Dudley Andrew

The Theater of Irish Cinema

An Introduction to the Issue(s)
Irelands perimeter, no more extensive than the borders of Indiana,
forms a slim girdle tightened by sea surges on all sides, enveloping a
population of some ve million, slightly less than that of Indiana. One
might consider this place a miniature society cut off from the larger
world, a Lilliput, and yet my subject, The Theater of Irish Cinema,
is the very opposite of insular. For when it comes to cinema, Ireland
makes an exemplary world stage, providing unexpected access to
occluded aspects of globalization. The movies produced there reach
out routinely, automatically, beyond themselves to the theater and the
other arts. And so, what might have been taken up as a simple land
survey (identifying the handful of lms turned out each year for a
relatively homogenous nation)a comfortable assignment for scholars
worn down by the obdurate complexities of American, European or
Asian cinemasquickly grows into something larger, with Ireland
serving as a laboratory for research projects funded by the upstart
disciplines of comparative arts and global studies. Whoever enters this
laboratory hopes to contribute to answering the perpetual question:
what is Irish Cinema? Indeed, what is Irishness?
Vain, impossible, yet unavoidable questions. Some decades ago, in
the USA at least, the phenomenon of Stage Irish would have been
the obvious place to start our inquiry. Obvious indeed! Stereotypical
Irish characters and antics conveniently served writers and directors
who could be condent of their effect and slot these in to help build
dramatic experiences of all sorts. Audiences relaxed with and enjoyed
broad Irish accents, behavior, and banter, whether patronizing them or
relishing the nostalgia they could provoke. Stage Irish are in every
case little folk: rural, ahistorical, uncomplicated. The movie roles that
devolved on these types have largely disappeared, especially after +,;:
when the Irish began to make lms themselves and control their pro-
jected image. The Irish camera, able to get close up to its own people
(no longer folk), has repeatedly countered the endearing and
naughty characters exploited in so many Hollywood lms, and cele-
brated in John Fords beloved The Quiet Man (+,). But we should
not expect some collective effort to build a satisfying (and corrected)
national portrait. What lmmaker would sign on to a mission like that?
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The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume +, number + (:oo:): 2358
:oo: by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press
Far from spotlighting Irishness, the stage and most denitely the
screen in Ireland have brought onto the island characters, values, and
ideas from abroad.The Theater of Irish Cinema is denitely global.
A census taken a decade ago found that, in over a four year period,
only two percent of lms on offer in the country were indigenous,
while Hollywood accounted for over ;o%, and another +% going to
British productions.
1
The remainder always included at least o% from
European countries. While in the ,os things improved for Irish pro-
ductions, several of their lms scoring very well in box ofce rankings
(Michael Collins, The Commitments, and In the Name of the Father stand
in the all-time top ten), screens there have always carried stories and
images that appeal to spectators on all continents. Irish spectators,
then, like most of the characters in their recent lms, hope to mesh
with this larger world. So too do a great many Irish cineastes who,
more than most of their countrymen, have tasted international life in
an unmediated form.
And so what can essentially Irish mean, either in the genealogical,
cultural, or cinematic sense? At the onset of last century a call went
out for a literary revival as prelude to a national rising; today Ireland
has indeed revived and arisen but as a fully international animal, the
Celtic Tiger. Whatever you think of the results, the efforts of the EU
and the momentum of the world-system have helped shape another
Ireland altogether. Perhaps a totalitarian state like the Peoples Repub-
lic of China can (wishfully) think to engage selectively with the
Global (resisting cultural contamination so as to retain traditional
Chinese values while proting from world economic interchange). It
is pure fancy for Irelandso small, so very vulnerable to the imperial
culture carried by Englishto survive alone. Yet, fancy is just what
the stage and the screen provide, often as prelude to debates about the
persistence of tradition in the twenty-rst century, about the battle
between the inherited and the prospective.
Such crude binarisms continue to fuel debates about Irish tradition
today (West vs. East, rural vs. urban, Catholic vs. Protestant, Gaelic vs.
English) just as they did in James Joyces day (with Joyce intending to
dismantle the binary system altogether, according to Kevin Whe-
lan). But the tilt from theater to lm in recent years has shifted the
grounds of discourse. This is what authorizes the prex post before
modernity. For where theater raises issues of national identity in the
modern age by pitting voices and settings against each other (people
and places being the currency of nation), cinema gures allegiances
and oppositions within a mist of images. Images arrive through shift-
ing points of view, and they may arrive either as document or hallu-
cination, as present or past, and so on. We take them in while regis-
tering scale, tempo, color, music, and a host of other qualities. To this
difference in textual material, we must add altered conditions of re-
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m :
ception. Each play addresses a single gathered audience, even if the
troupe repeats its performance, road-show fashion, night after night
around the country. But lms oat within the countrys atmosphere,
available simultaneously on many screens, existing in virtual state in
every videostore. They are exchanged by distributors with other lms
around the world. This uidity of the cinematic substrate confounds
the binarisms that nevertheless still organize the plots of most movies
made in or about Ireland.
Fluid binarismthis condition of cinemamay begin to charac-
terize what Irishness has left to offer as a concept. The essays in this
collection would seem to demonstrate that tradition has neither died
nor solidied into monument. Instead, it exists in a body of beloved
literature, as well as in what that literature treats: the struggle of a
people to make something from nothing, to survive loss of land,
power, and language, to survivein the ultimate casefamine. The
violence of tradition includes political, religious, and domestic ver-
sions. Literature, cinema, and cultural criticism dont merely represent
this violence but enact it in the present. Thus tradition is both lost to
the past and carried on; lost, in that Ireland will never again speak
Gaelic or maintain habits proper to the pre-industrial Western coun-
ties, but carried on in the idiosyncratic manner that Irish people meet
the present. That manner Kevin Whelan and Luke Gibbons dub rad-
ical memory, whereby the violence of the pasta violence that
fought and failed to achieve coherence against colonization and ex-
ploitationis put to use in a new struggle against updated versions of
these very same threats: American colonization and market exploita-
tion. Forget the question of its existence; if Irishness were to have
value, it would be as a habit of response, a habitus inculcated in its long
and painful history. Ireland will not avoid postmodernity, including the
homogeneity it breeds (the brand names, the hybrids) but it can live
postmodernity, indeed contribute to it, in an Irish manner, that is, with
Irish values in the fore.
It imagines just this in literature and on lm. The road lm, I Went
Down, for instance, annoyed many American viewers for including no
cottages or Celtic crosses as it meanders across the country. Its gas
stations, hotels, and barrooms sport a tawdry international non-style
and its plot comes straight from Hollywood genre pictures. Yet the
lm scored powerfully at home, appreciated precisely as an Irish road
lm. The anonymous stopovers in the drama form a clever hypo-
thetical geography to anyone familiar with County Cork. And the
actors gestures and dialoguetheir cadences, tone and delivery
were felt to be homegrown, inculcated on the stage and in life, as ways
of inhabiting a motion picture that can be called postmodern only if
local inection and local response be part of the denition of the
postmodern.
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If we would look for Irishness in something we still want to label
Irish cinema, I believe we must do so in the habits by which actors
and directors respond to the (post)modernity of their medium. In the
gestures and speech of actors, in the recalcitrant instincts of directors,
one senses a productive friction, a resistance to the smooth surface of
cinema today in the world entertainment order. I coin the term
demi-emigration to name this in-between state lived uncomfortably
by directors and actors who do more than make a living in crossing
over and back from Ireland; they represent, in all senses of the term,
Irishness today.
Far from a concession, a broken term like demi-emigration points
to a situation that may ironically promote Ireland to the cultural
avant-garde. After all, this island has emerged from a history of colo-
nization to become a lively participant in the global economy. Nego-
tiating on all frontswith America where half its population now
lives, with Great Britain whose history and literature includes it, with
Europe to which it has joined its futureIreland is a site and a pro-
ducer of cultural and economic innovation. Moreover, the language of
this negotiation is English, or rather several versions thereofAmeri-
can English for business, British English for culture, and what might
hesitantly be called Irish English for the habitus of feeling. Behind the
latter lies Gaelic, or at least the memory of its violent suppression and
equally violent resurgence. Largely due to this blessing of its multi-
English verbal state, Ireland looks condently toward a future that in-
cludes both its robust participation in the World and its secure sense
of itself. Other locations, both large and small (Korea, Quebec, Turkey,
Brazil) nd themselves similarly poised before the coming era. All
must face cultural homogenization and economic colonization; but in
negotiating a place for themselvesand a place as themselvesall
must face up to the unquestioned medium of negotiation: English.
They may look to Ireland for its response. Already they can look to
Irish lms.
They can do so either through the optique of critical regionalism,
whereby the distinctiveness of a local, even a peripheral, situation
speaks back to an international system it recognizes, or they can re-
verse this process through an optique that might carry one of those in-
evitably bi-valent names, like rooted cosmopolitanism, where the
wider world of economics, culture and criticism, thickens the local
situation. Here international theory is scanned and imported for Irish
purposes, enabling a more complex view of Irishness, one that includes
both a dynamic rooted tradition and a future-oriented cosmopoli-
tan thrust. Luke Gibbons, who subscribes to this term, best represents
it in these pages and he does so, as is appropriate, by reading not just
The Dead, but John Hustons cinematic re-reading of Joyces story.
Thus a story haunted by The Famine returns spectrally in +,::,
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m : o
through the eeting perspective of Lily the servant girl, to haunt a lm
that has brought Joyce into a presumably cosmopolitan Dublin.
