Dudley Andrew

The Theater of Irish Cinema

An Introduction to the Issue(s) Ireland’s 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 five 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 films 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 cinemas—quickly 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 confident 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 films 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 films, and cele- brated in John Ford’s beloved The Quiet Man (). But we should not expect some collective effort to build a satisfying (and corrected) national portrait.What filmmaker would sign on to a mission like that? The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume , number  (): 23–58 ©  by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press

dudley andrew  Far from spotlighting Irishness, the stage and most definitely the screen in Ireland have brought onto the island characters, values, and ideas from abroad.“The Theater of Irish Cinema” is definitely global. A census taken a decade ago found that, in over a four year period, only two percent of films on offer in the country were indigenous, while Hollywood accounted for over %, and another % going to British productions.1 The remainder always included at least % from European countries. While in the s things improved for Irish pro- ductions, several of their films scoring very well in box office 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 films, 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 People’s Repub- lic of China can (wishfully) think to engage selectively with “the Global” (resisting cultural contamination so as to retain traditional Chinese values while profiting from world economic interchange). It is pure fancy for Ireland—so small, so very vulnerable to the imperial culture carried by English—to 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-first 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 Joyce’s day (with Joyce intending to “dismantle the binary system” altogether, according to Kevin Whe- lan). But the tilt from theater to film in recent years has shifted the grounds of discourse. This is what authorizes the prefix “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 figures 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 yale journal of criticism 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 films float within the country’s atmosphere, available simultaneously on many screens, existing in virtual state in every videostore.They are exchanged by distributors with other films around the world.This “fluidity”of the cinematic substrate confounds the binarisms that nevertheless still organize the plots of most movies made in or about Ireland. “Fluid binarism”—this condition of cinema—may 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 solidified 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 survive—in the ultimate case—famine. The violence of tradition includes political, religious, and domestic ver- sions. Literature, cinema, and cultural criticism don’t 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 past—a violence that fought and failed to achieve coherence against colonization and ex- ploitation—is 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 film. The road film, 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 film scored powerfully at home, appreciated precisely as an Irish road film. The “anonymous” stopovers in the drama form a clever hypo- thetical geography to anyone familiar with County Cork. And the actors’ gestures and dialogue—their 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 inflection and local response be part of the definition of the postmodern.

dudley andrew  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 fronts—with America where half its population now lives, with Great Britain whose history and literature includes it, with Europe to which it has joined its future—Ireland is a site and a pro- ducer of cultural and economic innovation. Moreover, the language of this negotiation is English, or rather several versions thereof—Ameri- 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 confidently 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) find themselves similarly poised before the coming era. All must face cultural homogenization and economic colonization; but in negotiating a place for themselves—and a place as themselves—all must face up to the unquestioned medium of negotiation: English. They may look to Ireland for its response. Already they can look to Irish films. 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 Huston’s cinematic re-reading of Joyce’s story. Thus a story haunted by The Famine returns spectrally in ,

 the yale journal of criticism through the fleeting perspective of Lily the servant girl, to haunt a film 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 flash 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 s,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 cinema’s belatedness, like Iran’s, has brought it the attention it would never have garnered in the s and s, when it would have competed with the innovative modernist films 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 financing and spectators, Irish cinema after  played a substantial role in the public sphere, a role the medium had retreated from almost everywhere else. While the fifty features generally taken to be Irish made in the s span a healthy spectrum of political topics and perspectives, their sudden arrival after decades of inactivity—this “renaissance”—coin- 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  by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea, one senses a shift away from the cosmopolitanism that had set the intellectual agenda since the s, under the urbane rhetoric of Conor Cruise O’Brien. 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- cific contradictions responsible for its current impasses. Field Day’s 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

dudley andrew  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 fire.’”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 fi- 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 first screen role in the  Excalibur, on which Jordan served as assistant director. In Neeson’s body language and speech, as in Stephen Rea’s, and—so Fredric Jameson argues—as 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 inflec- 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 s, to take a clear example, knew how to orchestrate such habits; so too do the new filmmakers in Ireland in the s and s; 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  Easter Uprising had seen failed adap- tations of Abbey Theater productions. Why should such acting carry a national cinema after ? Something about the explicit cultural politics in the Field Day project lifted the ambition of films 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 Quinn’s  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 country’s 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 yale journal of criticism 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 film after  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 Friel’s 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 Friel’s 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 Jameson’s 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 fits a cinema whose most vernacular expressions owe their distinctiveness to what has been termed “the performative” as opposed to “the written” (the European artfilm model) or to “the spectacular” (the Hollywood model). For example, two films of the s supported by state funds, Anne Devlin and Eat the Peach, couldn’t be more different in theme, genre and style, yet they are equally identifiable 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 Devlin’s 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, find 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 filmmakers

dudley andrew  Figure : Stephen Rea and Liam Neeson in Niel Jordan’s Michael Collins

