Irish Cinema

Abstract

Irish cinema occupied a marginal status in world cinema until the double Oscar success in 1990 of the Irish feature My Left Foot, the directorial debut of Jim Sheridan. Three years later, The Crying Game, written and directed by Ireland’s preeminent director Neil Jordan, confirmed the emergence of an internationally recognized and commercially viable Irish cinema when it, too, took an Academy Award following its nomination in six categories. Although prior to this, there had been, throughout the first century of cinema, intermittent production of Irish-made fiction films and, during 1975 to 1987, an indigenous independent, almost artisanal, but culturally and critically incisive cinema, the majority of Irish-themed films were produced outside the country, mainly by the American and British film industries, with the former often focusing on the experiences of the diasporic Irish, and the latter moreover drawn to the Irish-British relationship and the legacy of colonialism. Given the dominance of these two powerful English-language cinemas, which together have supplied over 90 percent of the films seen on Irish cinema screens since the 1910s, their representations of Ireland and the Irish have had an enormous impact, both locally and globally, on how Ireland is imagined. As a result, much Irish film scholarship concerns the often complex intersection between indigenous Irish cinema and the representations of the Irish in the cinemas of the Irish diaspora, most especially America and Britain, but also Australia.