Alerted to the discontinuous historiography developed by Walter
Benjamin to counter standard hegemonic histories with the frag-
mented and broken tradition of a diasporic Judaism, Gibbons means
not to sentimentalize Lily, Michael Furey, and the West, but to glimpse
in a ash the loss of these values and the meaning of that loss today.
As I aim to indicate in what follows, Irishness (and not just a few priv-
ileged Irish citizens of the world) is haunted in just this way, making
demi-emigration a national state of being.
Translations on Stage and Screen
Irish cinema gained momentum during the +,:os, a decade of doldrums
for the medium generally, when cine-clubs and arthouses dwindled
and Hollywood reasserted its global grip on distribution. Yet this in-
auspicious moment in the history of the art turned out to be the right
moment for cinema to emerge in a land quivering with the expecta-
tions of change. Films registered those quivers and helped push for
those changes. Thus Irish cinemas belatedness, like Irans, has brought
it the attention it would never have garnered in the oos and ;os, when
it would have competed with the innovative modernist lms arriving
monthly from France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Latin
America. While miniscule by most standards (from a half-dozen to a
maximum twenty features a year), and often compromised by its need
to recruit both nancing and spectators, Irish cinema after +,:o played
a substantial role in the public sphere, a role the medium had retreated
from almost everywhere else.
While the fty features generally taken to be Irish made in the
+,:os span a healthy spectrum of political topics and perspectives, their
sudden arrival after decades of inactivitythis renaissancecoin-
cides with a clear turn in the politics of culture toward a particular
perspective: post-colonialism. In the overall program known as Field
Day, launched in +,:o by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen
Rea, one senses a shift away from the cosmopolitanism that had set the
intellectual agenda since the oos, under the urbane rhetoric of Conor
Cruise OBrien. Not that Field Day meant to retreat to the mythic or
the literary past. Instead, as Stephen Rea explains in his interview for
this issue, both in its stage productions and in its literary publications,
the group (expanded to include Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Tom
Paulin and David Hammond) determined to shed harsh light on the
historical conditions that had produced Ireland, including those spe-
cic contradictions responsible for its current impasses.
Field Days most direct gift to the cinema came in the form of the
actors it put on display. The lead male roles in the Derry production
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of its inaugural offering, Translations, were carried off by Stephen
Rea, soon picked up by Neil Jordan to star in Angel, and Liam Neeson,
whom Jordan instantly imagined as his Michael Collins (see Figure +).
I will always remember the way he leaned against the cabin window .
. . then turned nonchalantly and said, Tell him his tents are on re.
2
Jordan points out that even when Neeson plays morally upright
characters, he calmly incorporates into them a set of contradictions
that one can feel in his shrugs and verbal delivery. Such unstudied -
nesse lent his role as Schindler great complexity, even though all the
plaudits went to Ralph Feinnes who played a quite conventional car-
icature of evil. John Boorman was equally impressed with Neeson
when he saw Translations after it moved to the Abbey Theater in
Dublin. He gave Neeson his rst screen role in the +,:+ Excalibur, on
which Jordan served as assistant director. In Neesons body language
and speech, as in Stephen Reas, andso Fredric Jameson arguesas
in that of a whole cadre of Irish actors, lie a repertoire of gestures and
responses with which the Irish identify. Neeson, some have suggested,
exhibits a lumbering, nearly bow-legged bearing that stems from the
way he and his neighbors trod the soft bog country of his youth (see
Figure :).
3
He honed this walk in his stage work and retains it to some
extent even as Schindler. Jameson hypothesizes that every national
cinema worthy of the name feeds off a national theater.
4
He has in
mind not so much the output of playwrights but the gait, the inec-
tion, the facial grimaces which national actors put into play, no mat-
ter what roles they take on. These physical habits comprise an inven-
tory of national expression. Filmmakers in France in the +,os, to take
a clear example, knew how to orchestrate such habits; so too do the
new lmmakers in Ireland in the +,:os and ,os; more important,
home audiences instinctively experience as their own the movies in
which their actors express things in just this Irish way.
This particular reliance on national theater exists despite the fact
that every decade since the +,+o Easter Uprising had seen failed adap-
tations of Abbey Theater productions. Why should such acting carry
a national cinema after +,:o? Something about the explicit cultural
politics in the Field Day project lifted the ambition of lms like Pigs,
Maeve, Angel, and Cal. The sharp critical instinct evident in all these
productions was in the air even before Field Day, for instance in Bob
Quinns +,;: Gaelic-language Poitin, which pushed the face of the
country into the home brew that was its subject, providing a toxic an-
tidote to the wholesome image and fetching accents of The Quiet
Man. Irish cinema, it seems, had set itself to expose the countrys hid-
den vices and persistent problems: the perpetual state of surveillance
in the North (from Cal,Angel, and Hush-a-Bye Baby to In the Name of
the Father) as well as in the Republic (Anne Devlin, Eat the Peach, Into
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m : :
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the West); pederasty infecting the clerically run educational system
(from Our Boys and Lamb to The Butcher Boy); the vindictive repres-
sion of female sexuality (Hush-a-Bye Baby, December Bride, Fools of For-
tune); the parochial fear of outsiders (Traveller,The Field, Into the West).
Every key lm after +,:o registered the pain and reactions of its char-
acters to such systematic social aggravations.
The intellectuals at Field Day take these habits as symptoms of an
overriding historical nightmare dating at least to the battle of the
Boyne and the loss of local political control to the British. That is why
Brian Friels rich play Translations, set in +:, can be said to set the
tone both for this cinema and its reception, since it directly addresses
the process and consequences of colonization, dramatizing the strug-
gle over language, education, land, religion, literal surveillance, and
identity. Throughout the decade Friels company alternated original
plays (mainly by Friel, but also one by Terry Eagleton) with pointed
re-interpretations of classics, particularly Chekhov.
Stephen Rea performed in them all, and he did so all over Ireland.
For Field Day had determined from the outset to take its productions
around the island, so as to force the issues of their plays into con-
sciousness and thus trigger discussion. The stage was to be a mobile
train of memories, opened up each night in a different place to startle
their fellow citizens with the feel of an Ireland that was both the same
and different from what they knew by day. The sameness was pro-
duced, if Jamesons hypothesis holds up, by the familiarity of the ac-
tors and their manners. The difference was provided by Friel or by
Chekhov or by whatever playwright put these actors into situations
that shaped them morally, just as the country was shaped. Field Day,
we could say, performed the memory of a genuinely national audience;
in this its mission ts a cinema whose most vernacular expressions
owe their distinctiveness to what has been termed the performative
as opposed to the written (the European artlm model) or to the
spectacular (the Hollywood model).
For example, two lms of the +,:os supported by state funds, Anne
Devlin and Eat the Peach, couldnt be more different in theme, genre
and style, yet they are equally identiable as Irish expressions. Anne
Devlin is performed hieratically, almost as a rite; Eat the Peach, on the
other hand, desublimates its performance, coming off as casual as a
shaggy-dog story told in a pub. It looks far more like television than
serious cinema, forming the blasphemous obverse of Anne Devlins sa-
cred reenactment of history. We might count both as examples of an
oral cinema, in which the telling is audible beyond the tale. Most
audiences, especially outside Ireland, nd this clumsy or annoying, ha-
bituated as they are to the perfected Hollywood cinema in which the
teller disappears into the technology of narration. Irish lmmakers
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m o
Figure : Telling the story of Ireland in Into the West
Figure :: from Michael Collins
Figure +: Stephen Rea and Liam Neeson in Niel Jordans Michael Collins
join compatriots in under-funded industries when they assert their
poverty, make a virtue of it. West African lmmakers often adopt the
mantle of the griot or oral poet who entertains and instructs the
group he sings for.
5
Many of these African lms are framed as tales ac-
tually sung by griots. This is also the case with the most notable lm
of the new Korean cinema, Chun Hyang (:ooo), featuring an on-
screen singer who brings forth the images and story we are treated to.
While some lms with Irish topics allude to folk culture in this way
(John Sayless The Secret of Roan Inish, for example), the orality of Irish
cinema should be taken less literally and more generally. It character-
izes fully realized lms that refuse the perfection (in the grammati-
cal sense of the term) demanded by producers in Hollywood and in
its vassal state, Great Britain. British realism, British acting, and the
weight of British novels and history tomes are countered by the fresh
spontaneity of Irish orality and performance, terms meant to give
the Irish room to wriggle for space, and to respond to ofcial history
sometimes through wit and irony, other times through lament.
Oral deftness has a long tradition in Ireland. William Butler Yeats
could have had cinema in mind when he distinguished Ireland as a
nation where tradition ashes up in transient images, given off
through the anecdotes of oral poets, a nation of clever songs rather
than of the thick novels and history books that anchor mighty
England. England was to him what Hollywood is to me, the
smothering status quo, heavy and predictable. Ireland, Yeats believed,
practiced a nomadic mode of discourse, linked to the traveling
people of its countryside who recast their identity each night around
the re (see Figure ). This re has been rekindled in the stage lights
of Field Days mobile theater, and in the projection light of one of the
most exciting cinemas on the globe todayresisting, as it so often
does, the homogeneity of the Anglo-TV and American movie
culture.