Figure : from Michael Collins

Figure : Telling the story of Ireland in Into the West

 the yale journal of criticism join compatriots in under-funded industries when they assert their poverty, make a virtue of it. West African filmmakers often adopt the mantle of the “griot” or oral poet who entertains and instructs the group he sings for.5 Many of these African films are framed as tales ac- tually sung by griots. This is also the case with the most notable film of the new Korean cinema, Chun Hyang (), featuring an on- screen singer who brings forth the images and story we are treated to. While some films with Irish topics allude to folk culture in this way (John Sayles’s 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 films 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 official 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 flashes 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 fire (see Figure ). This fire has been rekindled in the stage lights of Field Day’s mobile theater, and in the projection light of one of the most exciting cinemas on the globe today—resisting, as it so often does, the homogeneity of the Anglo-TV and American movie culture.

Cinema as Silent Scream As its title divulges, Margot Harkin’s Hush-a-Bye Baby belongs to the category of lament, a quiet lament suppressing, until the final mo- ment, a primal scream. Not just its tone but its production may stand for the dogged insistence of much low-profile 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 Harkin’s only feature) but by a short-lived arts cooperative, taking advantage of a subvention by Channel Four. That a film so cheaply and unassumingly produced (and in a place so out-of-the-way) could find passionate adherents not just in Ireland, but in the USA, France and elsewhere, testifies first to the urgency of its assured voice, but equally to the strength of cinema

dudley andrew  overall in recent Irish culture.While television and radio tend to skirt the controversies of modern life or, until lately,present an official uni- vocal version (Harkin cleverly inserts both media in her movie), Irish films 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 film runs into at every turn, since they are everywhere ap- parent in Ireland, even if officially 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 vilified 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 girl’s quandary, amounting to a national plot. It was enough to film Goretti and her companions merely walking their city:“Entering Free Derry” reads one massive sign they pass;“The Silent Eye is Watching” reads another. Let us name this the plot of reclamation, a plot played out in differ- ent registers in film after film. In Hush-a-Bye Baby Goretti struggles to reclaim propriety over her body, hiding in locker rooms, toilet stalls, her bedroom, her sister’s apartment, until finally 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 child’s 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. Derry’s 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 fictional 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 first 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 yale journal of criticism in confinement 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. Goretti’s baby does not come to term with the film; 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 film. But Limbo has no theological purchase; it marks the state of contradiction between innocence and guilt, the no-place of a barred future. Margot Harkin’s story is happier than Goretti’s. She labored Hush- a-Bye Baby into existence, successfully enlisting not just the Derry Arts cooperative, but Seamus Heaney and Sinéad O’Connor 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 confined 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 Sinéad O’Connor would deliver full face at the Pope a few years hence on television. O’Connor, who had demanded a role in this film (she plays Goretti’s 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 financed it. And so it joined a morally elite coterie of alternative films with ad hoc distri- bution, films 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 film so difficult to screen in the USA. After all, language stands as the first line of defense against the enforcement of the King’s 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 films, their unflagging

dudley andrew  Figure : from Eat the Peach and tenacious attention to the “troubles” of their land, is guaranteed by the irregularity, the impurity of their form. Makeshift films, 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 films 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, is—to employ an apt oxymoron—essentially compromised. This oxymoron is the premise of Eat the Peach, one of the first 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 film industry. Eat the Peach garnered the largest award in the year that actual subventions were finally parceled out to become “the first 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 %) of Ireland’s landmass, the film 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 Quinn’s film, the opening credits roll over forlorn shots of the sparse

