Ruth Barton

The Ballykissangelization of Ireland

It is ironic that a country which established its national identity largely through recourse to historical and mythical narratives has now, with equal fervour, adopted a policy of commodifying those narratives for the purposes of developing its second largest industry, tourism. It is a further irony that the major consumers of Irish heritage tourism are the former colonizers, the British. Irish culture e nds itself in a double bind, promoting itself through its past, whilst simultaneously denying much of what is signie cant in that past. This cultural imperative has given rise in turn to a specie c cycle of e lms made in and about Ireland, an Irish heritage cinema. A parallel discourse has emerged in television representations, typie ed by the highly successful series Ballykissangel. The regressive discourses of these heritage productions trade on a very specie c image of Irishness which has resonances for the way in which areas such as community, gender and history/the past are depicted. The evolution of the stereotype of the ‘Irish Paddy’ has already been widely discussed; this article focuses less on how that particular e gure has transferred into recent e lm and television works than on other aspects of comic representations of Irishness, in particular how themes of interdependency have been treated historically and in the present. This article emphasizes comedy and its centrality to the heritage cinema and related television programmes. The kind of pleasures offered by comedies have tended to obscure their value as cultural documents. For example, no serious academic work has been carried out on Ballykissangel or the earlier British comedies set in Ireland, which function simultaneously as post-colonial texts and as pleasurable outings for the vicarious heritage tourist. My emphasis is on how the texts circulate between English and Irish audiences and e lm makers and to speculate on what these heritage e lms can tell us about the complex relationship between former colonizer and formerly colonized. Before dee ning in greater detail what is meant by the term heritage cinema, I want briee y to trace its origins both in tourist narratives and earlier comic treatments of the themes of interdependency. Finally, I want to question to what extent we, the Irish, collude in this image-making process and for what reasons.

From Symbol to Symptom — Changing Representations of Fatherhood in Recent Irish Cinema

In this chapter I would like to consider the changes in the representation of paternity by Irish filmmakers in the years before and during the Celtic Tiger. This intersects with other issues around masculinity but has some very specific circumstances that make it distinctive. In part what I am interested in is discussing how Irish cinema replaced a postcolonial discourse with another, or others, and how this in turn affected the manner in which the figure of the father was depicted on screen. As I would like to suggest, this history of representation follows a trajectory of seeing the Irish father as a symbolic figure, who stands in for a set of ideas surrounding Irish identity, to a realist depiction that intersects with a particular conglomeration of discourses in Irish society around paternity. This, as I will further explore, does not lead to a complete break with the tradition of symbolic representation, but alters it in a very conspicuous manner.

The O'Kalem Collection on DVD: Implications for Future Research

137 would become Kalem’s greatest commercial success. It was also the last big project that the pair did for Kalem. By the summer of 1913 Olcott and Gauntier were back in Ireland. Blazing the Trail gives a succinct account of what transpired in the meantime. They had broken with Kalem for good and were now the Gene Gauntier Players; Gauntier’s name, as the documentary tells us, was far more likely to attract financial backers than was that of the more contentious Olcott. Yet the films on the first DVD in the collection—For Ireland’s Sake and Come Back to Erin—demonstrate that a certain predictability had crept into their work. By the next year the pair had stopped working together. Olcott made a final trip to Ireland, filming Bold Emmett, Ireland’s Martyr (with Robert Emmet’s name unintentionally misspelled). Olcott had wished to build a production studio in Beaufort, but World War I intervened. Gauntier was soon out of films, and Olcott never achieved the level of acclaim he enjoyed when the pair worked together. The films made by Olcott and Gautier are important in their own right, and simply collecting them allows viewers to discover their significant contribution to the ways films are currently made in Ireland and the ways we currently understand Irish-themed films. The documentary in the collection adds valuable contextual information and the commentaries by important critics invite us to elaborate on the conclusions already reached. For anyone interested in the contemporary cinema in Ireland, The O’Kalem Collection is one of the best places to begin the study.

Irish Cinema and Theatre: Adapting to Change

This chapter discusses the relationship between the Irish stage and screen. Historically, Irish theatre has been favoured over cinema, the latter being viewed as compromised by its address to global audiences. Theatre also makes claim to greater cultural capital than film, in Ireland as elsewhere. Opening with discussions of two classic adaptations, The Field and Dancing at Lughnasa, I then consider more recent works such as Disco Pigs.