Cinema as Silent Scream
As its title divulges, Margot Harkins Hush-a-Bye Baby belongs to the
category of lament, a quiet lament suppressing, until the nal mo-
ment, a primal scream. Not just its tone but its production may stand
for the dogged insistence of much low-prole Irish cinema, for Hush-
a-Bye Baby was cobbled together in the border city of Derry; not as
the work of a visionary auteur (it remains Harkins only feature) but
by a short-lived arts cooperative, taking advantage of a subvention by
Channel Four. That a lm so cheaply and unassumingly produced
(and in a place so out-of-the-way) could nd passionate adherents not
just in Ireland, but in the USA, France and elsewhere, testies rst to
the urgency of its assured voice, but equally to the strength of cinema
dudl e y andre w +
overall in recent Irish culture. While television and radio tend to skirt
the controversies of modern life or, until lately, present an ofcial uni-
vocal version (Harkin cleverly inserts both media in her movie), Irish
lms have been able to burrow into the bogland of public life through
private anecdote and thus gain an immediate moral advantage because
of their independence. Harkin scarcely needed to exaggerate the is-
sues her lm runs into at every turn, since they are everywhere ap-
parent in Ireland, even if ofcially unacknowledged: a ten-year old
caught by his parents with a Molotov cocktail; fourteen young men
picked up without stated cause by the British; a newborn abandoned
in a grotto; reports of miracles involving the virgin; a young girl pub-
licly vilied for leaving the Republic to have an abortion. With every
choice of scene, dialogue, and prop, Harkin unfailingly contributed to
the dramatic pressure of what is more than one girls quandary,
amounting to a national plot. It was enough to lm Goretti and her
companions merely walking their city: Entering Free Derry reads
one massive sign they pass;The Silent Eye is Watchingreads another.
Let us name this the plot of reclamation, a plot played out in differ-
ent registers in lm after lm. In Hush-a-Bye Baby Goretti struggles to
reclaim propriety over her body, hiding in locker rooms, toilet stalls,
her bedroom, her sisters apartment, until nally running west to the
Gaeltecht of Donegal which provides her momentary retreat. The im-
passe of her unwanted pregnancy is set within the political impasse of
a divided Derry. The useless fathers she turns away from rather than
toward (her childs father, her own father, her father confessor) have
their political counterpart in the British soldiers who keep an eye on
the Catholics, enforcing curfew, spying on assignations, policing the
neighborhoods they have bounded by fences and checkpoints.
Derrys location at the border of north and south, and midway be-
tween east and west, make of it an emblem of the island. It is also the
headquarters of Field Day, and proximate to the ctional setting of
Translations. That play unrolls in the period of Catholic resistance
to the effects of the Act of Union, and especially to the institution of
English as the only language to be used in schools and public forums.
This was also the period of the great land survey the British carried
out (the rst of its kind in world history) in which plotters cut the sin-
uous Irish hills and rivers into maps of six inch quadrants the better
to govern their ownership and use. All this incited a backlash from
which the Church, an obvious rallying point, accrued absolute moral
authority. That authority would be felt in every parish and virtually
every soul. Catholic Church and British state, though at odds, con-
spired to doubly repress a ragged populace.
Hush-a-Bye Baby proposes no convenient release from the moral and
military structures that exert a dramatic pressure so pervasive it results
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m :
in connement in all senses of the term. Transcendence is glimpsed in
music, dance, drinking, and comradery at the pub, in furtive sex, in the
passing of messages in Gaelic, in visions of the virgin. But the pub is
under surveillance, the sex leads to a lonely pregnancy, Gaelic is
removed from the historical process, and the virgin turns on her sup-
plicants, terrifying Goretti in her dreams. Gorettis baby does not
come to term with the lm; its future is suspended, lying so to speak
in Limbo, the title of the Seamus Heaney poem read without irony,
and as a kind of embedded epigraph, in the heart of the lm. But
Limbo has no theological purchase; it marks the state of contradiction
between innocence and guilt, the no-place of a barred future.
Margot Harkins story is happier than Gorettis. She labored Hush-
a-Bye Baby into existence, successfully enlisting not just the Derry Arts
cooperative, but Seamus Heaney and Sinad OConnor to help her
deliver it. Despite its discretion, Hush-a-Bye Baby bravely invoked cur-
rent scandals of infanticide and child abuse, recent reports of kinesic
statues of the virgin, and weekly occurrences of men silently lifted
by British soldiers from the streets to jails. Hush-a-Bye Baby whispers
a word to all those conned in military prison or in Catholic ghettos
of the North, or in so many Catholic homes that have turned into jails
for countless girls like Goretti. From its opening underwater credits,
one can feel the scream forming in the throat of Hush-a-Bye Baby,
breaking the surface only at the end. This scream Sinad OConnor
would deliver full face at the Pope a few years hence on television.
OConnor, who had demanded a role in this lm (she plays Gorettis
prudish girlfriend) and composed its music, understood its work of
reclamation.
The Myth of Landscape
Intervening political events prevented Hush-a-Bye Baby from being
broadcast by Channel Four. They regretted having nanced it. And so
it joined a morally elite coterie of alternative lms with ad hoc distri-
bution, lms made by the likes of Cathal Black, Jo Comerford, and
Bob Quinn, all three directors thanked by Harkin in her tail credits.
Poitin, Pigs, Our Boys, Reefer and the Model, Budawanny encouraged her
not to compromise, whether on delicate matters like religion and
politics or on commercial matters like the brogues that make her lm
so difcult to screen in the USA. After all, language stands as the rst
line of defense against the enforcement of the Kings English, as
Quinn understood when he insisted on making Poitin with English
subtitles. Gaelic and thick accents produce the puns and circuitous
tales (the blarney) that comprise the discursive front of resistance to
colonization. Hence the purity of these Irish lms, their unagging
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and tenacious attention to the troubles of their land, is guaranteed
by the irregularity, the impurity of their form. Makeshift lms, all of
them, but by that fact, accorded the prestige of being essentially Irish.
But, as we have noted, controversy and confusion attends the con-
cept of essentially Irish. As its title announces, Translations recog-
nizes Irish identity to be less a substantive than the name of a contin-
uing process of negotiation. Certain lms such as Man of Aran, Poitin,
and Hush-a-Bye Baby may expose recognizably Irish traits and issues,
but the cultural life of the island, and its cinematic expression, isto
employ an apt oxymoronessentially compromised.
This oxymoron is the premise of Eat the Peach, one of the rst fea-
tures to receive aid from the National Film Board looking to under-
write projects expressing the national character. Although its internal
disputes and frequent changes of personnel made The Board ineffec-
tual until +,:, its coming into existence at the beginning of the
decade held out hope to independent producers, particularly when
combined with the favorable investment conditions that were legis-
lated in +,: to help spawn and develop a native lm industry. Eat the
Peach garnered the largest award in the year that actual subventions
were nally parceled out to become the rst fully commercial in-
digenous production in Ireland.
6
But Eat the Peach was in fact com-
promised from the outset, for, though set in the bog and peat country
that constitutes the center (and o%) of Irelands landmass, the lm re-
ceived even more money from Channel Four International and was
directed by Britisher Peter Ormrod.
7
Read as an allegory of the cottage industry of which it is a part, Eat
the Peach has the appearance of another makeshift production, not
unlike Poitin; only it adds a crucial international dimension. As in Bob
Quinns lm, the opening credits roll over forlorn shots of the sparse
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m
Figure : from Eat the Peach
Irish landscape. Reaping peat here replaces brewing the black market
liquor of Poitin. These are the pathetic industries by which the locals
exploit the meager natural resources at hand. But Eat the Peach, we
quickly learn, pictures an Ireland touched by modernization, and sub-
ject to its doubtful effects. While Vinnie is mired in a literally lthy
job for the peat concern, his brother-in-law Arthur is introduced
standing outside a clean high tech plant ringed by ags from around
the globe sited incongruously here in the barren midlands (see Figure
). Arthur hears his Japanese bosses announce through an interpreter
and over a loud speaker, the grim news: Due to unexpected down-
turns in the microcomputer demand, the world recession and local
communication difculties [a jab at Irish education] . . . provision has
been made for redundancy compensation.The bosses then simply lift
off the ground in helicopters and y away, leaving the Irish in their
peat bog. One Japanese, however, has befriended Arthur and Vinnie.
He leaves them a VCR and some tapes (this will be their access to the
larger world), before he too ascends to another realm.
That other realm, the international dimension, exists just off screen,
affecting the dreams and behavior of characters who never leave the
center of the island they inhabit. They seem to live in a cheap imita-
tion of America. While the women and politicians hear Sunday mass,
Vinnie and Arthur repair to their pub, The Frontier, which plays
country and Western music. Nualla, the tawdry barmaid, is desperate
to get to Nashville or L.A. where another patron, Boots, claims to
have many contacts. For what must be the hundredth time, Vinnie and
Arthur get the bartender to play a videotape of Roustabout starring
Elvis Presley, whose swagger and motorcycle bravado they envy and
emulate (see Figure ). Brilliant bricoleurs, they concoct a scheme.
Pressing their dowdy neighbors into labor, and with materials gleaned
dudl e y andre w
Figure : Watching Roustabout in Eat the Peach
from junkyards, they jerry-rig an amusement attraction in imitation of
what they saw in Roustabout. Soon a huge cylinder, like a grain silo,
rises out of the bogland. Like Elvis, they will race their motorbikes
round and round the inside wall until, attaining sufcient speed and
G-force, they defy gravity and climb high on the wall, riding paral-
lel to the oor (see Figures o and ;).