 the yale journal of criticism Figure : Watching Roustabout in 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 filthy job for the peat concern, his brother-in-law Arthur is introduced standing outside a clean high tech plant ringed by flags 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 difficulties [a jab at Irish education] . . . provision has been made for redundancy compensation.”The bosses then simply lift off the ground in helicopters and fly 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

dudley andrew  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 sufficient speed and “G-force,”they defy gravity and climb high on the wall, riding paral- lel to the floor (see Figures  and ). But first 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;“Haven’t 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 first, then in a rush. That night the despondent Vinnie sets his dream afire. In an epilogue Boots visits the pair some time hence. He finds them subdued, put in their place, feminized af- ter the fiery 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 they’ve 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 flight (see Figure ).The film 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 film 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 film 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 yale journal of criticism Figures , , and : from Eat the Peach

dudley andrew  Figure : 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 Olmrod’s camera necessarily remains on the bog’s 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 to—and longs to join—that 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 film 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 inflecting the themes and language of Hollywood so as to express an Irish reality, Eat the Peach joins those films (he specifically 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 Ryan’s Daughter made by non-Irish directors, like Excalibur and Light Years Away (Alain Tanner ), but also films directed by Irishmen but

 the yale journal of criticism whose primary financing came from offshore producers and distribu- tors aiming to exploit Irish themes. Pat O’Connor’s Fools of Fortune, Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, and even Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father could all be seen in this slanted light, since each of these ostensibly “engaged”films greatly simplifies Irish politics so as to clar- ify and heighten drama. McLoone classifies these films 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 film 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 specific to the con- flict 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 film stands up to McLoone’s strict critieria, in the first place because both were directed by foreigners (Mike Newell of Britain took charge of Sheridan’s script). Moreover, both indulge in what McLoone labels “historicist nostalgia.”11 Nonetheless, the differences between the films—differences McLoone overlooks in castigating their “regressive ideology”—are 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  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 films, however, affect an Irish audience first 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 Ireland’s 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 film. 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

dudley andrew  Figure : Grandparents and Children in The Secret of Roan Inish

Figure : The Silkie, from The Secret of Roan Inish 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. Sheridan’s script, ambiguous in certain respects, couldn’t 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, Ossie’s, birth, has sunk into alcoholism and into the projects, a final resting

 the yale journal of criticism place. To this grim spiritual grave comes Tir na nÓg, 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 police—surveillance helicopters—and are in the pocket of a British-looking businessman). A series of ready oppositions line up under the film’s master binary, “West/East.” These include: Ancient/Modern, sea/city, cleverness/ education, horse/helicopter, campfire lore/TV dramas, and travelers/ sedentary people.When early on the clan’s aged patriarch recites a tale to Ossie and Tito—a tale they will repeat—we 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 sacrifice in the sacred seas off Connemara (see Figure ). McLoone would not be alone in finding this century old mythology which comes from the Gaelic revival to be of dubious relevance in to- day’s more cosmopolitan Ireland. But cosmopolitanism is precisely what the film 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 figuring 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 Propp’s 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 film 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, Ireland’s 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 fluid of nostalgia—the 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 films 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 out—see Figure ).Tales like these have the power

dudley andrew  to precipitate action; Papa Reilly cries out that “it was stories killed Marie,” Ossie’s 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 children’s film, where it grossed $,,. Many favorable reviews steered an adult audience to the film, knowing perhaps that in Ireland it played broadly across ages. Still, the Irish reception was surely distinctive, de- spite Sheridan’s 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 champions—in part because its photography, acting, and music are so agreeable—he is too quick to link it to The Secret of Roan Inish, which, though perhaps a better film 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 films differ. McLoone himself has offered a scheme for diagnosing and rating the elusive category,“Irishness,” based on the scale and source of finance.

