Ireland and Cinema

Culture and Contexts

Barry Monahan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137496355
• eBook ISBN: 9781137496362
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The volume offers a broad range of academic approaches to contemporary and historical Irish filmmaking and representations of nationality, national identity, and theoretical questions around the construction of Ireland and Irishness on the screen.

Part I

Politics of Home, Space and Place

1

‘Nothin’ But a Wee Humble Cottage’: At Home in Irish Cinema

Conn Holohan

In September 2011, an Irish Times article on the unfinished ‘ghost estates’ that were blighting the post-Celtic Tiger Irish landscape cited the statistic that over the previous four years, Ireland had experienced the worst crash in house prices in the world since the Second World War (Holland, 2011). This fact, alongside the 2,881 incomplete housing estates that the Department of Environment calculated to be in existence around the country at the time, rendered in strikingly concrete terms the loss of economic sovereignty that had been experienced both individually and collectively since Ireland’s economic boom had come to a dramatic end three years previously. The dominant role that the construction industry had played within the Irish economy over the previous ten years, constituting as much as 21% of national income by 2006/2007 (Kelly, 2009), as well as the personal spending power that inflated house prices had granted to large sections of the Irish population, ensured that the subsequent mass devaluation of domestic property now functioned as a powerful index of economic decline. In the aftermath of the crash, the home became increasingly associated with burden within popular and media discourse as large numbers of people struggled to cope with unaffordable mortgages on houses now worth significantly less than the amount that had been paid for them. Nevertheless, as numerous contemporary commentators would suggest, the collective trauma of this experience could not be explained entirely in economic terms. The particular emotional relationship that Irish culture has sustained with private property, evident as far back as the 19th-century peasant struggles for land rights, ensured that the collapse of the Irish economy, and more specifically that of the Irish property market, was perceived as a crisis at the very heart of Irish identity. This interpretative tendency was given succinct, if hyperbolic, expression in an Irish Times editorial (18 November 2011) on the morning after the Irish government applied for economic assistance from the International Monetary Fund, in which, echoing W. B. Yeats, it wondered ‘was it for this’ surrender of national sovereignty that the men of 1916 had died?

Writing of the centrality of the home within the Irish cultural imaginary, Sean O’Tuama asserts:

One will probably find a reverential feeling for home-place in every country – and in every literature – throughout the world [ … ] It is unlikely, however, that feeling for place (including feeling for home-place) is found so deeply rooted, and so widely celebrated, in any western European culture as it is in Irish culture. It seems to have made its presence felt in Irish literature at every level and in every era from early historic times to the present day.

(1995: 248–9)

O’Tuama traces this intense ‘feeling for place’ from Irish-language poetry of the 17th century, through folksongs and ballads, and into the writings of 20th-century poets such as Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney. The physical anchoring of national identity in the home-place has not been limited to Irish literature, however, but has also been prevalent within a wider cultural and political discourse that found apt expression in de Valera’s famous image of Ireland as a countryside ‘bright with cosy homesteads’. Extending analysis of this discourse into the domain of visual art, Tricia Cusack argues that the idea of home, given expression in images of the country cottage in the work of painters such as Paul Henry, functioned as a mundane but powerful articulation of a particular form of Irish national identity and belonging in the first half of the 20th century. Through its everyday presence and its visual form, she asserts, the cottage conflated a specific set of nationalist values and ‘reinforced the claims of the new state to represent a people whose self-image enshrined homely and pious rural values’ (Cusack, 2001: 234). Similarly, in a discussion about the gendered landscapes of Irish cultural nationalism, Catherine Nash suggests the particular power of the cottage to function as an indexical expression of cultural ideals as ‘the realization, both in the physical fabric of the landscape and in the moral and spiritual domain, of the ideal form of Irish society’ (1993: 49). It is in the context of such a cultural tradition that the image of an Ireland scarred by unfinished housing developments and a populace weighed down by property-related debt has functioned to express so potently a wider social and cultural malaise.

