Before the sale of her family home, Tanya Doyle decided to document the life lived there - warts and all
MEET THE DOYLES: mother, father, sisters Sarah, Tracey, Patrice, and brother Peter. Oh, and Tanya. She is the one who has made a film about her family, The House.
The documentary consists mostly of interviews with family members shot straight to camera in the days before the family home in Clondalkin, Co Dublin, was sold. The Doyles have plenty to say for themselves and are almost frighteningly articulate. They also show they can say an awful lot with just one look.
Tanya asks her younger sister about their parents: "Do you think they loved each other?" The sister's wary expression speaks volumes.
The film is also full of sharp Dublin one-liners, delivered at breakneck speed. "Your Da's your Da and your Ma's your Ma," is Patrice's succinct take on the condition of childhood. "You don't have parents. You have a Ma and a Da."
The Doyles, effectively, had neither. Their father left when they were very young, and their mother died from cancer eight years ago. Tanya saw it as her job to keep them all together, and the house at 20 Harelawn Grove going. When all but Tanya and her brother Peter moved out, it was decided to sell up last year.
Tanya decided to keep a record, not just of bricks and mortar, but of the life lived in the house - warts and all. So she started taking photographs and then decided to interview everybody.
She was also, though she didn't realise it at the time, coming to terms with grief and loss. "I had no idea of what I was letting myself in for," she says. "I thought I was doing one thing and in actual fact it was something else.
"Stephen O'Connell was the guy who edited the film with me. We got these little cards - you know, like for exams - and we wrote down all of the major points that we wanted to include. Then we put them all out on the floor and organised them. He came in one day and saw me sitting in the middle of all the cards. He said: 'You weren't trying to sort out this film at all - you were trying to sort out your life.' He used to always jibe me about that, and I think he was right." Doyle clearly has a feel for the documentary medium. Her first short film, Moore Street, won her a Prince Philip Medal of Excellence in 2004. She has an MA in film and television and gained experience behind the camera by working on a variety of productions, from Once to Learning Gravityand Bachelors Walk. How, though, did she persuade her family to open themselves to the camera?
"The agreement was that throughout the edits I'd show them everything. And if anybody wanted anything changed or taken out, fine. It would be changed without question. Mind you, you couldn't have anything ridiculous taken out. Sarah's paranoid. There's a shot of her cleaning a toilet at the end, and she wanted that out - and I was like, 'No. There's no basis for that.' People got very emotional talking about me Ma and they were like, 'Well, look, that's private. I don't want to share that with anybody.' And I couldn't betray that trust."
AT THE HEART of the film is a scene in which Tanya confronts her father, asking him how he could leave them. It's a resolutely unsentimental, almost matter-of-fact conversation - until you see the look on his face. Anyone who has ever tried taking candid family photographs will appreciate the skill necessary to capture these subtle, fleeting expressions; did Doyle have any filmic models or inspirations in mind?
"Loads," she says. "But the film that made me want to get into documentary film-making was Chronicle of a Summer. I saw that in college and it just blew me away." Shot in the summer of 1960 by the film-maker Jean Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin, this documentary is regarded as a seminal piece of cinema veritéand a landmark in film history. It consists of a series of street interviews with Parisian passersby, each of which begins with the apparently artless question: "Are you happy, sir?"
For Doyle, the process of making The Housewas an emotional roller-coaster. "Every morning I'd wake up and I'd think about me Ma and the things she did for us. She was an amazing woman. I mean, there are people in our area that called their kids after her. In some ways I felt I had to live up to this, or to keep her alive. But sure I couldn't, because she was dead."
Making the film also changed her relationship with her father, and with her siblings. "I had never ever talked to my father like that before. Never. But even putting those questions - all of our relationships are changed, definitely. And I'd say for the better. I used to think I knew what they were all thinking, instead of asking their opinion about things.
"After making the film I thought, 'Gosh - they're people in their own right. Every thought and emotion and idea that I have in my head, they have that as well'."
Tanya Doyle's next project is still in the early stages and is a film about older women learning to swim: why they do it, and what motivates them.
"A film about learning to swim. And my last film was about people moving house. So there you have it," says Doyle, a chronicler of the ordinary.
...
The Housewill be shown on RTÉ 1 on Tuesday May 12th at 10.15pm