. 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 films usually far out- weighs their commercial achievement. . Low-budget films made entirely within Ireland, financing in- cluded. Ireland’s “rd World productions” seen mainly at festivals.14

In the first category McLoone reluctantly puts The Secret of Roan In- ish, for it remains a truly offshore production, with foreign finance and engineering skill (Haskell Wexler as cinematographer, Adrian Smith as Production Designer) brought in to mine “Romantic” Ireland. “Given [John Sayles’s] track record in making politically astute, revi- sionist films in the U.S,” McLoone finds this terribly disappointing.15 Into the West may share Sayles’s regressive ideology of the purity of the west, but as a product of Dubliners Sheridan and Byrne, McLoone should lodge it with Neil Jordan’s films 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 films represent a genuine national cinema struggling to take shape.”16

 the yale journal of criticism Figures , , and : from Into the West

dudley andrew  Critical Regionalism McLoone’s “critical regionalism” masks his deeper concern for “a gen- uine national cinema,”that is, for specifically Irish ways of expressing a specifically Irish situation, including perhaps a search for an identity in a vibrantly interactive world-system.While the term “regionalism” in 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 film 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 first shot, a long track across a bridge, figures the crossings such differences will invite in the course of the film. 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 midstream—in a line that becomes the film’s refrain—“It’s in my nature.”Once a scorpion, always a scorpion. Once gay,straight, IRA, Protestant, or whatever, al- ways . . . And yet the film dramatizes a series of crossings that blur dif- ference, nature, and—if I can say so—the 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 don’t elide differ- ence; rather they mollify or reverse its effects. For difference is scan- dalously real in the film, the penis—unveiled and completely undis- guised—its absolute signifier. 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 film preempts and mocks by overcoming the futile quest for “the thing itself.” Jordan’s Irishness, like Dil’s 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 ) traversed by The Crying Game may be the

 the yale journal of criticism Figures  and : from The Crying Game

one that took it across the Atlantic to the United States, where it shockingly found a mass reception (some  prints needed to be struck to meet the demand) after its initial repudiation in Britain (where but six prints sufficed).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 film—thanks 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 film; 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-

dudley andrew  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 McLoone’s pure “critical regionalist” group, that’s certain. For those films were destined first for a sophisti- cated Irish audience hungry for passionate expressions of pressing na- tional concerns; later they were celebrated by students of Irish film and politics everywhere. The ample discussion surrounding “critical regionalist” films is out of proportion with their share of the nation’s movie life, for even if we take the s, the period of their greatest im- pact, this group comprises no more than fifteen of the fifty fiction fea- tures shot in or about Ireland. Still, intense discussion does measure the intensity and effect of ambitions; uncompromising, these films refuse to dilute the language and accents of their actors, nor do they simplify the historical and cultural situations they represent. This makes them difficult 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 films 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 film phenom- enon, both because it treats the epic struggle for the birth of an inde- pendent Ireland and because it marks the first time that international film financiers had ever granted a filmmaker the chance to dramatize his own country’s 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.’ $,, without considering their interests, particularly in letting Julia Roberts wander into a pic- ture otherwise dominated by Irish actors. However, most understood Jordan’s film to be more sophisticated and—let’s say it—more 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 Valera’s 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 yale journal of criticism the Commonwealth, it was but a partial birth. Stephen Rea, who played one of Collins’s lieutenants, said: Michael Collins was a hugely important film to make at that time []. 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 didn’t 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 don’t particularly agree with how Neil depicted the period or how he depicted de Valera. But the film made discussion more possible, and in doing that it also helped Irish society to move on.20 A film 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. Jordan’s 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 film, The Butcher Boy, ahead of both Michael Collins and The Crying Game, and they do so not just as a Neil Jordan film 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 s 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 boy’s 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 s 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 fiction writer, Jordan surely knows his country’s literature intimately, but he doesn’t flaunt this tradition, doesn’t summon it for inspiration or self-definition. As for his image-memory, this must overflow with Hollywood movies and European art films, not with the few Irish precedents that could be cited.While cinema—like poetry,music, and the other arts—grazes

dudley andrew  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 specificity of Irish culture most immediately in question. That question pointedly arises whenever a foreigner lands on Irish soil to film its land, history, and people. In  BBC veteran Robert Knights adapted a Jennifer Johnston novel set in the revolutionary moment of , 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 flaccid treatment of an his- torical moment whose moral complexity should catch in the throat, as it does in Michael Collins, betrays the film. But the greater betrayal lies in Knight’s decision to assemble an all-British—though 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- ficity—and resistance—to what amounts to a standard coming-of-age story set in some time of crisis. Reversing the cross-over, does Neil Jordan’s British-made films (Mona Lisa,The Company of Wolves,The End of the Affair) contribute to Irish film 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 flat or hotel. But a filmmaker works with the people and locales in whose midst he finds himself; so, unless Jordan were to transport the former and construct in studio the latter, his Irish specificity must disappear except as an inflection of, say, Graham Greene’s England. When it comes to cinema, the Irish cul- tural grasslands—already invaded by spores of images that have blown from across the Atlantic and the channel—find themselves abandoned by emigrant talent and groups of itinerant artisans flying off to serve themselves and their craft in whatever territory they find 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 films 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 , the nature of exile and emigration changed in key respects. And now in

