New Irish Storytellers: Narrative Strategies in Film

Abstract

NEW IRISH STORYTELLERS: NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN FILM Diog O'Connell Bristol, UK & Chicago: Intellect, 2010, 200pp Reviewed by Heather Macdougall In one of the first book-length studies of Irish cinema, published in 1988, Anthony Slide wrote, To many, the idea of a book devoted to Irish cinema must be comparable to a volume on the snakes of Ireland. There are none of the latter and little of the former.1 How things have changed. Ireland's film production has expanded every year, so too has publishing on the subject. There are several authoritative studies of Irish film as well as several volumes focused on specific aspects such as censorship, documentaries, and actors. One running theme through all these books is the somewhat dismal cultural environment for indigenous filmmakers in Ireland until the 1990s and, as a result, the deficiency (in volume and, at times, quality) of the national cinema. While scholars do appreciate that there were some real success stories during this time, a recurring topic is the dominance of British and American representations of Ireland and the Irish, with a parallel emphasis on the drain of talent to those bigger industries. The premise of Diog O'Connell's first book is, therefore, a very welcome one: that contemporary Irish cinema might productively be positioned as a continuation of Ireland's strong storytelling tradition, instead of being seen only as a late-developing imitation of American, British or European film practices. This allows also for a more empowering assessment of how established film techniques are appropriated by (rather than imposed upon) a new generation of artists who then use the medium to tell stories which are nationally, regionally, or personally specific. Furthermore, O'Connell's focus is exclusively on films made since the 1993 establishment of Bord Scannan na hEireann (also known as the Irish Film Board, or BSE/IFB). Although over 150 Irish films have been made in this period, compared to only a handful per decade before then, most historical surveys tend to look at a disproportionately small sample of recent films. A booklength consideration of BSE/IFB-era films, then, is a significant complement to earlier studies because it allows space for a wider appreciation of the variety of styles, themes, and genres that characterize the diverse output of narrative Irish cinema since 1993. Given that the history of Irish film is well documented in other academic volumes, O'Connell includes only the briefest sketch of this history and focuses mainly on the varying historical levels of state support. She notes that, until relatively recently, other forms of storytelling were given more official privileges and recognition than cinema. For example, she explains that the government, through the Irish Folklore Commission, underwent a wide-scale project to record and archive orally-disseminated folklore in the first half of the twentieth century: As exercise in nation building, the Irish Free State saw the value in this form of storytelling and the need for preservation. On the other hand, the new and developing, innovative form of storytelling, the cinema, was seen as a threatening force. This is of course no longer the case. At least since the establishment of BSE/IFB in 1993, indigenous film production has been (relatively) well supported and is fully integrated into cultural policy at the national and regional level. O'Connell claims that the act of storytelling is now popularly received and expressed principally and predominantly in motion pictures. In the introduction to her book, O'Connell states that her objective in analyzing Irish cinema as storytelling is to present an argument for adopting a framework which illuminates the practice of scriptwriting by rendering narrative theory in a user-friendly way. Unfortunately, the promise of a user-friendly book is not always upheld, as the argument gets muddled at times in circuitous or unclear writing and analysis. …