CinemaA milestone publication in Irish media studies was Cinema and Ireland (Rockett, Gibbons and Hill) in 1987, followed by several other publications in the next decade. These are now joined by Ruth Barton's Irish National Cinema.
Avoiding facile and narrow definitions of "Irish film", Barton builds on previous research and is careful to establish her parameters and terrain. This has several key contours, including: films made on and outside the island, engaging with local and diasporic issues; the powerful legacy of romantic images from our national "image banks", amalgamating both the tourist gaze and immigrant nostalgia; State film policy in the context of the core industrial nature of cinema; and cinema's capacity to reflect cultural shifts, and the changing emphasis of Irish cultural and sexual identity.
Within this dynamic framework Barton discusses the revisions and resistances to the dominant legacy of Irish cinema. She also explores the lack of a sustained film-making tradition here compared with our consistently vibrant cinema-going ways. She also explores the cinema as a social and cultural space - an often highly charged political zone, reflecting and refracting the censorship imperatives on both sides of partition.
Her analysis moves easily between text and context, from the early British newsreels on Irish subjects and native forays into newsreel production. Across the Atlantic, she notes how the class-conscious "lace-curtain" Irish resented the vaudevillian Irish stereotypes on screen - yet their lack of control over cultural production was in contrast to their political power in Tammany Hall.
Barton also delves into Irish themes in Brian Desmond Hurst's mainly British-based work. The "quota quickie" of the 1930s gave him the opportunity to direct films for a working-class audience, of which Irish emigrants formed a large part. His low-budget productions often involved narratives of nostalgia and communality, and included Irish ballads and dancing, yet he was also alert to the expectations of the different audiences addressed, both Irish and non-Irish.
A chapter on 'The Deflowering of Irish Cinema' explores the shifting terrain of gender and sexuality in Irish film. Despite the recent apparently more liberal mode of address in matters of sexual identity, gay sexuality remains under-explored - and Barton is wary of any easy closures.
A section on representations of Northern Ireland spans previous critical writings and recent productions, including the work of John T. Davis, and Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday. Curiously, though, while a comparison between two films based on the events of Bloody Sunday might have been expected, Jimmy McGovern's Sunday is dismissed in a sentence as "the more conventional of the two". Arguably, it is Sunday, with its amalgam of visual registers and a resistance to a linear structure, which gives a more complex perspective and emphasises the instability of images. Another omission of "post-ceasefire" material is Johnny Gogan's The Mapmaker, which is explicitly concerned with boundaries and Border landscapes.
These omissions are thrown into relief by the otherwise comprehensive quality of the discussion throughout. Revisiting and re-examining key debates on Irish cinema and linking into wider critical discussions, Barton writes with authority and relish, always conscious of the industrial and cultural dynamics, and the policy initiatives of the second Irish Film Board and its impact on low-budget, digital production.
This is an intelligent and insightful contribution to the growing corpus of scholarship in Irish film. Its research was funded by an award from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, which is a welcome acknowledgement of cinema research within the scholarly fold.
Stephanie McBride is on the board of directors of the Irish Film Institute and teaches film studies at DCU
Irish National Cinema By Ruth Barton Routledge, 213pp. NPG