Irish Exilic Cinema in England Lance Pettitt the Axes of Ireland's Exilic
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Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt Irish Exilic Cinema in England Lance Pettitt School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK Email: [email protected] Irish exilic cinema is defined by the nexus of entanglements between Ireland and England as a subset of wider Irish-British relations. A case study of a Belfast-born director Hans – later known as - Brian Desmond Hurst (1895-1986) – is offered as axiomatic of the Irish exilic manifest in cinema. Using the idea of the ‘slipzone of anxiety and imperfection’1 to characterise the London-hub of the cinema business mid- century as an uneasy socio-cultural space, it explores Hurst’s career arc within this phase of Britain’s imperial history, including Ireland’s (re)positioning. Applying a queered concept of the auteur, Hurst’s exilic Irishness and sexuality are considered as ‘performed within material and semiotic circumstances’2 pertaining to a specific historical juncture. Analysis of films from Dangerous Moonlight (1941) to Dangerous Exile (1957) shows that Hurst’s most telling cinematic insights come not in films set in or about Ireland but rather in narratives of outsiders/exiles in British war and colonial films that expose socio- cultural anxieties about Englishness, class and decolonisation. Keywords: exilic; British cinema; Hurst; auteur; queer cinema, Irishness I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first, and in Britain I am still a foreigner.3 I wish one could either live in Ireland or feel oneself in England.4 The Axes of Ireland’s exilic cinema Irish exilic cinema helps us to interrogate some of the dominant theoretical and historical paradigms that have been used to construct British and Irish filmmaking activities as national cinemas.5 British cinema may be mocked by Europeans, Irish cinema seen by some as ‘belated’ and indeed both have been over-shadowed and deeply penetrated by Hollywood products, funds and ideas. Yet both lesser cinemas have also drawn on European influences and Britain has enjoyed periods of intense invigoration through the incoming creative talent of migrants.6 What filmmaking that did take place in Ireland has largely taken place as a sub-set of British cinema 1 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt production and exhibition on the basis quite simply that ticket sales could not produce a profitable return in Ireland.7 From a historiographical point of view, the research on the emergence of an indigenous cinema in Ireland has favoured a ‘national cinema’ framework. Despite serious and acknowledged drawbacks with this body of theory and Ireland’s material circumstances demonstrating the model’s very limitations, it shaped much writing about film in and about Ireland. The pervasiveness of emigration to the USA has rightly been discussed as a constituent of Irish identities both for the migrants themselves but also for those remaining. The key part played by Irish along with other immigrant groups in the burgeoning film industry of the US forms part of an emigrant ‘success’ narrative and has been reflected in a bias towards Irish diasporic and ethnic filmmakers.8 Even critical versions of a national cinema have only just started to do proper work on the Irish in Britain and analyses of its screen representation.9 As I am defining it, Irish exilic cinema is characterised by the majority of traffic going along a west to east axis that converges on London. Since the 1950s there has been much Irish shuttling back and forth along this axis, but it is worth noting that there has been a very small counter-flow, a trickle in fact: English-born filmmakers who moved to Ireland. Most internationally renowned of these is John Boorman (1933- ) whose films, from Zardoz (1974) Excalibur (1981) through Hope and Glory (1987) to The General (1998) and The Tiger’s Tail (1998 and 2006), and autobiographical writing speak idiosyncratically to Arthurian legend, suburban Englishness and an urban Celticism.10 At a different level, lesser known lives and workaday figures like Dave Barker in Belfast or John Peto in Derry have worked in Northern Ireland since the 1970s and 1990s respectively. In considering this reverse trickle, two pioneer figures in Northern Ireland’s cinematic history, Donovan Pedelty and Richard Hayward (1903-1989; 1890- 2 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt 1964) were themselves not born in Ireland. As John Hill has elegantly detailed, their cultural work, including some rudimentary films in the 1920s and 1930s, stands at the head of a gapped history of film post-1920.11 And it is with an exemplar figure who emerged from within this fractured, crossed-hatched history of Irish exilic cinema that the rest of this essay concerns itself. From