Irish Films Research Articles

Social Mobility and Interracial Dynamics in the Irish Films, Aisha (2022) and Seaview (2008)

Social Mobility and Interracial Dynamics in the Irish Films, Aisha (2022) and Seaview (2008)

Irish energy landscapes on film

Landscape, and its relation to place identity, is a powerful tool for visualizing and making legible the effects of environmental change. So often the operations of resource consumption and conservation occur in a way that shapes and changes particular regional landscapes. This is significant in an era where inspiring audiences and policy-makers to respond to unsustainable resource use and environmental change is difficult, but where we are still compelled to care for particular elements of place as they relate to identity. In this article we examine how resource use and landscape change are communicated through Irish films, where the interactions of place identity and landscape are central. A key through line argument is how landscape is an important vehicle for expressing anxieties and contexts for resource interdependency; another is how elements of local and regional identity compete and interact with global concerns, such as climate change or globalization, in complex ways. We analyse these interactions to demonstrate how energy resource use and environmental change are linked, highlighting ‘small nation’ tensions concerning geographic identity and resource ownership that are relevant to real-world energy transitions and apply much more broadly.

The language of Irish films

ABSTRACTThis study compares evidence taken from two corpora of Irish films (40 southern and 40 northern Irish films) with data from the northern and southern spoken components of ICE‐Ireland. The results of the investigation indicate that there are numerous parallels in the findings regarding not only the relative frequency of feature occurrences, but also the contexts in which they can occur. It is hoped that, by proving the validity of studying variation in Irish English using data taken from Irish feature films, other scholars may be encouraged to do likewise for other world Englishes, such as Indian English in Bollywood or Nigerian English in Nollywood.

Children, Childhood and Irish Society, 1500 to the Present By MariaLuddy, James M.Smith (eds.) Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014 ISBN: 978‐1‐84682‐525‐5, 448 pp, €58.50 (hb)

Childhood studies is an emerging area of scholarship in Ireland and this volume makes a significant contribution to the field. It ambitiously brings together 21 interdisciplinary essays, dominated by literature and history, but including other areas such as social work. To assist the reader in navigating these diverse studies, Maria Luddy and James M. Smith have arranged the essays into five thematic sections, expertly woven together in their introduction. The first two sections consider ‘the child and history’ and ‘charity, welfare and childcare’. The Irish child was considered instrumental in societal reform and military strategy in Tudor and Stuart times according to Mary O'Dowd, with preoccupations about child welfare only emerging during the 17th century. From the mid-Victorian period, child poverty was a central concern and Gillian McIntosh provides insights into attitudes towards Edwardian street-trading children. Welfare was provided by workhouses, church-run institutions and philanthropic organisations. Luddy highlights the work of the Dublin branch of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in increasing the reporting of neglect and abuse. Virginia Crossman notes that, despite campaigns to increase boarding out, institutional care (particularly church-run) predominated into the late-20th century. Eoin O'Sullivan shows how the 1970 Kennedy Report prompted a gradual transfer of welfare services to state-run professionalised community-based services. As well as improvements in the care and welfare of the ‘public child’ such as increased foster care, Robbie Gilligan identifies a number of gaps in state provision, including monitoring, and allocation of social workers. Despite parents' constitutional rights in relation to their children's education, Mary E. Daly notes that for many years they were excluded from playing any formal role by church, state and the teaching profession. Section three focuses on ‘shaping childhood cultures’. Ríona Nic Congáil analyses the extent to which the Weekly Freeman's children's Fireside Club column influenced the Gaelic League, while Ciaran O'Neill demonstrates how concerns about the imperialistic influence of the British schoolboy novel led to its adaptation for an Irish nationalist audience. Three of the studies use autobiographies to explore individual experiences. Drawing on hitherto underexploited 20th century Irish-language autobiographies Máirín Nic Eoin examines the representation of adult-child relationships, while Barry Sloan uses literary autobiographies to explore mid-20th century boyhood. Focusing on writers, Claire Lynch demonstrates that reading was an apprenticeship for both life and authorship, helping them make sense of the world. The following six essays explore ‘literary imaginings’. Mary Shine Thompson considers early modern understandings of childhood through Jonathan Swift's writing, noting for instance that despite emerging concepts of bourgeois boyhood, little distinction was made between girlhood and womanhood. Brandon Jernigan's re-examination of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales positions them as a space where issues regarding Anglo-Irish participation in Irish nationalism could be addressed. In Irish literature, the child frequently represents post-independence Ireland, mirroring the ideals of the newly formed state. Leeann Lane demonstrates how by foregrounding family, home and rural life, the children's author Patricia Lynch created a sense of history for post-Independence Ireland. Conversely, Eibhear Walsh notes the tensions that exist between the new state's nationalist and patriarchal ideals and European female education as portrayed in Kate O'Brien's The Land of Spices. The maturation narrative, key in Irish literary tradition, is dominated by masculine interpretations and Jane Elizabeth Dougherty argues that despite Ireland's coming of age, symbolised by Mary Robinson's presidency, a maturation narrative for the Irish female child was still not possible in the 1990s. Kelly J.S. McGovern explores the extent to which queer time and space in Eilís Ní Dhuibne's The dancers dancing expands the maturation narrative to encompass the female child. Section five, ‘cultural representations’, commences with Margot Backus's comparative study of the representation of children in nationalist journalism. During the Land War (1882), children were portrayed with little sentiment but by the Lockout (1913) poor children were depicted in emotional and symbolic terms, serving to unify a fragmented nationalist audience. In her analysis of Irish films, Ruth Barton demonstrates how magical realism has given way to social realism; being childlike and innocent is a disability in contemporary Ireland with its corrupting influences. Finally, Harry Hendrick highlights the need for a conceptual framework for researching and writing histories of children and childhood. This volume is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of Irish childhood studies. Although scholars will be drawn to particular topics, reading the volume in its entirety is recommended, providing fascinating insights into the changing relationships between child, family, state and church over time and across disciplines. It will also be of benefit to researchers undertaking comparative studies, providing them with perspectives on childhood as experienced in Ireland, as well as Irish scholarship in this field.

