Does the Irishness of a film matter? No, except when it does

It’s unlikely that shouts of “the British are coming” will ring around the Dolby Theater if Martin McDonagh and his co-producers end up, against the odds, onstage when the Academy Award for best picture is announced tomorrow night. But the fact that The Banshees of Inisherin arrives at the Oscars having already been anointed “best British film” by Bafta does remind us of an older sort of culture war over what exactly makes a film truly Irish. When it comes to national identity, movies are a funny old business, and the transactional transnational process by which they often get made can render any national designation problematic. None of which stopped us putting a picture of an Oscar statuette clutching a bunch of shamrock on the cover of this week’s Ticket.

Does anyone really care? The focus on this year’s Irish success suggests they do, in a soft, fuzzy way. But there was a time when debates about authentic Irishness had more of an edge. During the vicious infighting that broke out within the minuscule local film community in 1981 over the funding of Neil Jordan’s debut, Angel. Fillmmakers attacked the production for using British crew and equipment, which, they argued, disqualified the film as Irish. When Angel was finally released here, following an enthusiastic international critical reception, it was the subject of a boycott from producers enraged by the part played by Irish Film Board chairman John Boorman in its funding.

Four decades on, these disputes seem even more petty than they did at the time. But at the heart of the matter there were some profound and still relevant questions about why the State should put money into local production. Was it so that Irish people could tell their own stories on screen, instead of seeing themselves represented through an exclusively Anglo-American lens, with all the stereotypes and simplifications that entailed? Was it an exercise in job creation? Or was it a bit of both?

The English language has offered Irish filmmakers a competitive advantage over other countries ... but has also continued a tradition of dependence

During the Angel controversy, some argued for the purest of answers to the question of what an Irish film was: it had to be made in Ireland by Irish people with Irish money.

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That position became untenable in the face of the international success of Jordan and Jim Sheridan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Sheridan’s My Left Foot was made for a British TV channel and became an American hit thanks to the dark arts of Harvey Weinstein. Jordan embarked on an eclectic career that encompassed British art house and Hollywood comedy before the surprise success of The Crying Game (again thanks to Weinstein) catapulted him to international A-level status.

The successive waves of Irish filmmakers who followed were generally comfortable with the idea that getting their stories made inevitably required collaboration with international partners. They also accepted the need to craft their films to appeal to audiences outside Ireland, a process encouraged by funding agencies at home and across Europe. That many of the resulting co-productions were bland Europuddings or hackneyed genre exercises was beside the point; this was the way films got made and that was the end of it.

We should be grateful that the puritans lost the battle, given the insularity and thinly veiled xenophobia which underpinned some of their arguments, not to mention their detachment from the economic realities of trying to make films in a small, underdeveloped country. But that doesn’t mean the question has become irrelevant. At the Baftas, McDonagh skilfully defused any negative reaction to his film being (correctly, under Bafta’s rules) designated as British, due to the nationality of the production company that initiated it.

For what it’s worth, I think Banshees is indisputably an Irish film. But what about Room? The Lenny Abraham-directed film, adapted by Emma Donoghue from her own novel and produced by Dublin-based Element Pictures, was a winner at both the Iftas and the Canadian Screen Awards. Element have been messing with these classification systems for years with films such as The Favourite and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Irish films which many people don’t think of as Irish.

[ Neil Jordan: ‘I couldn’t make The Crying Game today’ ]

What’s most remarkable this year is that, for the first time, a feature film that would have passed the most stringent 1980s smell test is in contention at the Oscars. The English language has offered Irish filmmakers a competitive advantage over other countries in the international marketplace but has also continued a tradition of dependence on the aesthetics and concerns of London and Los Angeles. Perhaps, then, the success of An Cailín Ciúin retrospectively justifies an argument made by some more than 40 years ago: if you want to make a truly Irish film, make it in Irish.