I make this point because I believe that Irish cinema is approaching a juncture where it will need to rethink the strategies that have served it for the last decade, and that its best hope lies in the direction of greater playfulness, eclecticism, wit and imagination. Those words do not to me connote either idle frivolity or a Hollywoodised dumbing down, nor do they imply that Irish cinema should abandon its dedication to social and topical concerns. That dedication is founded in the historic circumstances and needs of this country, and it will and should remain an important element of its cinema. I am suggesting, however, that films about "the Troubles," or about bleak family crises and disaffected young people, films that see no stylistic possibilities beyond an earnest, unblinking realism - films like these have perhaps passed the point of diminishing returns in the ways they engage both audiences and filmmakers.
What's to take their place? Lots of things, I would hope. In the growth that has occurred here in the last decade, Irish filmmakers should have gained the confidence to look beyond formulaic and pat ideas of what constitute "Irish film" and try different approaches.
That observation is offered in the belief that Irish cinema right now is nearing a crossroads that will determine whether it simply continues to develop as an industry and cultural project or will grow as an art. To cite the most positive model of the latter I can think of, consider Italian cinema in the decades after World War II: Neorealism, which treated social problems in a realistic style, and lasted only seven years, was followed by the great imaginative works of Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Bertolucci, et al., which came in such dazzling profusion from the late 1950s to the 1970s. That leap happened because the filmmakers didn't allow themselves to be shackled to the initial paradigm; they shifted their focus from "Italy" to "cinema," without at all abandoning the former.
I see no reason why Ireland can't make great children's films, great science-fiction, new kinds of historical or philosophical films. An Irish musical? Why not? Ireland has always been a crossroads for world cultures, and there's no reason why Irish cinema can't borrow ideas and forms from Hollywood, from the European art film (especially the great ones of the past), even from Asia or cinemas like that of Iran, which shares with Ireland a love of poetry and landscape. Most of all, perhaps, models or inspiration for new kinds of Irish films should come from this country's literary traditions, where the most ancient storytelling traditions intersect with most innovative forms of modernist and post-modern writing.
If all of that sounds more vague and speculative than concrete, let me point to one film that illustrates some of what I have in mind. I'm very glad that Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy exists, for various reasons. Beyond the fact that it's my favourite of all Irish films, an endless source of pleasure and amazement, it to me also comprises the gold standard for Irish cinema to date, representing some of the most important things that have been achieved so far as well as pointing toward new horizons of possibility for the future.
Please note that The Butcher Boy does not abandon Irish social reality or even the theme of family disturbance and the damaged individual psyches it causes. In fact, you could say that it has all of those things in spades. Yet it also builds on their foundation, very playfully and creatively, an edifice of other meanings, ideas, suggestions and provocative associations. It reflects everything from the residue of ancient myths to the incursion of the comic-book reality of American popular culture; it's an interior science-fiction apocalypse, a riotously sarcastic send-up of village culture, a howl of pain, a yelp of liberation, a visual tour de force, a Joycean cataract of linguistic riches. And it takes a story that couldn't be more specifically Irish and makes it universally recognisable, a feat that has always been a property of the best Irish literature.
I'd like to salute that film, and to offer it as a model to keep in mind as I say a few words about the impending changes we are facing in world cinema. When I set down some of these ideas a couple of years ago in a pair of articles titled "The Death of Film" and "The Decay of Cinema," a paper in New York called The Village Voice described them as "high-concept future shock". In fact, I don't mean to shock. I hope to stimulate some thinking and discussion about something that I think far too few people appreciate, namely that we are on the verge of technological changes that will transform cinema more profoundly than anything since the coming of sound. In the next decade or so, the familiar experience of "going to the movies" will give way to something radically different.
"The death of film" refers to the fact that in the near future, film will disappear from public spaces as it will from the creation of most movies. This is part of the digitisation of the medium. In fact, the conversion to digital has several different aspects or stages. During the past decade the sound and editing of movies have gone digital and audiences presumably have barely noticed. A bit more noticeably, digital effects have become increasingly prominent within movies such as Titanic and Gladiator.
When digital projection replaces film in theaters, cinemas, the movies - or content - will be delivered to theaters cinemas by satellite transmission or coaxial cable. Technically, this means something that's simple yet drastic: the film theatre cinema will become a television facility, with a vastly expanded array of capabilities.
For the last half-century, film and television, which are technologies with very different natures and capacities, have existed side by side. This impending change effectively means that film will cease to exist and in its place we will find the much more diverse and variegated forms of television.
In a practical sense, this means that theaters cinemas can be expected to display many things that we currently associate only with television: sports matches, concerts and performances of many sorts, live comedy, major public events, celebrity specials, even religious revivals and political rallies. There will, I think, also be new forms of entertainment - interactive game shows and reality programming, for example - that evolve to take advantage of the new technical paradigm. And all of this, needless to say, will be enormously profitable for those who control the technology and the content.
What all this will mean for movies is, first, that there will be fewer movies in our multiplexes. Movies, that is, will exist more as they currently do on TV, as one option among many. And the movies that do get made will either be very big productions using the most expensive special effects technology that the industry possesses, or they will be small, specialised movies shot with low-budget digital cameras. What will increasingly be lost will be the mid-range movie, the $50 million Martin Scorsese movie, say.
As a result of these changes, some of the social habits and understandings associated with movies and TV will largely reverse themselves, I think. People will go to theaters cinemas for a public experience, much as one goes to a football match or rock concert now; one can talk on one's cellphone throughout. Serious movies, the ones that exist, will be more likely to be experienced in the home, in specialised boutique cinemas, and in festivals like this one.
When I wrote of the "decay of cinema", I was speaking of the historical rise and fall of the idea of movies as an art form. The idea was an old one that gained critical mass in Europe, France especially, in the 1950s and became a worldwide phenomenon during the following decade. Founded on the notion of the director as auteur, this idea produced an explosion of film festivals, cine-clubs, magazines, and so on, and hit its peak in the years 1960 - 75. Its decay or decline was effected, in large part, by the growing prominence and pervasive influence of television, which few people have ever regarded as an art in the way that cinema has been.
The digital conversion, by its nature, will complete the erasure of cinema by television. There are, to be sure, disturbing aspects to all this, quite beyond the loss of the ideal of cinema as an art: electronic imagery, which is becoming more and more potent on countless fronts in our society, will dominate in movie cinemas, and both the hardware and the content will be controlled by an ever-smaller group of powerful multinational corporations.
This is where it becomes necessary to confront a very powerful technological juggernaut with the ideal of maintaining a cinematic culture like the one Ireland now possesses. Ultimately, the forces driving these changes are largely economic, and their implications are profoundly cultural. But the decisions of what to do about them are, directly and irreducibly, political.
Godfrey Cheshire is the film editor and senior film critic for the New York Press. He is also a contributing film critic to Variety. He is currently writing a book about the New Iranian Cinema. His visit to the Galway Film Fleadh was part of the Arts Council's Critical Voices programme, in partnership with The Irish Times and Lyric FM. The programme is bringing international writers, critics and artists to observe the cultural scene here and to participate in public debate over the next six months.