Writing on the expressive function of the home in Hollywood cinema, Elisabeth Bronfen insists that we consider home a fictive rather than an actually existing place. The home is, she argues, ‘a symbolic fiction’ that functions to mediate our relationship to the external world and ‘makes one’s actual place of habitation bearable’ (Bronfen, 2004: 73). For Bronfen, home is an image of belonging; a utopian fantasy that confers order and stability upon the transient spaces of everyday life that we inhabit. While the imaginative act of home-making is intensely personalized in the relationships that we construct to our own spaces of habitation, the symbolic potency of the home-place within Irish cultural and political discourse suggests that the understanding of what it means to be ‘at home’ is always also a shared one. As J. Macgregor Wise argues, ‘cultures are ways of territorializing, the ways one makes oneself at home’ (2000: 300); it is through a shared understanding of belonging that a space becomes one in which we may collectively belong. However, as an examination of Irish cultural discourses over the past decades reveals, that understanding necessarily shifts over time in response to wider social, economic and cultural changes. In the pages that follow, this chapter will trace how such shifts have found expression within Irish cinema and how cinema as a medium has articulated a changing relationship to the ‘symbolic fiction’ that is home. In particular, it will track a movement within Irish films from the traditional association of home with a specific, bounded place, to the image of an Ireland that conceives of itself inhabiting a fluctuating global space. It will suggest that both these images of belonging express a tension between what might be termed ‘local’ and ‘global’ perspectives on space; indeed, that the purpose of home as an imaginative construct is to negotiate between those two seemingly divergent understandings of the physical and social spaces in which we live our everyday lives. Furthermore, in the troubled home-places of recent Irish cinema, it will discern a collapse of home’s comforting fictions as Irish society experiences a visceral encounter with the economic forces that determine our ability to imagine a space in which we can belong.

The ‘humble cottage’

In the opening moments of The Quiet Man (Ford, 1952) – that most iconic cinematic expression of what it means to be at home in Ireland – John Ford succinctly captures the spatial qualities that have long characterized the home within the Irish cultural imagination. Having arrived by train to the bucolic Irish countryside, Sean Thornton (John Wayne), a returning American emigrant, finds himself momentarily waylaid by a squabbling set of locals as he endeavours to acquire directions to the nearby village of Innisfree. Suddenly, an enigmatic figure strolls into shot, picks up Thornton’s bags and serenely announces, ‘Innisfree, this way’. As Thornton and his newly acquired escort depart by horse-drawn cart, Ford cuts to a wide shot of the green landscape, bisected by the perpendicular trajectories of two contrasting modes of transport. Advancing towards the camera is the train that Thornton has presumably just vacated; its mechanical nature emphasized by the several shrill blasts of steam that it emits. Meanwhile, the horse and cart upon which the American now travels ambles from right to left across the bottom of the screen, before disappearing into a tunnel just as the train passes by overhead. Through this simple spatial arrangement, Ford succeeds in establishing what will be the key characteristic of Innisfree and what renders it uniquely suitable as a space in which to make oneself at home. It is not simply that the countryside where Thornton now finds himself is a space of tradition, of an older way of life where the horse and cart supplants the train as a means of transportation. Equally significant as the qualities ascribed to it is the simple fact that this space is qualitatively different, that to cross its boundaries is to ensure a different mode of experience, indeed a different relationship to space and time themselves. As the geographer Doreen Massey asserts, the experience of place as home is generally rooted in ‘the security of [ … ] stability and an apparently reassuring boundedness’ (1994: 169). Despite an occasional subversion of its idealized vision of Irish rural life, the film does nonetheless present the village of Innisfree as one that is, above all, distinct and bounded. In the shot immediately following the one described above, we see Thornton and his guide seated on the cart in mid-shot, the landscape passing behind them as the noise of the train gradually fades from the soundtrack. As the train’s final whistle sounds, Thornton casts a last glance backwards before settling contentedly into his seat and lighting a cigarette. Having passed through the tunnel, neither Thornton nor the film itself will return to the mechanized world of modern life that has been left behind. The irreversibility of this journey from train to village suggests that it is not a simple movement in space that Thornton is undertaking, but a transformative encounter with place. Thus, when, a few moments later, Thornton first sets his eyes on the ‘wee humble cottage’ that was his childhood home, its presence in ‘the physical fabric of the landscape’ functions, to echo Nash, as a synecdochical manifestation of an idealized Irish society, as seemingly stable and natural as the cottage’s rustic whitewashed walls.

