Dudley Andrew the Theater of Irish Cinema

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 productions, 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 versions. 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 colonization 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.

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