IN John B. Keane's novel Duran go, there is a scene in which a group of farmers in Kerry is anticipating the outbreak of the second World War. One of them remarks that he has heard on the radio that the Pope has made an appeal for peace.
"Well, God blast him the oul' meddler," explodes another, "why don't he keep his oul' bald head out of it and let them at it so's we might get decent prices for our cattle?"
Seeing the small private gain in big public conflicts is one way in which Irish culture has dealt with foreign wars. But Irish artists have also found ways of reversing that process, of seeing the great forces of war and chaos through their small reflections in Ireland itself.
The sound of distant war drums echoes through much Irish writing, from George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer to the plays of Samuel Beckett. It rumbles, too, through Cathal Black's current feature film, Korea, based, like his first short film, Wheels, on a John McGahern short story. Black takes the aesthetic opportunity implicit in the contrast between a peaceful state and a world at war: that of making apparent, in small details, forces too large to be directly visible. He makes us feel the pressure of tar off events on a place that has no real connection to them and thus paradoxically, to become conscious of their awesome power.
The McGahern story that is adapted and expanded by Joe O'Byrne for the film is not just a small masterpiece in itself but also an emblem of what art as a whole can do. It is extraordinarily compressed, taking up less than five pages of the Collected Stories. It is about something that doesn't happen: a young man who decides not to take up his father's offer of a passage to America. It consists of a few fragments of conversation between father and son as they fish for eels on a lake in Ireland. Yet huge historic events, involving three continents Europe, America and Asia - weigh on every syllable.
Running through it are the father's memories of witnessing an execution during the War of Independence and the unspoken idea that his willingness to send his son to America is motivated by the prospect that the boy might be conscripted for the Korean War, with good money sent home and the chance of a big pay off if his is killed. The sense of scale is this a story about a tiny non event or about epic conflicts? - shifts all the time, turning on a word or a phrase.
The remarkable thing about Cathal Black's film is that, even while it opens out the story. adding characters, incidents. a plot, it manages to retain this feeling of being at once intimate and epic. O'Byrne's script invents a love interest and a set of motivations - the son is in love with the daughter of his father's enemy from Civil War days. It also paints in a social context - the electrification of rural Ireland, the conversion of the lake into a tourist attraction. But Black's camera is drawn to details, to small moments of exchange in which the force of what is unsaid passes across a face. And he has actors
Andrew Scott as the boy, Fiona Moloney as his girlfriend, Vass Anderson as her father and, above all, the marvellous Donal Donnelly as the boy's father, who are able to convey a sense of all that lies beneath the surface.
BLACK has had the courage to make a small film, to allow the larger forces to make their presence felt by implication. He might indeed have gone further in this direction. When the film runs into problems it is because it loses its nerve in this regard and tries to be literal, to fill in gaps that might be better left unfilled. We get, in the boy's nightmares, flashes of the war in Korea. We also get flashbacks to the father's memories of the execution. Both tend to reduce the impact of the events they depict, which are much more powerfully felt when they are merely suggested.
A superb image of a coffin draped in the Stars and Stripes being rowed across the lake for the funeral of a local young man killed in Korea is vastly more eloquent than images of his death. Equally, the still photographs in the boy's house of his father during the War of Independence are more resonant than what is enacted before our eyes.
These images, indeed, are part of the great visual density which Black achieves throughout the film, a richness of texture that matches the depth of emotion beneath the surface of the characters' laconic speech. And it is this density that makes the film important, not just in itself but as an example of how Irish cinema can operate with a sense of scale even when dealing with intimate material and low budgets. Where Hollywood and 530 million could have made Korea into an action movie, giving us battles and executions in all their gory detail, Black does much more with fewer resources by engaging the imagination.
In the process he gives the lie to the notion that a close look at Irish experience has to be provincial and shows that with skill and clarity of purpose, less really can be more.
