Adapting The Quiet Man: John Ford, José Luis Guerín, and the Palimpsest of Place

Abstract

In 1988, Catalan filmmaker José Luis Guerín took a film crew to the village of Cong in the West of Ireland. Cong was the site of the filming of John Ford’s adaptation of Irish writer Walsh’s story, ‘The Quiet Man’, thirty-seven years previously. Guerin’s resulting essay film, Innisfree (1990), is an adaptation of Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) and a commentary on the relationship between Ford’s film and Cong. Situating Guerín’s work within a series of adaptive relations, this article argues that Guerín’s controversial film is best understood as an adaptation that explores the palimpsestuous nature of artistic and cultural adaptation. Guerín’s adaptation elucidates elided layers within both Ford’s adaptation of Walsh and Ford’s cultural vision, and posits Ford’s film as an integral part of the palimpsest of place. Guerín’s work enacts the meeting and mating of (un)related parts in artistic and cultural adaptation. As such, Innisfree prompts exploitation of the under-realized properties of the discourse of palimpsestuousness in relation to adaptation.