Let's have more playfulness, wit and imagination and wit (Part 1)

in discussing Irish cinema, we are inevitably speaking about its future; and in the next wave of globalisation and digitisation which is looming over the medium as I speak, you can be sure that no cinema, Ireland's included, will remain unaffected by world changes. Indeed, cinemas across the globe will be less and less discrete and more and more interrelated.

I think that the best place to start is with the recognition that the growth that Irish cinema has experienced in just the last eight years - growth on so many fronts, from the sheer number of films made to their increasing technical sophistication and success in the global marketplace - is quite remarkable and should not be underestimated. Nothing comparable has happened in any other European cinema during the same period, and indeed anyone who would call Ireland the most interesting and promising cinema in Europe at the moment has very solid grounds for doing so.

On the other hand, the successes of the past decade have not brought Irish cinema the kind of distinct identity and cachet, from an artistic standpoint, that one associates with, say, the French New Wave, the New German cinema, or the post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. So it is worth wondering whether Ireland's cinema has so far failed to realise its full aesthetic potential, and if so, whether it might come closer to that potential in future.

In examining these contrasting impressions, I am not proposing to deliver any sort of comprehensive critique, but simply to offer a number of observations, first about contemporary Irish cinema, and then about impending developments in world cinema. But before I do that, I'd like to clarify something. I've been invited here as an American critic, and since I know that America in many people's' minds equates with Hollywood, I want to stress that I do not see myself as an emissary of that dreary company town.

I would rather define myself by three things that I can tell you about myself. First, I live in New York, which sees itself as a cosmopolitan outpost that in certain spiritual and intellectual senses is closer to Europe than to Los Angeles. Second, I have always been drawn to international cinema as an antithesis to Hollywood, and during the last decade I made several trips to China and Iran to get a first-hand look at their cinemas. Iran in particular has an amazing cinema that I think potentially offers some interesting lessons for Ireland.

The third fact is that I'm a native of the American South, which means that in certain moods I don't consider myself American at all. And though I do live in New York, I will always consider myself a Southerner, much as I know you would consider yourselves Irish even if you migrated to Birmingham or Bangkok.

As you may know, the South is very much a separate culture within the U.S., and Southerners tend to be very proud of that difference. We consider that the South has given America most of the real culture it has, the jazz, blues, rock 'n' roll and country, the greatest novelists and poets, and so on. The rest of the country, meanwhile, thinks that we're a bunch of dangerous, violent rustics crazed on whiskey, religion, rebellion and an wild-eyed attachment to the land and the past. Does any of that sound familiar?

Southerners love to contemplate their own Southernness and do so in boundless quantities of books and music. So why might there not be a Southern cinema? It made perfect sense to me, and I spent close to 20 years campaigning for the idea, including by starting a film festival in North Carolina in the mid-1990s. But to make a long story short, that campaign failed. There are some good filmmakers working in the South, but there's still no Southern cinema in the way that the Irish unquestionably now have an Irish cinema.

Ultimately, that difference is owed a crucial fact: We in the South lost our war for independence and the Irish won theirs. you won yours.(Congratulations, by the way.)You The Irish therefore had not only the cultural impetus to create your their own cinema, which we had, but also the national base on which to construct it; unlike rock songs and novels, cinema effectively requires that kind of base. Yet the base itself didn't guarantee you the Irish anything other than the chance to make a creative stand, and this is where I must offer a couple of observations on "the luck of the Irish.".

First, we should not forget that artistic breakthroughs of any sort are owed to individual talent. In that sense, Ireland was were very lucky to have Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan, and very lucky that My Left Foot and The Crying Game hit when they did and in the ways that they did. It only takes a couple of good breaks at the right moments to launch a whole juggernaut, and those films obviously deserve tremendous credit for what happened here in the 1990s.

The other piece of luck was that Ireland devised a viable and continuing form of government subsidy to support the development of a fairly broad-based film-making sector. I know a lot of hard work and thought went into this; I also know that the present system displeases various people for various reasons; the reason I still say it was lucky is that it might not have happened at all, or in any efficacious way. I come from a country which seems to regard government support of film-making as akin to Communism, and there are other countries that have devised subsidy systems that seem to instantly strangle the talent they're supposed to nurture. Here, you created a system, and it works. That's lucky, because in Ireland, with a population of only four million, you simply couldn't have a cinema at the present scale without government backing.