But rst they need money to complete their Wall of Death, and
money has dried up in the midlands. Boots encourages them to think
big and to enter into World Trade. In Roustabout Elvis had prolepti-
cally chided his rivals when they mocked his Yamaha: Made in
Japan, he says proudly;Havent you guys heard of World Trade? Al-
though he wears a cowboy hat and touts his international contacts,
Boots World Trade network amounts to his part in local whiskey
smuggling. The two heroes begin making truck runs across the bor-
der to the North on unauthorized roads, engaging in what they eu-
phemistically claim to be international road haulage . . . commodity
relocation, Irish style.
TV cameras from the local station are there to capture the inaugu-
ration of The Wall of Death. After a blessing with holy water from
the parish priest, and congratulations for their enterprise from a slimy
politician, Arthur and Vinnie mount their motorbikes dressed in
ridiculous gaudy costumes. Things go awry; the wall shakes enough to
terrify the crowd looking down from atop the cylinder. They scam-
per down, slowly at rst, then in a rush. That night the despondent
Vinnie sets his dream are. In an epilogue Boots visits the pair some
time hence. He nds them subdued, put in their place, feminized af-
ter the ery fate of their crazy whim. Vinnie and his wife now have
two children, playing within the fence that surrounds their tidy, white
house. Vinnie and Arthur tend a garden and show Boots the hothouse
theyve laid atop the bog.Tomatoes. Great! says Boots politely.Not
exactly a glamour business. But the hothouse is a front. Pulling back
some netting, they unveil for Boots what they are really growing: not
vegetables, but a homemade helicopter, nearly ready for ight (see
Figure :). The lm ends on an aerial shot taken from a helicopter, one
that affords a panorama of the bogland that Vinnie and Arthur are
working their way ever deeper into, even as they dream of defying its
pull and lifting off somehow into the air.
Eat the Peach disingenuously takes on the sheepish self-deprecation
of its characters. Full of blarney itself, the lm might have been
conceived in a pub and inspired by videos of Hollywood pictures.
Cobbled together, its rickety structure starts to fall apart as things ac-
celerate. And yet the effort to make a lm in Ireland, to build an in-
congruous attraction in the midst of nowhere and on the cheap . . .
this is what counts. Eat the Peach exhibits the enterprising Irish spirit
that it satirizes. It pays reluctant tribute to a viscous, porous earth that
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m o
dudl e y andre w ;
Figures o, ;, and :: from Eat the Peach
gloms onto boot, onto tires, and onto every effort to leave it or exploit
it. Ultimately Arthur and Vinnie, for all their efforts to escape, are hap-
pily stuck at home. The bog retards action but fertilizes dreams, lan-
guage, and ingenuity, especially when liberally watered with alcohol.
Whereas Seamus Heaney, The Bard of the Bog, has honored this
black earth for the layers of history buried within it, Peter Olmrods
camera necessarily remains on the bogs surface, watching monstrous
machines roll across it, cutting it up for peat, desecrating it (see Figure ,).
8
Arthur and Vinnie feel no urge to dig in search of ancient bog people,
since they are their direct descendants, still trying to climb into the
wider world. Eat the Peach thrives on this dialectic, which in turn char-
acterizes small cinemas around the globe: resolutely stuck in the local,
it listens toand longs to jointhat which is international. And in
this it modestly succeeded: after having played well at home, it re-
ceived exposure in England and the USA. The Washington Post recog-
nized its ethos, appreciating its moments of elevating, unforced
beauty . . . For a modestly scaled piece, [Eat the Peach] works on a lot
of levels. . . . Watching the lm we feel like Vinnie on his motorcycle,
held up in space by invisible hands, lighter than gravity.
9
Martin McLoone assigns another name to this dialectic of local and
international; he calls it critical regionalism. By inecting the themes
and language of Hollywood so as to express an Irish reality, Eat the
Peach joins those lms (he specically cites works by Quinn, Black,
Comerford and Harkin) that particularize the universal.
10
McLoone
wants to distinguish these indigenous efforts from those that go the
opposite direction, using Irish material to make internationally ac-
ceptable movies. He would include not just the offspring of Ryans
Daughter made by non-Irish directors, like Excalibur and Light Years
Away (Alain Tanner +,:+), but also lms directed by Irishmen but
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m :
Figure ,: from Eat the Peach
whose primary nancing came from offshore producers and distribu-
tors aiming to exploit Irish themes. Pat OConnors Fools of Fortune,
Neil Jordans The Crying Game, and even Jim Sheridans In the Name
of the Father could all be seen in this slanted light, since each of these
ostensibly engaged lms greatly simplies Irish politics so as to clar-
ify and heighten drama. McLoone classies these lms not on the ba-
sis of aesthetic value but rather on artistic function and audience. He
might believe The Crying Game to be far superior as a lm to Maeve,
but only the latter truly addresses the Irish situation, Pat Murphy
adapting to her topic the conventions of the historical genre. The Cry-
ing Game, on the other hand, appealed to a very wide audience by
working the other way around: adapting themes specic to the con-
ict in Northern Ireland Neil Jordan was able to cleverly exploit
genre conventions we are all familiar with.
A convenient way to clarify this distinction presented itself in +,,
when the American John Sayles brought out The Secret of Roan Inish just
two years after Into the West, a work scripted by Jim Sheridan and co-
produced by its star, Gabriel Byrne. Neither lm stands up to McLoones
strict critieria, in the rst place because both were directed by foreigners
(Mike Newell of Britain took charge of Sheridans script). Moreover,
both indulge in what McLoone labels historicist nostalgia.
11
Nonetheless, the differences between the lmsdifferences McLoone
overlooks in castigating their regressive ideologyare instructive.
Sayles has made a career of mining the geography and folklore of
places as distant from one another as Alaska, West Texas, Central
America and Ireland. These he digests for an international, generally
educated audience attuned to his signature style. In The Secret of Roan
Inish, he quickly exploits a universal suspicion of urban morals and an
equally universal attraction to the purity and sublimity of the sea, to
gain sympathy for a legend that sustains grandparents and children in
their resistance to the encroachments of modern life, symbolized by
adults (see Figures +o and ++). Sayles fetchingly employs Irish music,
accents, and tokens (notably the half-human selkies), in a make be-
lieve parable applicable everywhere. The values of critical regionalist
lms, however, affect an Irish audience rst and foremost. They con-
tribute to world cinema, if at all, by distending its language, like a di-
alect that may be hard or impossible to catch. In its title and through-
out the course of its plot, Into the West refers to themes and icons of the
Hollywood western, but it does so to complicate and clarify Irelands
very different western mythology. While neither trenchantly critical
nor regionalist, Into the West promotes an interplay between troubles
past and present that Sayles utterly ignores in his lm.
The West of Ireland. The West, celebrated by Yeats, is the sea-
washed source of ancient stories and values, still potent tonic for a
country at risk. Alone among European nations, Ireland was never
dudl e y andre w ,
taken by the Romans, was left untouched by the Reformation, and
was by-passed by the Renaissance. When Britain, having been over-
run by all three of these cultural revolutions, overran Ireland in turn,
the Irish looked to the West for spiritual resistance. They still do.
Sheridans script, ambiguous in certain respects, couldnt be clearer
about this moral geography. The civilization of the East, and particu-
larly of Dublin, feels cold and stiff, as though in the shadow of Eng-
land; at its edges stand the housing projects, a sewer drawing the weak
and the rootless who can no longer survive in the countryside. Papa
Reilly (Gabriel Byrne), once a proud nomad, the dashing leader of a
group of traveling people, having lost his wife at their son, Ossies,
birth, has sunk into alcoholism and into the projects, a nal resting
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m o
Figure ++: The Silkie, from The Secret of Roan Inish
Figure +o: Grandparents and Children in The Secret of Roan Inish
dudl e y andre w +
place. To this grim spiritual grave comes Tir na ng, the mystical
white horse from the Western seas (see Figure +:). He will carry young
Ossie back to the West to restore him to his dead mother beneath the
waves. In the process the horse, the boy, and his older brother Tito will
reclaim the full breadth of Ireland, racing over mountains, plains, and
midland cities, followed by their resuscitated father and by the police
(who use the tactics of British policesurveillance helicoptersand
are in the pocket of a British-looking businessman).
A series of ready oppositions line up under the lms master binary,
West/East. These include: Ancient/Modern, sea/city, cleverness/
education, horse/helicopter, campre lore/TV dramas, and travelers/
sedentary people. When early on the clans aged patriarch recites a tale
to Ossie and Titoa tale they will repeatwe know it is meant to be
the story of Ireland itself: an original equilibrium, a holy family of
travelers, destabilized by the loss of the mother, lies in weakness and at
the mercy of corrupt Eastern powers, until the family can be restored
by a sacrice in the sacred seas off Connemara (see Figure +).
McLoone would not be alone in nding this century old mythology
which comes from the Gaelic revival to be of dubious relevance in to-
days more cosmopolitan Ireland. But cosmopolitanism is precisely what
the lm questions; hence its pertinence to the problematic of Irish iden-
tity, and its difference from the more timeless The Secret of Roan Inish.
Jim Sheridan has said that he works by picking up a story and then
guring out where it came from.
12
He prefers to imagine every story
as it might have been told in some ancient manner: My Left Foot as
Oedipus Rex, In the Name of the Father as Antigone, and Into the
West as an undisguised version of Finn and the Fianna, the great Irish
epic, with Ossie an avatar of Oisin. Into the West thus answers to the
universal logic of folktales (it can be readily parsed into Propps
scheme for Russian tales, for instance), while it speaks to local prob-
lems and obsessions. One of these obsessions, the American West, Eliz-
abeth Cullingford has relentlessly tracked across this lm and a host of
other Irish expressions.
