IRISH FILM AND TELEVISION - 2006

The Year in Review

Tony Tracy (ed.)

 

Introduction

Tony Tracy                 Top

Industrial In/Activity

Roddy Flynn

TG 4

Eithne O'Connell

The Wind that Shakes the Barley

Ruth Barton

Isolation

Barry Monahan

Capital Letters

Debbie Ging

Once  

Tony Tracy

Middletown   

Jane Ruffino

Six Shooter

Seán Crosson

Brendan Gleeson

Harvey O'Brien

The Clinic

Diog O Connell

The Tiger's Tail and The Pope's Children

Pat Brereton

 

 

Introduction

Tony Tracy, February 2007

This year's review of the year in Irish film and television is slender by comparison to 2005, reflecting the dearth of new productions, ongoing difficulties in distribution and the still unpredictable nature of the sector despite more than a decade of sustained infrastructural support. Six Irish films received a domestic release during the year: The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Middletown, The Tiger's Tail, Isolation, the hardly released Short Order and the widely released but barely seen The Front Line. Breakfast on Pluto was also a release in 2006 but we reviewed it in these pages last year, while Small Engine Repair and Once (which recently won the Audience Award for World Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival) both received festival screenings in 2006 but have not, as yet, found theatrical releases.

 

Under the stewardship of its new CEO, Simon Perry, the Irish Film Board (IFB) is again showing signs of  life after a period of stagnation and rumours of dissatisfaction from within the organisation and the film industry. By year's end the IFB had shiny new offices –still in Galway– a new logo and 'brand identity'; gone is the green Celtic 'swir'l in place of a vaguely abstract graphic which might belong to anyone involved with moving-image production. A PR campaign to coincide with the re-branding papered over the recent slim output with a colourful annual review –which dwelt heavily on upcoming productions– and the distribution of Vol 3 of the popular DVD compilation of IFB funded short films.

 

The semiotics of the logo is an interesting indicator of where we stand with regards to ideas about a national film culture. Writing recently in the Irish Times under a column entitled 'Culture Shock' Fintan O'Toole initiated a backlash against Ireland's Celtic heritage. "The secret of Celtic Ireland is that it is all bogus [. . .] The survival, and indeed thriving, of bogus Celticism owes something to the relative timidity of the archaeological establishment and a lot more to the sheer utility of the term. Baggy, mystical, touched with the glamour of oppression, a useful way of alluding to white ethnicity without sounding overtly racist, it sprinkles a dust of profundity on much that is mediocre and meaningless"[i].The old IFB logo was introduced at a time when Ireland was in the early flush of the Celtic Tiger era which –as O'Toole suggests– drew upon a rag-bag of the mythic and the modern in reconciling Ireland's 'deep past' and high-velocity present; the most intoxicating articulation of this newly configured 'imagined community' being Riverdance. And yet the 'bagginess' of the ideas were useful to a culture attempting to move into a global marketplace while internally moving away from the confining limitations of nationalism in the years leading up to the 'Good Friday Agreement'. In re-establishing the IFB (and TG4) the then Minister for Culture Michael D Higgins held such a tension in balance in a frequently iterated commitment to the local and a state sponsored repudiation of 'cultural colonisation'. "The right to communicate has a community component – the right of the community to hear its own story, to serve minorities and more importantly to recover a myriad of stories and imagine a whole series of things." But Higgins' ambitions for the second film board and the oft repeated sentiments of its first Chief Executive Rod Stoneman –who called for a 'radical pluralism' of Irish audiovisual content– increasingly seem as distant and ambitious as the words of Yeats and Lady Gregory in the heyday of the Celtic Twilight. While there appeared in those first ten years of the film board a wide variety of aesthetic styles, ambitions and indeed competencies, there nonetheless emerged a strong sense of a national cinema in the making. This has been on the wane in more recent years. Take, for instance, what the film board is funding this year (2007): Becoming Jane (Inspired by the true events of the little known romance of the young Jane Austen when she falls in love with the attractive young Irishman Tom Lefroy);  Dot.Com  (what appears to be a Portuguese comedy); Foxes ("Alzbeta, a young Slovakian girl, arrives in Ireland to make a new life. She is envious of her older sister who is happily settled in Ireland with a nice house and partner"); Shrooms ("A group of American teens go to rural Ireland in search of notoriously potent magic mushrooms"), Puffball ("Powerful forces are unleashed when a young architect becomes pregnant after moving to an isolated and mysterious valley to build a house and neighbouring farmers move against the unborn child"); True North ("In order to save the trawler of which he is first mate, Sean reluctantly decides to smuggle Chinese immigrants into Scotland for extra money")[ii]. All of these productions are essentially foreign with Irish co-producers, featuring largely foreign casts. To be sure there are also a small number of what might be called 'indigenous' productions –like Anthony Byrne's How About You (which features a largely British cast in a kind of generic Home Counties setting) and Kings (the most promising of the lot dealing with a group of middle-aged male Irish emigrants in London) but we can see here a shift away from developing local stories and a move towards hosting international co-productions and international audiences – in the case of Paddy Breathnach's Shrooms, a film aimed squarely at an American youth audience.