Transnational Post-Westerns in Irish Cinema

This article reviews the implications of two film categories developed in the last few decades (the transnational and post-Westerns) and applies them to two films produced in Ireland and usually not identified as such. After a review of the concepts of post-Westerns and transnationalism, two examples from Afghanistan (The Kite Runner) and Turkey (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) are provided to illustrate the proposed category. A review of the cultural implications of the West in Ireland follows, with examples from James Joyce’s Dubliners and John Ford’s film The Quiet Man. Finally, two Irish films (Into the West and Mickybo and Me) are analyzed. These films, like other transnational post-Westerns, make explicit references to American Westerns, establish a dialogue with the original film genre, question its values and assumptions, and, at the same time, probe into the national identities and conflicts of both Ireland and the US.

‘The Rest is Silence’: Psychogeography, Soundscape and Nostalgia in Pat Collins' Silence

Guy Debord defines the term psychogeography as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (Debord 1955: 23). Similar to the belief of psychogeographers that the geography of an environment has a psychological effect on the human mind, proponents of acoustic ecology such as R. Murray Schafer hold that humans are affected by the sound of the environment in which they find themselves. Further to this, they examine the extent to which soundscapes can be shaped by human behaviour. Recently a body of Irish films has emerged that directly engages with the Irish soundscape and landscape on a psychogeographical level. Rather than using landscape as a physical space for the locus of action, these representations of the Irish landscape allow for an engagement with the aesthetic effects of the geographical landscape as a reflection of the psychological states of the protagonists. Bearing this in mind,...

The representation of non-Irish immigrants in recent Irish films

This paper examines the representation of ethnic and racial minorities in Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger films such as Adam and Paul (2004), Pavee Lackeen (2005), Once (2006), The Front Line (2007), and New Boy (2007). Key areas of analysis include: how is immigration represented on screen? Whose character's point of view predominates? How much space do these ethnic minorities occupy in the shot? In order to answer these research questions, I draw on a plurality of theoretical paradigms currently employed in film theory, mainly narrative theory, critical race theory and feminist theory. As I show, the differences between these films are paramount and will inform the different ways in which recent Irish cinema represents racial and ethnic Otherness. In some films, immigrants appear mainly as decorative props and they largely function as cinematic elements which emphasise the marginalisation of other “inner” Irish outsiders, particularly drug addicts and Travellers. By contrast, other films make serious attempts to see “into” or “through” immigrant characters by fictionalising not only the point of view of natives but also of newcomers themselves.