13
The boys confusion over Cowboys and In-
dians (Which are we? Ossie wonders) goes to the heart of European
racism applied by the British to the Irish (called blacks in certain pe-
riods) and by the Irish to the traveling people (called tinkers and
gypsies). Another obsession, Irelands confusion over the West
whether it is a new horizon to be exploited as difference or a tired
past that will pull them into the amniotic uid of nostalgiathe
movie frames as a debate over education. Ossie is illiterate yet preter-
naturally responsive to oral tales, whether told by his grandfather, Papa
Reilly, or by the lms he sees on TV (westerns above all, plus Back to
the Future, part II in the key scene at the Savoy theater where the boys
and their horse hide outsee Figure +). Tales like these have the power
to precipitate action; Papa Reilly cries out that it was stories killed
Marie, Ossies mother. And this story, once underway, must take
young Ossie down with it into the sea and back to Marie.
Tellingly, Into the West was marketed in the U.S.A. as a childrens
lm, where it grossed $,:oo,ooo. Many favorable reviews steered an
adult audience to the lm, knowing perhaps that in Ireland it played
broadly across ages. Still, the Irish reception was surely distinctive, de-
spite Sheridans contention that a small country like mine requires of
its stories a more universal connection. For Into the West engages
issues (racism, education, pagan folklore, the lure of America) that, if
not unique to Ireland, bear a distinct cast in the Irish context. While
McLoone cannot include Into the West alongside the militant works he
championsin part because its photography, acting, and music are so
agreeablehe is too quick to link it to The Secret of Roan Inish, which,
though perhaps a better lm by standard standards, holds nothing for
the Irish that it does not hold for other spectators.
Moreover, despite similarities of genre and story, the funding and
artistic sources of these two lms differ. McLoone himself has offered
a scheme for diagnosing and rating the elusive category, Irishness,
based on the scale and source of nance.
+. big-budget American productions like Far and Away where artis-
tic control lies outside Ireland. Primarily commercial ventures, they
show off Ireland and its talent.
:. Medium budget co-productions where artistic control remains
within the country; the critical impact of these lms usually far out-
weighs their commercial achievement.
. Low-budget lms made entirely within Ireland, nancing in-
cluded. Irelands
rd
World productions seen mainly at festivals.
14
In the rst category McLoone reluctantly puts The Secret of Roan In-
ish, for it remains a truly offshore production, with foreign nance and
engineering skill (Haskell Wexler as cinematographer, Adrian Smith
as Production Designer) brought in to mine Romantic Ireland.
Given [John Sayless] track record in making politically astute, revi-
sionist lms in the U.S, McLoone nds this terribly disappointing.
15
Into the West may share Sayless regressive ideology of the purity of the
west, but as a product of Dubliners Sheridan and Byrne, McLoone
should lodge it with Neil Jordans lms in category two. This group,
together with the third category of Critical Regionalist works,
forms a broad band: Taken together, the medium and low-budget
lms represent a genuine national cinema struggling to take shape.
16
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m :
dudl e y andre w
Figures +:, +, and +: from Into the West
Critical Regionalism
McLoones critical regionalism masks his deeper concern for a gen-
uine national cinema, that is, for specically Irish ways of expressing a
specically Irish situation, including perhaps a search for an identity
in a vibrantly interactive world-system. While the term regionalismin
this context clearly refers to pockets around the world whose density
and integrity can withstand and respond (critically) to global pres-
sures, it can also turn inward to destabilize a complacent sense of the
nation. Regions in this sense are sub-areas within Ireland whose values
and interests compete for attention in the amalgamation of the island.
The North comprises a de facto political region, whereas the Gaelic-
speaking Gaeltacht of the West makes up a recognizable cultural region.
A problematic example are the traveling people, for they comprise a
mobile region,not quite assimilated. In cinema as in daily life, groups
and regions can be celebrated by the whole or disparaged, difference
providing energy and excitement in the one case, contributing to
paranoia and racism in the other.
The Crying Game, that quintessential lm about the politics of
identity, is powered by a plethora of differences: black/white,
male/female, Irish/British, IRA/Protestant, West Indian/British,
workers/boss, gay/straight. Its rst shot, a long track across a bridge,
gures the crossings such differences will invite in the course of the
lm. Yet the most memorable of these proves disastrous for, in the
parable that Jody relates to Fergus, both frog and scorpion drown
when the latter exclaims upon stinging the frog midstreamin a line
that becomes the lms refrainIts in my nature. Once a scorpion,
always a scorpion. Once gay, straight, IRA, Protestant, or whatever, al-
ways . . . And yet the lm dramatizes a series of crossings that blur dif-
ference, nature, andif I can say sothe nature of difference: Jody to
Ireland; Fergis to England; Dil from male to female and back; Fergis
from lover to friend to lover. Identity perhaps lies less in DNA than in
the role one adopts, as characters disguise themselves with clothes and
makeup, change their orientations, lip-sync their voices, and stand in
for one another (see Figure +). Affection and trust dont elide differ-
ence; rather they mollify or reverse its effects. For difference is scan-
dalously real in the lm, the penisunveiled and completely undis-
guisedits absolute signier.
Is The Crying Game a genuinely Irish work, and Neil Jordan a prop-
erly Irish director? Such questions, especially when put this way, are
precisely what the lm preempts and mocks by overcoming the futile
quest for the thing itself. Jordans Irishness, like Dils penis, may be
incontrovertible but it is not determinate. He performs his art, as Dil
does his sexuality, for a desiring and variable audience.
17
And so the
longest bridge (see Figure +o) traversed by The Crying Game may be the
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m
one that took it across the Atlantic to the United States, where it
shockingly found a mass reception (some ;oo prints needed to be
struck to meet the demand) after its initial repudiation in Britain
(where but six prints sufced).
18
In consequence of its Academy
Award nominations, The Crying Game returned triumphant to the
British Isles, then scored powerfully on the Continent, in Japan, and
in Latin America, entering the world market as a successful Irish
lmthanks to the efforts and strategy of Miramax. We might say
that promotion and marketing serve the cinema system like the
make-up, costume, and karaoke of this lm; they exploit and over-
come difference, in a game of seduction that adapts to varying cir-
cumstances.
Challenging and often transposing a host of categories by which we
identify and judge characters, The Crying Game is itself a mix of
money and talent from Great Britain, Ireland and the USA. This, to-
dudl e y andre w
Figures + and +o: from The Crying Game
gether with its international pretensions, ought to complicate if not
curb commonplace rhetoric about Irish national cinema. Its own
place is in another camp from McLoones pure critical regionalist
group, thats certain. For those lms were destined rst for a sophisti-
cated Irish audience hungry for passionate expressions of pressing na-
tional concerns; later they were celebrated by students of Irish lm
and politics everywhere. The ample discussion surrounding critical
regionalist lms is out of proportion with their share of the nations
movie life, for even if we take the :os, the period of their greatest im-
pact, this group comprises no more than fteen of the fty ction fea-
tures shot in or about Ireland. Still, intense discussion does measure
the intensity and effect of ambitions; uncompromising, these lms
refuse to dilute the language and accents of their actors, nor do they
simplify the historical and cultural situations they represent. This
makes them difcult for all but Irish audiences to follow, restricting
their exposure and the progeny they might spawn.
19
The accents in
The Crying Game, on the other hand, pose just enough of a problem
to give auditors pleasure in sorting them out. And as for progeny, this
successful political thriller that brought such attention to the IRA,
opened the doors for a series of other medium budget lms with Irish
settings and gave Jordan access to Warner Bros. coffers for his pet proj-
ect, Michael Collins, in +,,.
Michael Collins may look to be the apex of the Irish lm phenom-
enon, both because it treats the epic struggle for the birth of an inde-
pendent Ireland and because it marks the rst time that international
lm nanciers had ever granted a lmmaker the chance to dramatize
his own countrys history for a world audience (Ghandi having been
made by Richard Attenborough, The Last Emperor by Bernardo
Bertolucci, etc.). Some critics were quick to contend that Jordan
could hardly spend Warner Bros. $:;,ooo,ooo without considering
their interests, particularly in letting Julia Roberts wander into a pic-
ture otherwise dominated by Irish actors. However, most understood
Jordans lm to be more sophisticated andlets say itmore Irish
than the scuttled versions by Kevin Costner and Michael Cimino. In-
deed, in part because of the controversy over its compromises with
Hollywood and with History, Michael Collins overwhelmed Ireland,
playing to full houses throughout the island, occasioning unprece-
dented debate in the newspapers, on TV, in pubs and around family
dinner tables. Was the terrorist Collins a hero, and so might terror still
be called for in the North? Or did his heroism lie in knowing when
to negotiate and compromise, making him wiser and more moral than
the IRA that assassinated him? And what of de Valeras role in this
murder, de Valera who would hold the reins of the Republic for so
many years? Such questions are vital to a nation still ruminating over
its recent birth and wondering if, because the North remains within
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m o
the Commonwealth, it was but a partial birth. Stephen Rea, who
played one of Collinss lieutenants, said:
Michael Collins was a hugely important lm to make at that time [+,,o]. Suddenly his-
tory was being discussed, suppressed stuff was coming out in the open. Kids would
come up to me who had never heard of Michael Collins. This was in Ireland. They
were never taught about Michael Collins. They didnt know who he was. There was
a deliberate silence about that pivotal time, that whole area of history. There was a
very exciting feeling in Ireland then that things were opening up and you could dis-
cuss issues again. I dont particularly agree with how Neil depicted the period or how
he depicted de Valera. But the lm made discussion more possible, and in doing that
it also helped Irish society to move on.