 

Andrew Higson and others have recently begun to question the very parameters of what constitutes a national cinema. "When describing a national cinema there is a tendency to focus only on those films that narrate the nation as just this finite, limited space inhabited by a tightly coherent and unified community, closed off from other identities beside national identity"[iii]. Higson writes from the multi-cultural context of Britain in the aftermath of Empire but his objections to the famous Benedict Anderson formulation of 'an imagined community' have repercussions for Irish cinema. To be sure, a priority  for  the  IFB  must  be to bring back the film industry from its recent state of crisis and consolidate the efforts and advances of the past decade and a half, but there is also a growing sense that the Irish cinematic imagination is unsure of where to look for inspiration and engagement; witness the recent spate of low-budget horror films. (Though Barry Monahan finds room for a contextual reading of this most sealed of genres below in his reading of Isolation) Perhaps this is because Ireland is less sure of being a 'tightly coherent and unified community' than at any time since its independence. Indeed it is remarkable that the most successful –commercially and critically– Irish film of the past year, The Wind that Shakes the Barley (discussed in this issue by Ruth Barton) was written, produced and directed by non-Irish personnel. Over the past decade a traumatic breach in the national imagination has opened up. How else can we understand the daily, numbing stories of random violence –shootings, suicides, car crashes, street fights, robberies, stabbings, and sexual assaults– except as the collapse of solidarity central to the national project? Along with the destruction of any correlation between value and worth in many people's minds (largely down to the property market) has come a similar cutting of the cord between individual action and larger social consequence. There are vast sections of Irish society cut adrift from their moorings of identity, reduced to the status of consumers –rather than citizens– in a culture presided over by an ideology no more sophisticated than an 'open economy' at all costs. Is this sense of alienation the 'deep structure' beneath a slate of films which include elements of Irishness only so as to fulfil international co-production requirements? Where are the stories that address who we are as a community? In an early phase of the nation state French philosopher Ernest Renan was able to declare, "A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle". A principle comprised of two elements: "One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form"[iv]. But what if the 'value of the heritage' is no longer present in 'an undivided form'. Whence then for a national cinema?

 

In this year's review we have a number of reviews which attempt to come to terms with both sides of this discussion –the 'spiritual' and the industrial– and despite the paucity of output we find subject for discussion. Pat Brereton reviews two attempts to explore contemporary Ireland –John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail and the documentary series The Pope's Children– and finds both wanting. Roddy Flynn's essay undertakes an illuminating analysis of the roller-coaster fortunes of the Irish audio-visual industry and offers an insight into the vagaries of a creative business so sensitive to national and international pressures which have little if anything to do with the young and not-so young graduates, writers, directors, actors and technicians hoping to make a career in film-making. As well as a number of individual film reviews  –including one of Ireland's Oscar-winning short film entry Six Shooter– and the TV series, The Clinic, this edition contains an overview of the Irish language channel TG4 after 10 years on air, and an appreciation of Ireland's most employed character actor Brendan Gleeson. Our review of John Carney's modest, low budget 'musical' Once, suggests one way out of the impasse discussed above. Tender and engaging, this unusually framed tale of unfulfilled attraction between a young Irishman and a Czech girl manages to be both topical and timeless. Debbie Ging finds a similarly topical, if far less romantic, tale of immigrant women in Ireland in Capital Letters[v].

 

As 2007 begins, the New Year augurs better for the film and television industry than 2006 with the number of productions in both sectors significantly increased. There is a sense of optimism returning among those who work in the industry. How such an increase in production will contribute to debates on a national cinema remains to be seen.