Critics such as Luke Gibbons and Martin McLoone have argued that The Quiet Man is less concerned with any actual place called Ireland than with a particular emigrant fantasy of return (Gibbons, 1988; McLoone, 2000). What Sean Thornton seeks in the film is a sense of place that seems to have been denied him in the ‘steel and pig iron furnaces’ of Pittsburgh; the promise of which Ford locates in the imagined space of Ireland’s rural west. Unlike the alienating city-spaces of modernity, Ireland is here offered as a bucolic space of community in which everyone can find a place in which to feel at home. As Gibbons points out, however, Ford’s vision is continuous with a long-established European romantic tradition that found in Ireland ‘all the attributes of a vanished pre-industrial era’ (Gibbons, 1988: 204). To compound the idealized essentialism, this was an image equally embraced internally by Irish cultural nationalism, which located in Ireland’s western seaboard the markers of national difference that legitimized the pursuit of an independent Irish state. Thus, the space of rural Ireland has long offered a nationally specific image of belonging that has been predicated upon its separation from the flux and uncertainty of modern, industrialized life. In The Quiet Man, as Thornton becomes increasingly entwined in the communal structures of Innisfree, the village acquires for him what Gaston Bachelard labels ‘the intimate values of inside space’ (1994: 3); a feeling of belonging within a space that is perceived as materially distinct from that which lies beyond its borders. This seductive promise of the intimate rural space can be traced through the history of Irish film, from the earliest Kalem productions, filmed in Cork and Kerry in the 1910s, to the restorative power of the rural homecoming suggested by the very title of 1992’s Into the West (Newell). Indeed, this strong association of the rural with intimacy and homecoming persists into such recent genre films as Perrier’s Bounty (FitzGibbon, 2010), at the end of which a petty Dublin criminal escapes the crime-ridden city to reunite with his estranged mother on the coastline of County Clare. However, it is an image of belonging that has increasingly seemed to clash with Ireland’s self-image as a cosmopolitan participant in a global cultural and economic space.

A global space

Writing on the changing meanings of Irishness during the years of the economic boom, Diane Negra argues that, from the mid-1990s, the cultural construction of Ireland as a space that remained apart from economic modernity was replaced with ‘a new discursive formulation that emphasise[d] the integration of Irishness and globalization’ (2010: 836). Correspondingly, in contrast to a representational tradition that conflated Ireland with images of its rural west, film and television productions from this period display a new focus on the city as a space where the Irish are at home. In the urban spaces of Dublin in particular, Celtic Tiger cinema locates what Martin McLoone labels ‘a kind of transglobal cool [ … ] of luxurious apartments and well-appointed offices’ (2008: 46); a global, cosmopolitan culture that seemingly transcends any narrowly local sense of place. In a range of films such as these, we encounter characters who move comfortably through a variety of urban spaces and whose identities are less bound to any particular geographical location than to the transnational flows of capital and culture that shape their urban lives. The representation of space in these films is markedly different from that which characterizes the carefully constructed sense of place in cinema’s rural Ireland. In the example from The Quiet Man above, we see how mise en scène, narrative structure and dialogue function to demarcate the rural spaces of the film as bounded and distinct. The urban spaces of Celtic Tiger cinema, by contrast, are integrated into a transnational cosmopolitan space, characterized primarily by consumerism and sexual liberalism, and are marked by constant movement and change. An illustrative example is the opening title sequence of Cowboys and Angels (Gleeson, 2003) that introduces us to the cityscape of Limerick with a series of helicopter shots, and pans and crash zooms across its crowded city streets. These establishing visuals are underscored with the jaunty, upbeat soundtrack of a morning radio show. Movement is constant in this opening sequence; an aesthetic quality that clearly signifies the city as a vibrant space of personal encounters. Furthermore, the images that immediately follow these suggest the erotic potential of these encounters and the ability of the city to open us up to, as yet unknown, sexual pleasures. As the music fades, a young man wanders into shot, while a voice-over asks us if we have ever felt that there was something missing from life. A reverse shot frames three young women in slow motion as they brush past the young protagonist, suggesting quite clearly what the insinuated something might be. From these few images, the changing relationship to space occasioned by the shift to the city can be deduced. While the rural promises a stable set of inter-personal relationships within a clearly defined place, the city offers fulfilment in much more individualistic terms, through the fortuitous encounters forged by the individual’s own trajectory through the mutable urban space.