The Ironic Gaze: Roots Tourism and Irish Heritage Cinema

Writing in 2004 on Irish cinema, I identified a trend that had emerged in the previous decade of films defined by nostalgia for a pre-modern Ireland. Such films—Hear My Song (Peter Chelsom, 1991), Into the West (Mike Newell, 1992), War of the Buttons (John Roberts, 1993), Broken Harvest (Maurice O’Callaghan, 1994), The Run of the Country (Peter Yates, 1995) and others—were distinctive for being structurally and thematically conservative, particularly in terms of their gender representations. They were also all rural-based and many centred their narratives on children, whose state of innocence became a palimpsest for Ireland of old, and by extension the innocent Irish people of bygone times. The impetus behind this wave of heritage films was, I concluded, a desire to make a break with the pervasive legacy of The Troubles and the image of a country defined by lawlessness and violence. In this, the films had much in common with Irish Tourist Board (Failte Ireland) campaigns designed to persuade tourists that a visit to Ireland was a visit to a country of timeless and ancient beauty, populated by welcoming natives who had no axe to grind with foreigners (particularly the lucrative UK tourist market). Drawing on theories of the tourist gaze, it appeared that many of the films replicated such a gaze as part of their aesthetic (Barton 2004: 148–56).

Screening the Irish in Britain: introduction

This collection of essays originates in a one-day symposium held at Trinity College Dublin in September 2009. The surprise for most of us who gathered there was that such an event had not been held before. It was as if the scholarship that was unfolded during the course of the day had somehow lain invisible over the years of our collective research. It was at once all new – most speakers were presenting their ideas for the first time – and very old – the articulation of histories and concepts that stretched back over the eras. This impression of something hidden but always there was reflected in the papers, and now in the essays in this collection. As so many of the contributors note, the presence of the Irish in Britain has often been an invisible one; Bronwen Walter outlines the historical background to the issue of invisibility, discussing the reasons why it so often suited the Irish to be unnoticed members of English society, just as it suited the English not to notice them. Martin McLoone refers to a ‘hidden history . . . of dispersal and removal’ noting how the identification of Irish characters may rest on the process of ‘naming and claiming’, of recognising Irishness through surnames. Padraic Killeen suggests that one way of reflecting on the presence of the Irish in Britain is not to depict their Irishness at all. Conn Holohan refers to another hidden history in his essay on Felicia’s Journey (Atom Egoyan, 1999) with its narrative of a displaced young woman and her need to seek an abortion. Emmie McFadden adds to this the double invisibility of Irish women, rendered silent by their gender and their social status, as maids and onlookers in the greater dramas of British society. These Bridgets and Paddies built the roads and railways and emptied the grates and minded the children of a society that seldom paused to wonder who they were and why they were there. The Irish were poor and servile in the British narrative because that was what nature intended for them. They were drunk and disruptive by virtue of their own failings; and superstitious because of their Catholicism. These white Others represented everything that the British were not, a colony on their own doorstep, a source of plunder and cheap labour. For the Bridgets and Paddies, Britain held out the promise of a living, and sometimes too an escape from the restrictive, narrow-minded society that was Ireland. They were also official entertainers to the wider British public. The Irish provided cheap laughter in the Music Halls and sentimental ballads for the Victorian parlour. And in this way, they transferred to early British cinema, emerging, just as they did in early American cinema, as comic figures in short sketches of which the earliest recorded in Kevin Rockett’s The Irish Filmography is listed simply as Irish Jig (1898): ‘Four

The British ‘B’ Film

quote from is never set out Nor do the authors engage with the terms of Lambert’s criticism, passing quickly on to the next film and the next plot summary. They deserve credit for quoting, prominently, from other criticisms of Dearden – it is generally he as director who is named in them, rather than both men – by critics like David Thomson, V.F. Perkins (in the first issue of Movie in 1962) and indeed myself in the first edition of Ealing Studios (1977). Having gone some way to revise my own line in a second edition, I wish they had engaged more boldly on their own account with this range of attacks, which focus on flashy cinematic technique as well as facile handling of social issues, especially in terms of the post-1950 films. One ends the book without having a clear sense of the case they want to make for the importance of all these films, something that can never be said of a book in the MUP British Directors series. After starting with one unconvincing sentence, one can end with another. ‘The prominence of the psychoanalytic dimension in Dead of Night has never been thoroughly explored, and unfortunately there is not sufficient space here to offer a developed discussion’ (p. 76). So a study that gives more than three pages to a sceneby-scene plot summary of, for instance, Out of the Clouds (1955), an obscure airline drama whose reviews were ‘almost universally poor’ (p. 172) and for which the authors do not attempt to mount a case of their own at any level, cannot give a page or two to a fresh analysis of one of the key Ealing films, an analysis that by their own account would fill a gap? Like the book overall, this represents a missed opportunity.