20
A lm with an international budget and distribution this time spoke
far more pertinently to the region it represented than to the world au-
dience Warner Bros. had hoped it would entertain.
Jordans career does not rise up to Michael Collins and then fall away
after it, though; nor is Irish cinema necessarily strongest or most im-
portant when national questions are explicitly invoked. Most critics
rank his next lm, The Butcher Boy, ahead of both Michael Collins and
The Crying Game, and they do so not just as a Neil Jordan lm but as
an Irish expression. Taken from a quirky short story written by Patrick
MacCabe thirty years earlier, The Butcher Boy resurrects the claustro-
phobic +,os through the voice of a disturbed and violent adolescent.
While it may appear disengaged from the strictly political perspective,
it is fundamentally in touch with a way of being Irish. Strikingly res-
onant images (the desperate mother, the Virgin Mother, the local
shops with their stereotypical customers and proprietors, the atomic
bomb) emerge from the rhythm of the boys febrile thoughts and in a
tone at once comic and psychotic. Something powerful rumbles be-
neath The Butcher Boy, something ready to explode. If Neil Jordan did
not share with his countrymen a feeling for the +,os and for the per-
sistence today of a frame of mind still congruent with that grotesque
decade, he would not appeal to or appall them so.
Can one can expect of The Butcher Boy what one does of a Seamus
Heaney poem or a song by Van Morrison? All three men, it is true,
attract an international following by exuding a recognizably Irish sen-
sibility, which can be felt even when they burrow beneath or slide
around national issues, narrowly conceived. Heaney and Morrison,
who often reside abroad, quickly credit a bardic tradition they im-
bibed as they grew up in Ireland, implying that they venture away
from that tradition at great peril. Originally a ction writer, Jordan
surely knows his countrys literature intimately, but he doesnt aunt
this tradition, doesnt summon it for inspiration or self-denition. As
for his image-memory, this must overow with Hollywood movies
and European art lms, not with the few Irish precedents that could
be cited. While cinemalike poetry, music, and the other artsgrazes
dudl e y andre w ;
in the unfenced grasslands known as Irish culture, it more quickly
strays in search of nourishment and companionship. Of all the arts, cin-
ema puts the specicity of Irish culture most immediately in question.
That question pointedly arises whenever a foreigner lands on Irish
soil to lm its land, history, and people. In +,:: BBC veteran Robert
Knights adapted a Jennifer Johnston novel set in the revolutionary
moment of +,:o, The Dawning.
21
His postcard backdrops, new-age
Celtic music, and drawing room dialogue seem designed for a BBC or
world audience, but not for the Irish. The accid treatment of an his-
torical moment whose moral complexity should catch in the throat,
as it does in Michael Collins, betrays the lm. But the greater betrayal
lies in Knights decision to assemble an all-Britishthough stellar
cast. Anthony Hopkins, Hugh Grant, Jean Simmons, and Trevor
Howard play to and against one another most professionally, but they
could be doing so in any location or time period. None reaches far to
attain an Irish accent, something that might have provided speci-
cityand resistanceto what amounts to a standard coming-of-age
story set in some time of crisis.
Reversing the cross-over, does Neil Jordans British-made lms
(Mona Lisa,The Company of Wolves,The End of the Affair) contribute to
Irish lm culture, in the way that the verses Seamus Heaney has com-
posed in Cambridge, Massachusetts contribute to Irish letters? Not di-
rectly, for Heaney can surround himself with the books and thoughts
that inspire him in no matter what rented at or hotel. But a lmmaker
works with the people and locales in whose midst he nds himself; so,
unless Jordan were to transport the former and construct in studio the
latter, his Irish specicity must disappear except as an inection of, say,
Graham Greenes England. When it comes to cinema, the Irish cul-
tural grasslandsalready invaded by spores of images that have blown
from across the Atlantic and the channelnd themselves abandoned
by emigrant talent and groups of itinerant artisans ying off to serve
themselves and their craft in whatever territory they nd fertile.
Demi-Emigration
Emigration has functioned as a norm, not a deviation, within the
world image system from its inception. In the classic era the Holly-
wood studios managed their hothouses by engineering varietals that
required importing the best strains of certain foreign lms for exper-
iments in hybridization. Directors, actors, and artistic personnel were
lured from Europe with money or with the promise of a safe haven
from political repression. With the demise of the contract system in
+,: and then the meltdown of the old Hollywood around +,oo, the
nature of exile and emigration changed in key respects. And now in
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m :
the revived, post-Star Wars era, known precisely as global Holly-
wood, these categories have by denition begun to disappear. Holly-
wood claims to go everywhere, be everywhere, so that nothing need
escape to it, because nothing at all escapes it. At the same time, as hap-
pens elsewhere, through a combination of State measures and critical
regionalism, Irish lm culture has grown weighty enough to retain
the allegiance of homegrown image-makers, keeping some of them in
its orbit, though a great many are pulled away by the magnet of
money, both for themselves and their productions.
The routine movement of lmmakers out of Ireland the past two
decades should be expected, not just because of the globalization of
the industry, but because, when compared to France or Italy or even
Norway, Irelands audio-visual life is virtually co-extensive with that
of the USA and Britain. Language, albeit in a colorful dialect, makes
Irish lmmakers more at home in Anglophone countries than is the
case for continental or Asian artists. Mass migration to Liverpool and
London, to Boston and New York, to Australia and South America,
has deposited more Irish offshore than the ve million inhabitants of
the island. These sociological factors nearly dissolve Irish image culture
within the larger pool, making it apparently simple for a director to ro-
tate from Dublin to London to Los Angeles, in pursuit of new projects.
My euphonious term demi-emigration aims to describe this form of
routine dislocation. We imagine genuine emigration for the Russian
or German lmmakers who were forced or enticed from their home-
lands into a system that may have awed but surely troubled them.
Their Irish counterparts, however, seldom underwent the sharp break
of sudden and denitive emigration, not just because speak they Eng-
lish natively but because so many of them went across the water rst
to England, where they entered the orbit of the Hollywood market-
place in the satellite London exchange.
Neil Jordan is precisely such a demi-emigrant. He wrote a poem in
+,:; concerning his Hollywood experience entitled, Lines written
in Dejection.
22
In his Michael Collins journal he records December +:
+,, thus:
Fly to Los Angeles. Stay at the Peninsula Hotel. I always see the city under the fog of
jetlag. So never know what I really think about it. When I came here rst I was en-
tranced by all the pastel pinks and greens and blues. I spent several years here, made
two lms and the city did to me what it often does to others. Drives them crazy. I
went back to Ireland then and got myself into some semblance of sanity, but over the
years Ive come to know more people here than I do at home, so its become an er-
satz home, a mental home.
23
Several Irish directors work readily in Hollywood, returning inter-
mittently to their homeland either to recuperate their artistic re-
dudl e y andre w ,
sources or to shoot a Hollywood production on a landscape attractive
to millions of viewers in the USA. This fact de-dramatizes their puta-
tive exile. Jordan, for instance, may share personality traits with strong
directors like Max Ophuls but his Irish origin and his situation in the
New Hollywood reduces both the potential prot and the suffering
occasioned by dislocation. Neither Ophuls, nor Fritz Lang, nor Jean
Renoir could contemplate a return when they disembarked in New
York. Forced to assimilate or compromise in a new environment, their
chances for success were not exclusively a function of personal ability,
but of the extent to which their personal style depended on a web
of collaborators, or on culturally specic material, deprived of which
they found themselves aesthetically crippled. I have in mind precisely
Lang and Renoir, the former thriving, the latter paralyzed in Holly-
wood. Let me call Lang a novelistic lmmaker in contrast to the the-
atrical Renoir. Like Hitchcock and many other successful transplants,
Lang was a master of architecture, pre-planning, and precise editing,
permitting him to make effective lms in any system. Renoir, how-
ever, planned lms only far enough to ready himself and his collabo-
rators for the event of the making of the lm. Success, when it came,
lay always in the moment of confrontation among actors, between an
actor and the text, between the director and the mise-en-scne. Imag-
ine, to reverse the ow, John Cassevetes making a lm in Germany
and in German, even if he were able to learn the language as well as
Renoir learned English by +,. If Jamesons thesis holds, and the par-
ticular kinds of interactions theater promotes are crucial to national
lm expression, then certain directors who abandon the theatrical am-
bience of their home cultures will likely be lost elsewhere.
Given the putatively literary and performative culture from which
they come, Irish lmmakers ought to lend themselves to being typed
according to their rapport with both the novel and theater. Among
the most prominent of directors, Jim Sheridan is one who sees little
point in working outside the island of his birth, for he is a dramatist
rst and thus thrives on the tradition and rhythm of local manners of
expression. His +,,o The Field could be read as an allegory of his own
situation: like the crotchety Bull MacCabe played by Richard Harris,
Sheridan has staked everything on his little plot of ground, his Irish
stage (see Figure +;). He feels menaced by those who come back with
outlandish wealth and technology, ready to claim his eld as their
birthright, even when promising to develop it protably and ration-
ally. Sheridan may have blunted The Fields political and historical edge
by making the colonizing interloper an American rather than the Brit
he was in the stage version, but the shift in medium exonerates him.