Belfast to Belgravia: The trajectory of exilic mobility Hans Hurst (to use his given name) was born in working class Belfast in 1895 and grew up within late-Victorian Ireland. It was a provincial city strongly connected eastwards to London and outward to the British Empire, through industry, monarchy and political ties within the Union. Hurst was brought up as a Presbyterian amongst the linen mills and shipyards in streets off ‘Loyalist’ Newtownards Road, leaving school early but literate to work in a local mill. His early domestic life was fractured by bereavement, the remarriage of his father, frequent house moves and rivalry for attention with several step- and half siblings. Aged seventeen he signed the Ulster Covenant12 and by nineteen had enlisted in the Irish Rifles, a regiment in the British Army, knowing that he would be deployed abroad as World War One (1914-18) extended into a far-reaching realignment of imperial powers. Informally renaming himself ‘Brian’, perhaps to sound less German and more like Irish nobility (Brian Boru?), Rifleman Hurst survived the horrors of a bloody defeat in Gallipoli and campaigns in the middle-east, Africa and Balkans. Unable to settle back in Belfast, disturbed by the anti-colonial conflict of the Anglo-Irish war (1919-21) and seeing no way to explore his creative nature, he took a government veterans grant and emigrated in 1920/21 to Canada. He studied art in Toronto (1921-23), then informally in Paris (1924-27) and afterwards found work in the US as an interior decorator. Making his 3 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt way to Los Angeles, he worked for John Ford, first as an extra, then got into set design and art direction between 1928 and 1932. The Depression, a dip in Ford’s fortunes and a lack of official work papers meant that Hurst decided to leave the US. He had assumed the twin forenames of ‘Brian Desmond’ from his time in Toronto in the attempt to impress would-be buyers of his art work. He settled in London initially with his sister, and through various connections - Irish lords, landed eccentrics and rich entertainers – and an embroidered past, he managed to finance three experimental films: The Tell-Tale Heart, Irish Hearts (both 1934) and Riders to the Sea (1935) – the latter two featuring impressive location shooting in Ireland - which gave him critical attention and led to him being associated ‘with the London avant-garde in the 1930s’.13 Within four years of intense activity he had directed a clutch of more mainstream pictures: Ourselves Alone, Sensation (both 1936) The Tenth Man and Glamorous Night (both 1937) and On the Night of the Fire (1939). He took up more prestige projects where offered (Prison without Bars, 1938 and On the Night of the Fire, 1939) and Alexander Korda contracted him to direct a major production of Lawrence of Arabia, the ‘plumb job of the year’ and for which he co-wrote the screenplay.14 With this, his work as co-director with Michael Powell and Adrian Brunel on The Lion has Wings (1939), at the eve of WWII Hurst was positioned to ascend to British cinema’s top rank. Hurst is thus an exemplar of the Irish exilic filmmaker, situated at the interstices of British/Irish cinema industries, where he had to negotiate himself consciously and persistently within the discourses available in Britain, essentially as a bohemian cineaste – cosmopolitan, cultured, convert Catholic and queer. By inhabiting the professional and social circles that he did in London from 1932 for the rest of his long life, he was socially and semiotically confronted with the contingency 4 Irish Studies Review ‘Irish Exilic Cinema in England’ (2011) ©2011Lance Pettitt of Irishness. As exilic, defined by the backward look to ‘Ireland’ as home – but not the actuality of his Belfast/domestic/family life, he felt a nostalgia for the kind of Ireland he never knew and never lived in. He developed a strong kind of cultural and political conservatism – in his film practice, cultural tastes and social attitudes. In this way he is not quite one of those ‘aspiring careerists and arrivistes who may be referred to as ‘“micks on the make”’15, rather he could be seen as upwardly Ulster in England. Hurst’s deracinated Ulster Irishness in the British industry comes through in an exilic sensibility – with its looking back, its sentiment for the past and its conservatism – that is grafted onto his films during the 1940s and 50s. That sensibility occupies the mental terrain and emotional landscape of particular kinds of Anglo- centric British identities with all their anxieties and contradictions. The exilic Hurst avoided assimilation, but nor did he quite ape the English to become a ‘West (End) Brit’. Yet he also avoided the ethnic Irish ghettos pocketed in Hammersmith, Kilburn and Southwark because they were too close to the class roots of his adolescent Belfast.