Above all, these city-located films celebrate the potential for self-realization expressed in the spatial trope of circulation. In films such as About Adam (Stembridge, 2001) and Goldfish Memory (Gill, 2003), characters circulate between sexual partners and sexual orientation with dizzying regularity in narratives of self-discovery that they experience as overwhelmingly positive. Furthermore, the images of the city presented in these films constantly evoke movement and fluidity, emphasizing the circulation of water and people. In Goldfish Memory, the shots of the city that act as punctuation for the film’s cyclical storylines return repeatedly to images of the River Liffey, to the bridges traversing it, and to the Customs House and Liberty Hall, which are both set on the riverbank. We see the city’s revitalized Dockland area, now a paean to the promises of international capital; even the bar that serves as one of the primary settings in the film is located on the Liffey Basin. The streets flow with attractive young Dubliners, whose chance encounters drive its convoluted romantic plot. It is as if, in the shift from the rural to the urban as its primary narrative location, Irish cinema relinquishes the pleasures of place for the possibilities of a semantically open space. Identity in these films is tied less to the inhabitation of a particular geographic location than to the ability to move comfortably through a range of different milieux, primarily those of work, consumption and sexual pursuit. The shift to the city implies a loss of organic community, of the ties to the soil that bind Sean Thornton to the cottage of his youth, and yet the ease with which the ‘hip-hedonists’ of Celtic Tiger cinema circulate through the urban space ensures that they always feel at home.

As suggested above, we can understand this reimagining of the cinematic home-place in the context of a wider repositioning of Ireland as a model open economy, in which ‘Irish’ and ‘global’ are no longer mutually exclusive terms. Unlike the traditional, bounded image of home – clearly marking the distinction between within and without, between those who belong and those who do not – inside and outside now cease to be competing terms. In the celebratory cinema of Celtic Tiger Ireland, the country’s urban landscape is reimagined as a home that is open to all – gay, straight, black, white – in a rhetoric of non-exclusion, even as the actual experience of exclusion which persists in the country is somewhat evaded. The urban is the site that perfectly expresses such a society, as it offers a sense of place that is both local and cosmopolitan, that offers the experience of being inside and outside the national space simultaneously. The cinematic city renders the nation visible through urban landmarks and a recognizable local space, yet, in the same moment, it expresses a transcendence of the parochial, a connection to the network of global metropolises that supersedes any narrowly national concerns.

As commentators such as Ruth Barton have pointed out, however, one of the difficulties that these films encountered was that critics and audiences regretted the deficit of identifiable local markers. Indeed, Barton describes About Adam, a romantic comedy set in middle-class Dublin, as illustrative of ‘a culturally specific desire not to be culturally specific’ (2004: 112), as a film that deliberately refuses the limiting set of images that had defined Ireland cinematically, but which thereby provokes anxious questions as to which markers of Irishness ultimately remain. This echoes a wider anxiety, expressed constantly in media discourses throughout the years of economic boom: namely, that in the process of modernization, Ireland had sacrificed a distinctive sense-of-self. Within this discourse, the cosmopolitan city becomes a space that gives concrete form to these nebulous fears. Discussing the planning and architectural changes that took place in Dublin throughout the Celtic Tiger years, Diane Negra describes ‘the metallic sheen of a new Dublin landscape that showcases generic, postmodern features such as the Spire, the Luas, the refurbished Connolly Rail Station, and new financial districts/cultural quarters such as the International Financial Services Centre and the Docklands’ (2010: 844). She contrasts this newly constituted city space with locations like Bewleys, the long-standing coffee shop that had been so central to Dublin’s cultural identity in a previous era and spoke to a far more local sense of place. As she points out, in this spatial reconstruction of the city, ‘traditional conceptions of the social geography of Ir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Irish National Cinema – What Have We Wrought? Contemporary Thoughts on a Recent History
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Politics of Home, Space and Place
• Part II: Identities of Gender and Stardom
• Part III: Northern Ireland
• Part IV: Overseas Perspectives
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index