For as an American, Tom Beringer is as likeable and entertaining as
Hollywood, though posing a more pernicious threat than some out-
right British colonizer.Bull Sheridan must battle him for the sacred
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m o
eld. Evidently the producer of Into the West need look beyond that
Western shore only when the image of America intensies drama on
the tightly circumscribed island that serves him as a stage.
24
An opposite case would be Pat OConnor, whose early experience
was in television rather than theater. OConnor got his feature lm
start with Cal in +,:, picking up the assignment after Neil Jordans
proposed revisions to the script had been rejected. Cal and Angel share
a fatalistic tone and enough themes for their directors to have been
linked as constituting the erce new Irish talent of the time.
25
But
OConnor quickly softened his tone, moving to England for the gen-
tle A Month in the Country, then to the U.S. where he took on a cou-
ple of ill-received romantic comedies. His return to Ireland came in
+,,o with Fools of Fortune, from the William Trevor novel. Like The
Dawning, this was a British production about the period of the revo-
lution, and its featured stars, Julie Christie and Mary Elizabeth Mas-
trantonio, were imported.
Given this itinerary and his residence in New York, is OConnor
still an Irish lmmaker? British producers thought so, since after Fools
of Fortune they sent him to his homeland to take on the adaptation of
Maeve Binchys very Irish novel Circle of Friends. Was it to guarantee a
universal look and tone that they dispatched with him a British cine-
matographer, art director and editor and, most important, a cast of pri-
marily non-Irish actors, including Chris ODonnell, Minnie Driver,
and Colin Firth? Counted his most successful work, particularly in its
sensitive treatment of women, Circle of Friends brought OConnor his
rst Irish-initiated assignment since Caland perhaps the most an-
ticipated Irish lm of the decadeDancing at Lughnasa. Adapted from
Brian Friels acclaimed play by emerging playwright Frank McGuin-
ness, Dancing at Lughnasa had behind it the full weight of the Irish
dudl e y andre w +
Figure +;: from The Field
Film Board and Irish Television. This time an entirely local crew (ex-
cept for a British cinematographer and editor) would be responsible
for the lms look, and as for the actors, all but two of the roles were
to be lled by actors born into the accents scripted for them. Those
two were Sophie Thompson and, crucially, Meryl Streep.
I would be in danger of fetishizing the birthplace of the cast had not
this become the chief focus of response to OConnors most publi-
cized effort. While Streeps uncanny ability to mimic accents amazed
all reviewers, it was perhaps her necessarily studied approach to her
role that kept the electricity that energized the stage production from
ever sparking the lm. Of Friels subtle success and OConnors at-
ness, one critic said:
The play works when its cast can reect the nonverbal communication that links the
sisters, their ability to understand and react to each other without words, the emo-
tional choreography they all dance to. The increasing tension on the family then nds
a ready translation in their relationships . . . though director OConnor has a quiet
camera with greater powers of concentration than most, he still loses patience with
his characters too quickly. They emerge as individuals, but not as a family. And their
poverty, the general joylessness in which they live, remains undiscovered. That means
that the almost bacchanalian dance that sweeps over them toward the end of the lm
loses its punch, the contrast of its ecstasy with the meanness of their ordinary lives un-
established.
26
On the Broadway stage the acting ensemble had only their gestures to
build and sustain the feeling; in this lm, commissioned by Irelands
department of Heritage and Culture, the actors play to and against a
picturesque landscape accompanied by Bill Whelans (Riverdance) mu-
sic. The naked shape of the play, one could say, has been clothed in
cinematic accoutrements. Even those who admired the lm conrm
this. Janet Maslin praised it for being A quintessentially Irish experi-
ence, reveling in the romance and beauty of [its] setting. Whatever the
material loses in claustrophobic tension and foreboding, it benets im-
measurably from the glorious, untamed vistas and the quaint ambiance
of the little Irish village seen here.
27
Maslin appreciates the lm as a
memorable and embellished re-creation of experience, not the expe-
rience itself. It is all Riverdance, not a session at the pub.
OConnor could break up the all-Irish cast that won the play three
Tony awards (only Brid Brennan, recipient of one of those awards, ap-
peared in play and lm) because actors are for him what they are in
international cinema: talents whose names draw attention (Meryl
Streep) or elements to be orchestrated into a larger design, sometimes
called spectacle, sometimes narrative. In this case both spectacle and
narrative are achieved, but at the cost of the kind of intensity the en-
semble produced on stage. The music and the picturesque cinematog-
raphy suffuse the audience in a moody haze, signaling rather than con-
fronting an Ireland of the past, and keeping the actors at a comfortable
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m :
remove to be admired but not worried over. As Roger Ebert said,On
stage they were dancing and are dancing still, but on screen it is as
though they were dancing then. OConnor instinctively novelized a
text that is given as a ashback by an adult character rehearsing the
decline of his family when he was a boy.
28
He thereby de-dramatized
the material, saturating it with nostalgia, while on stage the past is
thrust into the present directly at the audience.
Although not a particular success with the critics or at the interna-
tional box ofceit played well enough in IrelandDancing at Lugh-
nasa neither slowed Pat OConnors career nor kept it in his native
country.
29
He had learned early on how to orchestrate the elements
that comprise a lm no matter where it is made. His considerable nar-
rative talent and his background in TV have made him an essentially
American director, even, I would venture, when he lms in Ireland. A
close analysis ought to discern his instincts and methods, which I sus-
pect line up with Hollywoods narrative system where action and
close-up character response are locked tautly together. Contrast this to
Jim Sheridan, whose devotion to the stage must keep him spiritually
in Ireland among the actors whose accents and gestures serve as the
material he works with, distending plot when need be.
Neil Jordan occupies some middle category in this typology be-
tween the easy migr OConnor and the ever-Irish Sheridan, for Jor-
dan lives the dialectical tension between novel (his rst vocation) and
theater. His early itinerary resembles OConnors, in that he went from
Angel, reviled by many in Ireland, to England and soon on to the
USA. Having composed nightmarish short stories that develop in
ordinary settings, he was inevitably attracted to Hollywood and Hol-
lywood to him: hence, The Company of Wolves, Interview with the Vam-
pire and In Dreams all derive from his novelistic sensibility and all ex-
ploited the spectacular effects of the dream factory. In England and
Ireland, however, he runs up against a public reality that he cannot
completely manipulate (a literary reality in the case of The End of the
Affair, the historical past in Michael Collins). He also runs up against ac-
tors whose habits exist beyond his ability to ignore or corral them.
Just compare the +,,: In Dreams to The Butcher Boy made a year
earlier. As a full-blown production, In Dreams allowed Jordan to in-
dulge his wildest Hollywood fantasies. An underwater town (shot in
the Titanic tank in Mexico), cascading water (shot in the Tennessee
Valley), idyllic countryside (shot in Massachusetts), and a series of
bizarre studio sets alternate with close-ups of big name actors, in-
cluding Robert Downey Jr. as a psychopath who stares relentlessly
straight ahead. Annette Bening is alternately catatonic and hysterical,
but in both cases she scarcely notices her acting partners. Even Jordans
reliable Stephen Rea can do little in a script that foregrounds vision
over interaction. The actors wait for the driving force of the
dudl e y andre w
soundtrack or the sudden visual effects to make the screen pulse and
them with it. Jordan conducts the Hollywood orchestra of which ac-
tors are only instruments to be intoned intermittently. He narrates In
Dreams as Poe might have, with an eye to the effect of each separate
element.
How different from this is The Butcher Boy despite its being, and
trebly, a novelistic lm and thus subject to the same danger of autho-
rial manipulation: novelist Neil Jordan adapts novelist Patrick McCabe
whose tale is narrated by a grown boy looking back over his life gone
awry. Yet somethingthe independent force of the acting, I claim
thrusts this lm at us with immediacy, particularly when compared to
Dancing at Lughnasa, or, Martin McLoone argues, with yet another
Irish ashback lm, Angelas Ashes.
30
Jordan risked putting the harsh,
undigested language of the novel into the mouth of a wild young boy,
a new Jean-Pierre Leaud, and the other actors responded in kind. Jor-
dan catches himself with caustic irreverence each time the period set-
ting of The Butcher Boy risks becoming cute. Like an animal, the lm
sniffs and bolts, then pauses to sniff again, the tone of the boys narra-
tion seeping into the dialogue of the townsfolk and the garish images.
The lesson should be clear: in Hollywood his novelists imagination
tempts Jordan to become a director of effects, featuring story and de-
vice, whereby technology amalgamates actors in a totalizing spectacle.
In Ireland, on the other hand, he engages the specic resistance of the
theater (story and performance in tension), and so maintains his dif-
ference from his actors. Instructively, rather than move to Hollywood
after In Dreams, Jordan set up a Dublin subsidiary of Dreamworks,
while his longtime British producer, Stephen Whooley did the same
in London.
31
Whether or not this venture has paid off, its mission is
emblematic: to de-center Hollywoods Dreamwork is to bridge but not
erase differences that are economic in every sense of the term: nan-
cial, cultural, and psychological. This brings rooted cosmopolitanism
directly into the entertainment sphere.
