Tony Tracy

Contemporary Irish Film: From the National to the Transnational

An invitation to consider contemporary Irish cinema suggests a number of potential frames and approaches. The most obvious might be the identification of dominant genres, themes, or practices of representation that reflect something about Ireland and the Irish a century after the 1916 Rising. Within a specific understanding of the role and function of a late-flowering national cinema, auteur and culturalstudies approaches have dominated readings of Irish film, which has frequently been called upon as a means of critiquing or negotiating key social structures such as the Catholic church, family, sexuality, and gender. Yet as our earlier attempt to categorize the output of the Irish Film Board (IFB) between 1993 and 2003 revealed, deriving a unifying narrative of Irish cinema centered on textual concerns is fraught with oversimplification and exclusion, eliding a range of variables around production policies and practices, the complexity of which have increased enormously with the proliferation of formats and circuits that characterize the digital era. A comprehensive overview of Irish film in 2017 needs to reckon with a diverse industry worth i550 million annually, which incorporates productions as disparate as large international television dramas with budgets in millions of euros and micro-budget feature films (under i50,000 or even under i10,000) produced by tiny crews and struggling to find an audience even in the face of an increasing proliferation of local festivals. In the nearly a decade-and-a-half that we have been assembling an annual review of Irish film and TV output, it has become increasingly the case that although still small by international standards, the

Emerald illusions: the Irish in early American cinema

by Gary D. Rhodes, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2012, 320 pp., £45 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7165-3143-2 Gary D. Rhodes is a prolific historian of American cinema, having written and edited several book...