 the yale journal of criticism the revived, post-Star Wars era, known precisely as “global Holly- wood,”these categories have by definition 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 film 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 filmmakers 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, Ireland’s audio-visual life is virtually co-extensive with that of the USA and Britain. Language, albeit in a colorful dialect, makes Irish filmmakers 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 five 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 filmmakers 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 definitive emigration, not just because speak they Eng- lish natively but because so many of them went across the water first 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 first I was en- tranced by all the pastel pinks and greens and blues. I spent several years here, made two films 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 I’ve come to know more people here than I do at home, so it’s 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-

dudley andrew  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 profit 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 specific 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 filmmaker 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 films in any system. Renoir, how- ever, planned films only far enough to ready himself and his collabo- rators for the event of the making of the film. 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-scène. Imag- ine, to reverse the flow, John Cassevetes making a film in Germany and in German, even if he were able to learn the language as well as Renoir learned English by . If Jameson’s thesis holds, and the par- ticular kinds of interactions theater promotes are crucial to national film 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 filmmakers 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 first and thus thrives on the tradition and rhythm of local manners of expression. His  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 field as their birthright, even when promising to develop it profitably and ration- ally.Sheridan may have blunted The Field’s 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 yale journal of criticism Figure : from The Field

field. Evidently the producer of Into the West need look beyond that Western shore only when the image of America intensifies drama on the tightly circumscribed island that serves him as a stage.24 An opposite case would be Pat O’Connor, whose early experience was in television rather than theater. O’Connor got his feature film start with Cal in , picking up the assignment after Neil Jordan’s 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 fierce new Irish talent of the time.25 But O’Connor 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  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 O’Connor still an Irish filmmaker? British producers thought so, since after Fools of Fortune they sent him to his homeland to take on the adaptation of Maeve Binchy’s 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 O’Donnell, Minnie Driver, and Colin Firth? Counted his most successful work, particularly in its sensitive treatment of women, Circle of Friends brought O’Connor his first Irish-initiated assignment since Cal—and perhaps the most an- ticipated Irish film of the decade—Dancing at Lughnasa. Adapted from Brian Friel’s acclaimed play by emerging playwright Frank McGuin- ness, Dancing at Lughnasa had behind it the full weight of the Irish

dudley andrew  Film Board and Irish Television. This time an entirely local crew (ex- cept for a British cinematographer and editor) would be responsible for the film’s look, and as for the actors, all but two of the roles were to be filled 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 O’Connor’s most publi- cized effort. While Streep’s 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 film. Of Friel’s subtle success and O’Connor’s flat- ness, one critic said: The play works when its cast can reflect 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 finds a ready translation in their relationships . . . though director O’Connor 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 film 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 film, commissioned by Ireland’s department of Heritage and Culture, the actors play to and against a picturesque landscape accompanied by Bill Whelan’s (Riverdance) mu- sic. The naked shape of the play, one could say, has been clothed in cinematic accoutrements. Even those who admired the film confirm 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 benefits im- measurably from the glorious, untamed vistas and the quaint ambiance of the little Irish village seen here.”27 Maslin appreciates the film as a memorable and embellished re-creation of experience, not the expe- rience itself. It is all Riverdance, not a “session at the pub.” O’Connor 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 film) 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 yale journal of criticism 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.” O’Connor instinctively novelized a text that is given as a flashback 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 office—it played well enough in Ireland—Dancing at Lugh- nasa neither slowed Pat O’Connor’s career nor kept it in his native country.29 He had learned early on how to orchestrate the elements that comprise a film 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 films in Ireland. A close analysis ought to discern his instincts and methods, which I sus- pect line up with Hollywood’s 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 émigré O’Connor and the ever-Irish Sheridan, for Jor- dan lives the dialectical tension between novel (his first vocation) and theater. His early itinerary resembles O’Connor’s, 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 Jordan’s reliable Stephen Rea can do little in a script that foregrounds vision over interaction. The actors wait for the driving force of the

