Holding up our movie mirror to the world

IN LOS Angeles he was working on the "industry" aspect of the Irish film industry, though he did have dinner with Marlon Brando (four stone lighter; the ambience was Japanese, and the talk was of world culture, if you must know). But in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Michael D. Higgins stopped off on his way home, it was the "film" side of the film industry he celebrated. In an address which opened a large conference - Irish Film: A Mirror Up To Culture, he remarked on the dual agenda. Since he became responsible for film and broadcasting policy, he said, "I have based, many of my public pronouncements on the economic potential of film and television production, at the expense of emphasising the powerful cultural and social significance of such production...

His speech to the conference and the conference itself left to one side, for the moment, the mathematics of investments and jobs. Instead 40 or so invited speakers from Ireland and Irish America - film makers, prose writers and poets, cultural historians, academics - together with more than 200 participants who had flown in from all over the States, and a fluctuating number of local Virginians, looked at and discussed Irish film for three packed days. The organiser, Andrew Wyndham of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, described the event, as the first comprehensive public exploration of the contemporary renaissance in Irish film and its relation to culture and society. As such, certain grievances accumulated in the past were ventilated, but much more powerfully, new Irish film was seen as an enormously enjoyable and impressive cultural development.

As was pointed out by more than one speaker (thanks to the storehouse of factual information which has just become available in Kevin Rockett's huge work, The Irish Filmography) fewer than 100 feature films have been made by Irish film makers in the first 100 years of cinema. More will have been made in the last two years of the decades of the century than in the preceding 80 years. The sense of new energy means that "Quiet Mannery" is dead, and not likely to rise again, even in Hollywood. Kevin Rockett has documented more than 2,000 films made outside Ireland about it and its people in the last 100 years. Many of the Americans who went to Charlottesville had never known any other Irish film but these externally made ones. At the conference they could see from a day of continuous screening of recent Irish movies, Anne Devlin, Korea, Guiltrip, The Visit After 68 and another dozen or so, that an Ireland more complex than Oireland ever was is being expressed.

Irish film in North America is a new and stylish presence. And even the less "native" films are telling more of the truth than ever before. Margaret Spillane of The Nation magazine, who attended the conference, said: "Films like Circle of Friends or In The Name Of The Father may not seem revolutionary to you in Ireland. But they are, here."

THE conference operated on several levels as a gathering of academics, a showcase, an exploration of film craft, a debate on cultural imperialism and the claims of the local. Speakers ranged from the exactingly intellectual to the simply personal. And tensions arose. It was suggested, with more or less grace, by several film makers, that film academics - especially Irish ones - bend the actuality and autonomy of film to a purpose, which is to promote a left wing nativist, social political agenda, hostile to cosmopolitanism and to "production values".

Film director Gerry Stembridge floated the idea of a conspiracy in the film academic establishment, to write certain kinds of Irish popular film out of the record. Fionnuala Flanagan said she had certainly been written out. Her film, James Joyce's Women does not appear in the Rockett filmography "What list am I not on?" she asked a rivetted audience. In conversation, Margo Harkin, who made Hush A Bye Baby, gave an example of the ideology she sees infecting media departments. She was sent a questionnaire by media students. "Can, Neil Jordan be forgiven for, making Angel?", one of the questions went.

The conflict made the conference. "The reason it is happening," the director of Korea, Cathal Black said, is because we have never all been together before".

The centre of the event, and its justification, was a presentation of eight short films by young Irish film makers. They included Thirty Five Aside, 81 (the second part of a trilogy on the Troubles) and The Cake. The audience had no doubt whatsoever, coming out from that, that something wonderful is happening. There's an explosion of talent at this level.

But there was also the shade of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's grandfather, who wrote an article called Aras an Scail, about the new cinemas in 1916, welcoming what film would do - and the man from International Creative Management in Hollywood on his way to Dublin to set up an office: "We can sell someone anything from a short," he said cheerfully.

The woman who wrote Prizzi's Honour rubbed shoulders with Celticists and Yeats scholars. The veteran Kevin Me Clory, who wrote the early Bond movies and Around the World in 80 Days and worked with John Huston, talked film with struggling Irish filmmakers, who bewildered the hotel in Charlottesville by not having credit cards.

Even the acting side wasn't for gotten. The last event was the premiere of Geraldine Creed's feature film, The Sun and the Moon and the Stars. People came out into the warm southern night raving about Aisling Corcoran, the sensational child star of the movie.

The Virginian Foundation For The Humanities will have two more conferences, on Eastern European and on Asian film. All of them, Andrew Wyndham explain, ask the question - in a world media dominated by America: "Who gets to tell what stories, how do they get told, and how does this affect lives?"