Of course, these remarks speak only of the 1990s and I am well aware that there was luck before that, that Irish film culture didn't spring into being with My Left Foot. When I was doing my homework for this assignment, one of the great pleasures I had was discovering filmmakers such as Bob Quinn and Joe Comerford. Their work is truly fascinating and original, and it reminds me that every film culture needs their type, artists who maintain a very rooted and particular vision. Do I think it's a crime their films aren't playing on the Champs Elysees or being nominated for Oscars? Not really. But I will say this: When I was dreaming of a Southern cinema, it was filmmakers like them that I was hoping to find, artists who could point the way toward a genuinely indigenous film culture.

There were, indeed, significant advances in establishing that kind of culture here in the 1970s and 1980s, so much so, perhaps, that it might be tempting to see the boom of the 1990s as a dilution and diminishment of the purer, more focused cinema that came before it. But such an assertion would be the equivalent, I think, of wishing that time would stand still, or that one could remain young forever. Change is necessary, and change would have happened here even if Irish filmmakers had not encountered a boom economy along with the force and lures of globalisation.

As I indicated with my analogy to the American South, one's primary motive in wishing for a local film scene is cultural. And from a cultural standpoint, commercialisation and the kind of films it produces can seem like menaces. But I don't think that they are in essence. Commercial and artistic modes of film-making, rather, are two sides of the same phenomenon; kept in a reasonable sort of balance, each helps maintain the strength and vigour of the other. In the industrial art form known as cinema, rigid ideas of "authenticity" and "purity" are as unhelpful as they are unrealistic. We should not forget that every virtually every great artistic cinema that the world has seen, from the German Expressionists to the French New Wave to the current Iranian cinema, developed out of and remained closely bound to a pre-existing commercial cinema.

What I'm getting at is not just that I think that the 1990s' film boom and the greater emphasis on more commercial and Hollywood-like movies it entailed were natural and, in some senses, very healthy developments. In many ways, I do think they were. But my main point is that these developments, rather than reversing the original cultural project, actually helped to further it. Prior to them, most of the movie images of Ireland you saw were manufactured by Hollywood or the British, and I'm sure that you felt about many of them the way that I felt about Deliverance (sorry, Mr. Boorman). As a result of the boom, Ireland not only became the prime creator of its own images, but was able, in films like Michael Collins, In the Name of the Father and others, to send those images abroad and have the world, for the first time, see Ireland from an Irish perspective.

To me, this was an epochal shift and an accomplishment of which many people here should feel proud. Do films such as those just mentioned not involve compromises in choosing to employ Hollywood film language, and conventions like stars, to put their stories across? No doubt they do. To be honest, I find Joe Comerford's Reefer and the Model a more interesting film than Michael Collins. But the latter type of movie represents something more than just the chance to turn Hollywood's tools on Hollywood and thereby take control of one's image in the world - which, of course, are considerable feats in themselves. It also represents the possibility of controlling Irish cinema's development in ways that might allow its next chapters to be more incisive, uncompromising and formally adventurous.

The reason to hope that this might happen is that the Irish cinema's current surge obviously is not, finally, confined to or explained by economics, government subsidy or a small corps of filmmakers and films. It is part of a general creative and intellectual ferment in the culture, a wrestling with the meaning of Irish identity and values and the direction of this society. This ferment is your cinema's greatest asset, as well as the thing that sets it apart, happily, from most other European cinemas, which are stagnant if not moribund.

A few years ago, when Britain saw a flood of new independent productions resulting from its lottery subsidies, a distributor friend of mine went to view a batch of them and came back declaring most "unwatchable."

In my experience, the general level of interest and quality in Irish films is notably higher than those of their British counterparts. Irish cinema also has so far escaped the extreme over-application of the auteur idea, which devastated the cinemas of France and Italy in part by undermining the function and value of the screenwriter. A friend of mine in New York, Jim Stark, who produced Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law, Mystery Train and other films, recently said to me: "The crisis in European cinema right now is a crisis of scripts." I think that's correct, and that the paucity of good scripts indicates something larger: a failure of imagination.

If Irish cinema is to avoid its own downturn, it seems to me that writing and imagination will be the keys. And this brings me to an observation that may be considered heretical in some quarters. If so, fine, but hear me out. I would say that politics, topicality and prosaic realism have generally been overvalued in Irish cinema, and that they threaten to keep that cinema from making its next creative leap. To put that another way, works of genre or imagination (ghost stories, romances, action films, say) here tend to be viewed as inherently commercial, i.e., frivolous, while realistic depictions of social strife or family dysfunction are seen as inherently serious, worthy, artistic. That "inherently," I believe, points straight into a cul de sac, for several reasons: It obliges artists to obey arbitrary limits; it sets up barriers against various kinds of experimentation; and it increasingly separates artists from many sorts of filmgoers.