 

 Tony Tracy is Lecturer in Film Studies and Associate Director of the Huston School of Film and Digital Media, NUI Galway.


 

[i] Fintan O' Toole. 2007. "Our ancestors weren't Celts, they were copycats", The Irish Times, February 3.

[ii] Information and descriptions taken from Irish Film Board website.

[iii]  Andrew Higson, 'The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema' in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds) Cinema and Nation, London: Routledge (2000)

[iv] Ernest Renan. 1996. 'What is a Nation' [Lecture at Sorbonne, 11 March 1882] in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (ed) Becoming National: A Reader. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 41-55.

[v] Capital Letters was made in 2004, but had a very limited release. 

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Industrial In/Action: The Irish Audiovisual Sector in 2006

Roddy Flynn

It has been another up and down year for the Irish audiovisual sector. In December 2006, the publication of the IBE Confederation Annual Review of the sector confirmed what was obvious to anyone working in the industry: film production activity has declined significantly since 2003. The total value of audiovisual output had fallen from €320.1m in that year to €169.9m in 2004 and €152.4m in 2005.

The collapse in expenditure on feature film production is particularly significant dropping from €244.3m in 2003 to just €33.5m in 2005. The collapse is almost entirely due to the disappearance of international production in Ireland: although low-budget indigenous production has continued more or less apace, non-Irish expenditure on features fell from €191.1m in 2003 to €14.2 in 2005, with a concomitant knock-on effect on the levels of Section 481 funding (availability of which is closely tied to international activity here). This has had a very real impact: 2004 saw employment dip below 1,000 fulltime job equivalents for the first time in a decade, in an industry which in 1999 had been identified by the Film Industry Strategic Review Group as having the potential to quadruple in size by 2010.

When the Irish state introduced a number of measures designed to kick-start the audiovisual production sector in the early 1990s, it was generally assumed that the commercial basis for the industry would be based on producing content for newly liberalised broadcasting markets in Europe. Senior figures in the Irish film industry frequently asserted that the future of the industry lay with Irish film-makers:

 Whether it's Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise or whoever, they may never be back to the country. That's no disrespect to those individuals, but the nature of the business is that they may not have a project that lends itself to Ireland again, or not for a long time. Whereas, if you develop indigenous film makers, they will make films here this year and hopefully next year, and the year after.[1]

(Kevin Moriarty, Chief Executive of Ardmore Studios in 1993).

 In practice, however, the main focus of audiovisual policy has not been on new markets but on winning contracts to 'service' (i.e. shoot) international productions developed overseas. The collapse in such activity has demonstrated both the extent to which the Irish film industry has come to constitute an element of the new international division of cultural labour and its vulnerability within that division. In the first volume of his Information Age Trilogy, The Network Society, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells argues for the emergence since the late 1970s of a new 'informational' economy:

 It is informational because the productivity and competitiveness of units or agents in this economy…depend on their capacity to generate, process and apply efficiently knowledge based in information. It is global because the core activities of production, consumption and circulation…are organised on a global scale, either directly or through a network of linkages between economic agents[2].

 Film production can perhaps be considered doubly 'informationalised'. At one level its basic output is constituted by information. However, the project-based nature of production facilitates constant monitoring of the opportunities for reducing costs or accessing 'soft' finances across the globe by Hollywood production companies. In the 1990s the Irish film industry reaped the benefits of these cost pressures. Ireland offered Hollywood real cost-savings not just through the availability of Section 481 finance but also less visible subsidies such as cheap access to the defence forces and national monuments. However, reliance on exogenous production left the Irish film industry vulnerable to shifts in international terms of trade beyond the control of the Irish state. The role played by an internationally resurgent Euro in this regard has already been discussed elsewhere by this author[3]. However other factors have also been significant. When the Irish government signed up to the European Convention on Co-Production in April 2000, the fact that both of the main UK film tax incentives –Section 42 and Section 48– were available to co-productions with relatively low levels of UK spend allowed producers to structure projects which simultaneously availed of tax incentives in the UK and Ireland. This was a "key factor in attracting major Hollywood films to Ireland"[4].