dudley andrew  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 film 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 something—the independent force of the acting, I claim— thrusts this film at us with immediacy,particularly when compared to Dancing at Lughnasa, or, Martin McLoone argues, with yet another Irish flashback film, Angela’s 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 film sniffs and bolts, then pauses to sniff again, the tone of the boy’s narra- tion seeping into the dialogue of the townsfolk and the garish images. The lesson should be clear: in Hollywood his novelist’s 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 specific 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 Hollywood’s Dreamwork is to bridge but not erase differences that are economic in every sense of the term: finan- 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 filmmakers 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 films like Ron Howard’s Far and Away

 the yale journal of criticism Figure : Nostalgic journeys in This is my Father

() and Paul Quinn’s 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  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 . As in Ryan’s Daughter, the spectacular Din- gle setting drained Quinn’s film 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 film 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 film people back to the cool respite of Ireland. Actors such as Daniel Day Lewis, Richard Harris, and Peter O’Toole have floated 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. Jordan’s maiden film, 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 Huston’s The Dead: an American filmmaker living in Ireland adapts to the image arguably the densest story concocted by the greatest Irish

dudley andrew  wordsmith of all. Yet Joyce was not, of course, exclusively Irish or lit- erary. He wrote “The Dead”—like all his fiction—while 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  to establish Ireland’s first film 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 story’s 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 Irishman’s 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 film 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 films have taken up the main fortresses, but European and Asian films 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 films 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 filmmakers for the first time. It is the EU that pays for Gaelic films like The Long Road to Klondike (Desmond Bell, ), a curiously world film made in Gaelic. It is also European production money that has backed a few Irish art films (two important ones in : Guilttrip and Ailsa). Critical regionalism finds a ready audience in France. Some time ago someone recounted to me the skeleton of a dead- pan Irish filmscript (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 yale journal of criticism post-offices, and department stores to blow them up. What will hap- pen at Disney’s Space Mountain? The plot is not yet fully worked out. We’ll 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, ), .  Luke Gibbons, interview with the author, December , , Dublin Ireland.  Fredric Jameson, keynote lecture, Conference on Cinema and Nation, Dublin, Ireland, Nov .  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, ): –.  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 final version.  See Luke Gibbons,“Romanticism, Realism and Irish Cinema,” .  Hal Hinson, The Washington Post, December , .  Martin McLoone takes this term from Kenneth Frampton’s “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, ), . 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, ).  Martin McLoone, Irish Film, .  Jim Sheridan lecture at the Tel Aviv Film Festival, June .  Elizabeth Cullingford,“‘John Wayne Fan or Dances With Wolves Revisionist?’ Analogy and Ambiguity in the Irish Western,” Ireland’s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, ): –.  McLoone,“Reimagining the Nation:Themes and Issues in Irish Cinema,”Cineaste :–, .  McLoone,“Reimagining the Nation,” .  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 Jordan’s The Crying Game,” Film Criticism . (Fall, ).  The Crying Game (London: BFI publications, ).  In comparison, one finds in the s a greater number of full-blown dramas about Ulster made for the BBC’s substantial audience, and spilling back onto Irish TVs.  Stephen Rea, Interview at Yale University, Feb , , published in Yale Journal of Criti- cism . (Spring ).  Jennifer Johnston, daughter of Denis Johnston (who directed Guests of the Nation in ), was a member of the Irish Film Board in the s 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, –.  At this moment, however, Sheridan is currently developing East of Harlem, due to be re- leased in , whose plot concerns an Irish couple who take up life in New York.The

dudley andrew  actors and the wider world will still be an Irish one and so Sheridan could not, even after this film, be called an emigrant, even by half.  See John Hill,“Images of Violence,” in Cinema and Ireland, , . O’Connor in fact adapted Neil Jordan’s most famous short story “A Night in Tunisia”for television in .  Barry Johnson, The Portland Oregonian, December , .  Janet Maslin, The New York Times, November , .  The play is also framed as a flashback, but still loses none of its immediacy.  O’Connor’s next film, Sweet November (Warner Bros, ), was not only a Hollywood ro- mantic comedy, but a remake of one.  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 yale journal of criticism