrodden native, the film is undoubtedly cheesy in places but it doesn’t baulk at tougher questions such as the relative poverty of the characters, the challenges of living in a city and a world where you are essentially forgotten and things don’t work out as they do in Hollywood.
The success of Once could be a sign. With a meager budget of not much more than €100,000, Once succeeded beyond all expectations. Irish filmmakers can make feature films for that kind of budget as long as the creativity is there. They may not be able to make the glossy Hollywood films that some may want to but is that a bad thing?
An Irish film costing €10million must please every possible audience in Ireland and make a break through in mainstream international markets. Moderate success in Irish and European cinemas will see an Irish film costing €1million easily making healthy profits. A film costing €200,000 to make can break a profit in Irish cinemas alone and go on to relatively enormous profits if seen outside of Ireland.
The film that costs €200,000 will have an artist at the helm. It will be an act of love for the medium, love for what they are making, perhaps even being an act borne out of genius. The hope is that it would fund itself if managed properly. The film that costs €10million will not have an artist at the helm. €10million for a film in Ireland is an unbelievable amount of money and the project will merely be a product, a commercial enterprise headed by a team of accountants and made by an army of trained technicians rather than passionate cineastes. The history is there; it is called In Bruges.
If Irish cinema is to have a life it will not be as a cinema of commercial enterprises. Cinema, as a breathing art form, can never exist as a commercial enterprise. It can be a commercially viable art of course, but to think of it merely as an enterprise is the folly of those who do not care for the art. Success for Irish cinema should not be measured by profits but by substance. For some In Bruges is a success. For me, Adam and Paul is a success.
For those who do care about profits, think about this. We could double the amount of films we produce as a nation for half the cost. That is the bare truth. For every director or writer that is funded for a large project, four or five are rejected in their quest for a small budget for their work. Reverse that trend and the profits would come for those who care about profits. Crucially though, the cinema would come for those who care about cinema.