Guilttrip and Roundtrip
The bridge carrying Dreamworks to Dublin has been crossed for a
century by lmmakers of Irish extraction. Of the dozen volumes on
Irish cinema, the earliest two treat the many Irish immigrants who
might join hands in a very wide panoramic photo somewhere outside
Galway with John Ford at their center.
32
Ford, who spoke Gaelic, most
memorably journeyed to his ancestral home in The Quiet Man, which,
like The Field forty years later, shows the havoc wreaked by the senti-
mental return of a successful American to claim some piece of the
land, even for the noblest purpose. Such havoc upsets the dramatic
equilibrium of well-meaning lms like Ron Howards Far and Away
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m
(+,,:) and Paul Quinns This is my Father (+,,:), both of which might
be thought of as elaborate versions of the home videos so many Irish
Americans make each summer as they travel to the Green Isle in
search of their roots (see Figure +:). Ron Howard used ;o mm instead
of a mini-cam on what amounted to a roundtrip voyage that took
him to Ireland and then back to Oklahoma with the immigrants who
made that voyage in +,oo. As in Ryans Daughter, the spectacular Din-
gle setting drained Quinns lm of the usual need for dramatic ten-
sion. Retracing the steps of his ancestors was pretext enough. The
same holds true for entire Quinn family (Aidan, Paul, and Declan)
who went in search of their father and of the events that brought their
family to Chicago where that lugubrious lm opens and closes.
Unquestionably, talent that has incubated in Ireland often seeks its
fullest expression in the excitement, variety and anonymity of the
New World. But an undertow pulls many beleaguered American and
British lm people back to the cool respite of Ireland. Actors such as
Daniel Day Lewis, Richard Harris, and Peter OToole have oated to
its shores, as have two very prominent directors, born elsewhere, who
adopted Ireland as their moral and production center: John Huston
and John Boorman. The latter took over Ardmore Studios after shoot-
ing Excalibur; more important, he took under his wing the young as-
sistant he met on that project, Neil Jordan. Jordans maiden lm, An-
gel, came off under the patronage of Boorman.
John Huston brings to a head the dialectic of Irishness I have labeled
demi-emigration, because Huston brings us to James Joyce, where
the dialectic operates with merciless clarity. Register the stunning fact
of Hustons The Dead: an American lmmaker living in Ireland adapts
to the image arguably the densest story concocted by the greatest Irish
dudl e y andre w
Figure +:: Nostalgic journeys in This is my Father
wordsmith of all. Yet Joyce was not, of course, exclusively Irish or lit-
erary. He wrote The Deadlike all his ctionwhile at home in
Europe. The only thing that brought him back to Ireland was, in fact,
the movies, when sent by Trieste businessmen to Dublin in +,o, to
establish Irelands rst lm theater. This was shortly after he staged his
one theater piece, aptly titled The Exile.
As for The Dead itself, if Joyce looked East to the continent and
to a modernist future to sustain him, the characters of his story look
West and to the past. Around that dinner table, so full of tradition dur-
ing the Christmas holidays, and in the hotel room at the storys end,
lurk the ghosts of a past, ghosts capable of incriminating the dead pres-
ent. How could or how might the American expatriate Huston give
life to this exiled Irishmans tale of the living death of Ireland? The
ghosts remembered in the tale include the trailing voices of once-
lionized tenors, the small voice of a tubercular poet, the hollow ring
of voices still surrounding civic statues in the square . . . this ghostly
dimension mediates life and death and allows the dialectic of lm and
literature, and of home and exile, to come to momentary rest. Dublin-
ers closes by evoking ghosts who inhabit two zones at once, and who
descend like snow. In approaching its cinema, we must recognize that
Ireland is at once and always Home and Away.
Ireland has been a peripheral theater of operations during a hun-
dred-years war of cinema that involves Hollywood, Great Britain and
Europe. Generally Hollywood and British lms have taken up the
main fortresses, but European and Asian lms can be found at a few
out of the way movie theaters and parish halls, as well as at the Gal-
way festival and the Irish Film Center, even occasionally on television.
As for export, while most Irish lms look to the other Anglo nations
with larger populations, the European Union has smoothed the sail-
ing eastward. It was entry into the EU in +,; that gained State sup-
port for culture and lifted the hopes of lmmakers for the rst time.
It is the EU that pays for Gaelic lms like The Long Road to Klondike
(Desmond Bell, :ooo), a curiously world lm made in Gaelic. It is also
European production money that has backed a few Irish art lms (two
important ones in +,,: Guilttrip and Ailsa). Critical regionalism nds
a ready audience in France.
Some time ago someone recounted to me the skeleton of a dead-
pan Irish lmscript (naturally still unproduced) that activates the forces
at play in the Theater of Irish cinema. It concerns a group of itin-
erant Irish workers, fresh from cutting the tunnel through the English
Channel and now in the employ of Disney during construction of its
theme park outside Paris. All the action takes place in the dark cav-
ernous techno-rubble beneath and inside Space Mountain. For
decades the Irish have been the conscripted diggers of Europe; they
have also employed their skills to tunnel under banks, railroad stations,
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m o
post-ofces, and department stores to blow them up. What will hap-
pen at Disneys Space Mountain? The plot is not yet fully worked out.
Well have to wait and see.
Notes
+ Kevin Rockett, Culture, Industry, and Irish Cinema, in Border Crossing: Film in Ireland,
Britain, and Europe, ed. John Hill, et. al. (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, +,,), +:.
: Neil Jordan, Michael Collins: Film Diary and Screenplay (London: Vintage, +,,o), +o.
Luke Gibbons, interview with the author, December :, :oo+, Dublin Ireland.
Fredric Jameson, keynote lecture, Conference on Cinema and Nation, Dublin, Ireland,
Nov +,,o.
See my The Roots of the Nomadic: Gilles Deleuze and the Cinema of West Africa, in
The Brain is the Screen, ed. G. Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, :ooo):
:+::.
o Luke Gibbons,Romanticism, Realism and Irish Cinema, in Cinema and Ireland, ed. Kevin
Rockett, et al. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, +,::), :+.
; Peter Ormrod had done a featurette for the BBC on an enterprising man from the mid-
lands of Ireland, the basis for Eat the Peach. Hence he had proprietary rights to direct the
feature that developed on the heels of his documentary. Stephen Rea and his friend, Belfast
dramatist Stewart Parker, were involved early in the project until it went in directions they
did not feel comfortable with. Sarah Miles played a role that was shot, but edited out of
the nal version.
: See Luke Gibbons, Romanticism, Realism and Irish Cinema, :+.
, Hal Hinson, The Washington Post, December , +,:;.
+o Martin McLoone takes this term from Kenneth Framptons Toward a Critical Regional-
ism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance, in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster
(London: Pluto Press, +,:). See McLoone, Irish Film: the Emergence of a Contemporary Cin-
ema (London: BFI, :ooo), +o. For a full discussion of the term, see Cheryl Herr, Critical
Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the Midwest (Gainsville, FL: Univeristy of
Florida Press, +,,o).
++ Martin McLoone, Irish Film, +:o.
+: Jim Sheridan lecture at the Tel Aviv Film Festival, June +,,o.
+ Elizabeth Cullingford, John Wayne Fan or Dances With Wolves Revisionist? Analogy and
Ambiguity in the Irish Western, Irelands Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and
Popular Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, :oo+): +o+,o.
+ McLoone,Reimagining the Nation: Themes and Issues in Irish Cinema,Cineaste :::,
::.
+ McLoone, Reimagining the Nation, +.
+o McLoone, Reimagining the Nation, ::.
+; For a discussion of this, see Shantanu Dutta Ahmed,I Thought you Knew!: Performing
the Penis, the Phallus, and Otherness in Neil Jordans The Crying Game, Film Criticism
:.+ (Fall, +,,:).
+: The Crying Game (London: BFI publications, +,,;).
+, In comparison, one nds in the :os a greater number of full-blown dramas about Ulster
made for the BBCs substantial audience, and spilling back onto Irish TVs.
:o Stephen Rea, Interview at Yale University, Feb :, :oo+, published in Yale Journal of Criti-
cism +.+ (Spring :oo:).
:+ Jennifer Johnston, daughter of Denis Johnston (who directed Guests of the Nation in +,),
was a member of the Irish Film Board in the :os and is the author of a number of highly
regarded novels, including The Old Jest, from which The Dawning was adapted.
:: Producer + (May +,:;), :::.
: Neil Jordan, +,:o.
: At this moment, however, Sheridan is currently developing East of Harlem, due to be re-
leased in :oo:, whose plot concerns an Irish couple who take up life in New York. The
dudl e y andre w ;
actors and the wider world will still be an Irish one and so Sheridan could not, even after
this lm, be called an emigrant, even by half.
: See John Hill, Images of Violence, in Cinema and Ireland, +:+, +:. OConnor in fact
adapted Neil Jordans most famous short story A Night in Tunisia for television in +,:.
:o Barry Johnson, The Portland Oregonian, December :, +,,:.
:; Janet Maslin, The New York Times, November +:, +,,:.
:: The play is also framed as a ashback, but still loses none of its immediacy.
:, OConnors next lm, Sweet November (Warner Bros, :oo+), was not only a Hollywood ro-
mantic comedy, but a remake of one.
o McLoone, Irish Film, :+.
+ Screen International, May +,,:, +:.
: Anthony Slide, Cinema and Ireland (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, +,::) and Joseph Curran,
Hibernian Green on the Silver Screen:The Irish and American Movies (Westport, CT: Green-
wood, +,:,).
the yal e j ournal of c ri t i c i s m :