New Irish Storytellers: Narrative Strategies in Film

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. …

North and South of the River: Demythologizing Dublin in Contemporary Irish Film

North and South of the River:Demythologizing Dublin in Contemporary Irish Film Jenny Knell (bio) Introduction Given the historic focus upon rural narratives in Irish film, it is surprising that only within the last twenty years have urban representations broadly appeared as "recognizable" Irish settings.1 Although Paddy Breathnach's I Went Down (1997) and Kirsten Sheridan's Disco Pigs (2001) depict Cork2 and, more recently, David Gleeson's Cowboys & Angels (2003) depicts Limerick, such urban films are set predominantly in the capital, Dublin.3 Until the mid-1990s cinematic representations of urban Ireland were dominated by the Roddy Doyle adaptations of "authentic" Northside Dublin imaged in terms of urban decay and working-class suburbia. However, [End Page 213] the Celtic Tiger's transformation of the social and economic landscape of Dublin provided an opportunity for the production of new cinematic images incorporating the global iconography of wealth and success. Responding to these transformations, recent scholarship on Irish cinema increasingly has oriented itself around discussions of urban space and an interrogation of social change as inscribed on these spaces.4 The concept of Dublin as materially, socially, and economically halved by the Liffey permeates representations of Dublin. Though this division is often reduced to a jocular rivalry between North and South (and in fact is the subject of much local satire), these spatial delineations emerge as discourses of class and are a way of referencing social and economic difference indirectly through the cultural vernacular. How to engage with this mythology in their representations of Dublin is of particular relevance to Celtic Tiger films in their navigation of the changing spatial and socioeconomic configuration of the city. Films produced during the Celtic Tiger period undertake an overt reimaging of Dublin that both renegotiates and overwrites prior representations. This article examines the role played by the binary division of North and South in filmmakers' situating of the recent economic boom and the pockets of dereliction and neglect left behind. Alternative narratives that represent the city outside the North- and Southside division challenge this binary way of thinking about Dublin's urban space. For example, John Crowley's Intermission (2003), one of the highest-grossing Irish films to date, portrays Tallaght, an outer suburb of the city, as a new socio spatial entity imbued with its own unique set of working-class mythologies. The analysis that follows considers how urban phenomena such as suburban sprawl, gentrification, and regeneration produce alternative mental images (or imagined geographies) of the city pursuant to new axes of division defined by social class. [End Page 214] Mythologies of Division Seminal urban theorist Henri Lefebvre argues that cities concurrently exist in a "present and immediate reality, a practico-material and architectural fact," but also in a "social reality made up of relations that are to be conceived of, constructed, or reconstructed by thought" (103).5 Thus cities transcend their physical constructions of brick and mortar to become spatial reflections of society and its principles of organization. Though Lefebvre has become associated with the exploration of the sociospatial dimension of cities, this concept informed critical discourse in urban studies prior to Lefebvre's work. In The Image of the City Kevin Lynch argues that urbanites form mental images of the city and render the cityscape legible through a subjective structuring of their environment. According to Lynch, an individual "creates and bears his own image" of the city through the mental organization of the city in terms of paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks ("Image" 7). These facets of city topography possess "imageability," which Lynch defines as the quality in a physical object that evokes a strong image in a particular person, and which is essential in the structuring of the mental image (9). Though Lynch initially discusses the individual formation of city image, he also notes that a "public image" of city can exist as "common mental pictures carried by large numbers of a city's inhabitants" that reflect shared perceptions of the city (7). A city image, according to Lynch, consists of three basic components: identity, structure, and meaning. Imageability, then, is wholly subjective in its reliance upon an individual's perception of the city. As Lynch argues...

Psychiatry in contemporary Irish cinema: a qualitative study.

Media portrayals of mental illness and psychiatry have a considerable impact on public perceptions of mental health issues. This paper aims to focus on portrayals of psychiatry and psychiatrists in four contemporary Irish feature films in order to make wider points on this theme. Contemporary Irish feature-films that made substantial reference to psychiatry, psychiatrists or mental health in Ireland were identified though electronic searches and consultation with the Film Institute of Ireland. Selected films were viewed. Electronic searches were performed in the medical and film literatures, with broad search terms related to film, psychiatry, psychiatrists or mental health in Ireland. Additional books and papers were identified by tracking back through references and consulting with colleagues. The portrayal of psychiatrists in film is closely related to the development of both twentieth century psychiatry and twentieth century cinema. In common with recent European films, certain recent Irish films have tended to show psychiatrists as sympathetic, humane individuals (with some notable exceptions). While there have been a number of portrayals of dissocial personally disorder and various states of chronic alienation in recent Irish film, there have been fewer portrayals of psychosis or learning disability. Recent Irish films emphasise the role of alcohol in causing and perpetuating psychological distress. They generally provide unflinching portrayals of the effects of psychological distress and alienation, suicide and substance abuse at individual, family and community levels; nonetheless, there is still a regrettable tendency for films to associate mental illness with dissocial behaviour. The portrayal of mental health issues in film presents both challenges and opportunities to film-makers, mental health service-users and general audiences alike. It is to be hoped that the recent trend towards realistic explorations of mental health issues in many European films continues into the future. Increased research in this area would help clarify the role of cinema in shaping public understandings of mental illness, and may also help identify additional ways of addressing stigma in the future.

In the Name of the Family: Masculinity and Fatherhood in Contemporary Northern Irish Films

(2001). In the Name of the Family: Masculinity and Fatherhood in Contemporary Northern Irish Films. Irish Studies Review: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 203-213.

In the Name of the Family: Masculinity and Fatherhood in Contemporary Northern Irish Films

In the Name of the Family: Masculinity and Fatherhood in Contemporary Northern Irish Films

Berlin 1997

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE HISTORY OF THE BERLINALE, or the first time in the history of the Berlinale, a Latin American entry was awarded the Golden Bear: Walter Salles's Central do Brazil (Central Station) (Brazil). And for the second time, Dutch animation director Gerrit van Dijk was awarded a Golden Bear for Best Short Film -- in 1989 for I Move, So I Am. Generally speaking, critics and public agreed that the festival prizes at the 48th Berlin International Film Festival (11-22 February 1998) went to the right films and directors. Two Irish films were standouts. Jim Sheridan's The Boxer (a co-production with the USA) continued his insightful dialogue on the crisis in North Ireland -- together with In the Name of the Father (1993) and Some Mother's Son (1996) it appears to form a trilogy -- and confirmed once again that Daniel Day-Lewis is one...