Reeling in three decades of film

To mark the 30th anniversary of the Arts Council's support for Irish film, Ted Sheehy is archiving all the films made with support from the council and the Film Institute. It's not as straightforward as it sounds.

Gather the information, contact the film-makers, show the films. It was a worthy but simple proposition, a way of marking the 30th anniversary, next year, of the Arts Council's support for Irish filmmaking. It was a proposition based on the fact that many of the films have not been seen for a considerable time and that they have never been gathered and shown together.

When it was given a title - "30 Years On: The Arts Council and the Film-maker" - the proposition became a reality, with backing from the Arts Council and the Film Institute of Ireland (FII). In April I was asked by the FII to act as project curator and I was delighted to accept. Like many simple propositions, however, it's turning out to be considerably less simple and more challenging in practice than it seemed at first. Film titles changed from project to screen, some projects may or may not have been completed, some grant recipients seem to have disappeared without a trace, and some of the grants were never actually drawn down. But I'm getting ahead of myself; let's rewind to the early 1970s.

Having offered grants to writers, artists and composers since the early 1950s, the Arts Council was able to grant-aid film-makers only as a consequence of film, or "cinema" as the act puts it, officially being deemed an art form in the 1973 Arts Act.

Film-makers like Colm O Laoghaire had applied in vain to the council for grants in the 1950s and 1960s but I believe it was only after the intervention of people like James Dooge that official Ireland belatedly conceded the artistic potential of the medium. Since 1973, the Arts Council has awarded approximately 300 project-based grants to filmmakers. Some of these awards involved co-funding partners such as RTÉ, TG4, BBC Northern Ireland and the Irish Film Board, which co-funds the Frameworks animation scheme.

These grants cumulatively amount to about €1.8 million (£1.4 million) which, spread over three decades, is a tiny amount in the context of film production costs. Yet this fund made a significant contribution to the development and production of no less than 20 feature films and hundreds of short films and documentaries. The features include films as diverse as Poitín, Traveller, The Bishop's Story, Anne Devlin, Reefer and the Model, Ailsa, Snakes and Ladders, Hush-A-Bye-Baby, Hard Shoulder and All Souls Day. Of the Irish film-makers known to the world perhaps only two, Pat O'Connor and Jim Sheridan, seem unconnected to any film project funded by the Arts Council. Having said that, Sheridan was offered a film travel or study grant in 1981, the only award in the list cited in US dollars.

The first phase of the "30 Years On" project involves documenting each of the awards made to film-makers in order to set up a comprehensive database both of completed films and of scripts which may not yet have been produced. The intention is that this database will be searchable through the web sites of the Arts Council and the FII and create an access path to the films and film-makers for researchers and programmers. However, when we launched the project on June 24th at the IFC with a screening of the late Kieran Hickey's Exposure, we had an object lesson in how more complex and pressing the project is.

Exposure is an important 48-minute drama shot on 16mm film which won the Arts Council Script Award in 1978. It survives on two film prints and on two copies on an obsolete videotape format, all wisely put in the care of the Irish Film Archive. Both the prints and the tapes are below an acceptable standard for exhibition. At the launch we programmed a barely watchable Beta tape transfer from the (slightly) better of the two prints, unaware that the print was virtually played out when the copy was made.

To quote from the Archive's condition report on one of the prints of Exposure, "heavy vertical scratches across frame intermittently throughout reel . . . white emulsion tears/blotches generally occur over the frame intermittently throughout. The soundtrack is slightly distorted (noisy) towards the end of the reel. Poor condition: rating 4 out of 5 (1 = Best; 5 = Worst)."

That an important film from 1978 should already be in such a perilous state came as something of a shock. What is even more alarming is that attempts made by Pat Duffner and Sean Corcoran, Hickey's partners in BAC Films, to locate the negative from which new copies could be made have, so far, proved fruitless. It's possible that the comparatively recent work of many Irish filmmakers may be lost or mislaid in a similar limbo.

Invariably, Irish films are processed in the UK since there is no laboratory in Ireland. Most of the UK laboratories have merged, been sold or closed down in recent years, making it increasingly difficult to trace negatives, which are a film-maker's master source material. When laboratories run short of space they may write to a film-maker or production company, at their last known address, seeking instructions on what to do with their negative. Failing receipt of these, the negative may be dumped.

Against this possible disaster there is a chance that RTÉ may have good copies of some of these films in its archive: they have kindly offered to check a list of titles for me. Since film-making is one of the less secure occupations, most film-makers have long since moved on from the addresses at which they were based at the time they received their awards from the Arts Council. This leaves me facing one of the challenges of building up the database for the "30 Years On" project. For instance, the address the council had for me - I received an award for a short film in 1989 - was nine years out of date. This is no fault of the council's; it can't be expected to track people who aren't applying to it on a regular basis. Similarly, the laboratory used for my film had a long out of date referral address for me, albeit on its non-upgradeable, Y2Klimited system. I expect to hear soon that my negative is either safe in a vault in Cambridge, or that it's been thrown out.

Of course, not every film-maker is so absent-minded about their master materials. Many, particularly those who have made larger-scale films, will have their negatives in safe storage in the Irish Film Archive or elsewhere. But the question of good quality exhibition copies remains an issue. This is a particular concern of the "30 Years On" project, since a primary objective is to screen many of the films at a major event in the IFC next spring. If the films are to be preserved for posterity, money should be found to digitise them to tape or DVD so that high quality copies would be readily available for viewing at any time on the large or the small screen.

Notwithstanding the challenges, I hope the celebratory screening of many of the films at the IFC next year will be an opportunity, as the "30 Years On" title suggests, not just to look back at the wealth of material produced, or to look at the present-day relationship between the Arts Council and film-makers, but to look forward, to develop a vision of how that relationship might evolve.

• Recipients of Arts Council film and video project or script awards should contact Ted Sheehy at 30YearsOn@ifc.ie, or at the Irish Film Centre, Eustace Street, Dublin 2.