However, in early 2004, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown announced that both Section 42 and Section 48 would be replaced by a new structure. Since Spring 2006 projects availing of British tax incentives must spend at least 25% of their budget within the UK. Furthermore British cast and crew working in Ireland no longer count towards British spend as had previously been the case. This has greatly reduced the incentive for productions on the scale of Reign of Fire and Tristan and Isolde (both of which shot in Ireland in 2003) to shoot outside the UK. The Irish state has conceded its relative impotence in the face of such exogenous pressures. In July 2004, John O'Donoghue admitted that:

 There is very little one can do about exchange rates and the value of the euro against the US dollar. I have no control over the fluctuations on the money markets…we can only control those things which are under our remit and maintain the highest standards in those areas in which we have power[5].

 That the outlook for the Irish audiovisual sector as a whole is not even worse is largely due to a perhaps unexpected expansion in production for television. Having long come in for criticism from the independent production sector for failing to commission, RTE has, over the past five years hugely increased the resources devoted to doing just that. In part this was forced upon the station by the introduction of mandated minimums for independent commissions by the Broadcasting (Amendment) Act of 1993 which also led to the establishment of the Independent Production Unit within RTE. However, whilst the station was initially slow to embrace the concept of external commissions, in recent years expenditure on independent commissions has leapt from €51m (in 2004) to €70m in 2006, far in excess of RTE's mandated minimum spend (€29.4m in 2006).

This impact of this has been felt across programme genres but is perhaps most obvious in the field of drama. From a low point in the mid-90s where RTE Drama was essentially limited to a single soap opera, there is now a constant flow of new broadcast fiction. As this article goes to press, soap stalwart Fair City, is flanked in the schedules by Trouble in Paradise, Dan and Becs and Rough Diamond. Two other high production value series –The Clinic and Showbands– have also become established elements of the Autumn schedule.

These shows have made a significant financial contribution to the audiovisual sector. Perhaps more importantly from a cultural perspective, they are routinely engaging with audience numbers that many Irish feature films could only dream of. A single episode of Trouble in Paradise going out at 21.25 on a Monday night garners upwards of 250,000 viewers[6]. Compare this with the frankly disappointing theatrical releases of indigenous films like Short Order, Isolation, The Front Line, Middletown, and A Tiger's Tail in 2006. Furthermore a further phalanx of Irish films made in 2005 and 2006 have yet to receive any theatrical release at all: whither Johnny Was, 48 Angels, Pride and Joy and Speed Dating?

Despite this, Irish audiovisual policy continues to concentrate its efforts on winning back overseas projects, fine-tuning what incentives remain within its gift with varying degrees of success. In December 2003 Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy increased the ceiling on monies which could be raised via the Section 481 tax break to €15m. When this failed to have the desired effect, 2006 saw further changes allowing producers to avail of 80% of production costs via Section 481 up to a maximum of €35million. There has also been a new emphasis on the Irish Film Board's promotion of Ireland as a location for Hollywood productions: in October 2006, the Board appointed Jonathan Loughran to run the board's first US office (the Irish Film Commission US). Thus far, however, these moves have not succeeded in wooing any new large-scale international feature film productions

One initiative –also Film Board-related– has been more successful. In 2005 and 2006, Minister John O'Donoghue secured for the Board an additional €1.5m and €2.3m, to fund a new category of international production loans 'targeted at high-quality international production that can demonstrate a strong connection to Ireland.'[7] Those connections have nothing to do with content: projects thus far availing of the scheme include The Tudors (a Showtime (US) production about the British royal family in the 16th century), Northanger Abbey (a Granada television adaptation of Jane Austen's novel) and Kitchen (which is set in a Glasgow restaurant and produced for the UK's Channel 5). Instead announcements of Film Board involvement in these projects heavily stress the involvement of senior Irish crew and their economic impact.

There's nothing technically untoward about this re-orientation of the Board's spending. The 1980 legislation establishing the Film Board gave it carte blanche to do anything it saw fit in the interests of creating a film industry in Ireland. Actual practice throughout the 1980s and 1990s, however, assumed the Board would concentrate on indigenous material. Thus when he referred to the need for the Board to "balance its support for incoming productions with its role in promoting the indigenous Irish film sector"[8] in a May 2006 speech John O'Donoghue was announcing a de facto shift in practice.

There is no question but that the Film Board's international loans have succeeded in bringing in new activity. Provisional estimates for audiovisual spending in 2006 suggest that total overall output will rise to €238m, a 50% increase on 2005's figures. Nearly two-thirds of this (€155m) has been spent on independent television production. Section 481 has also been an element in the fact that the majority of overseas projects attracted to Ireland since 2004 have been television projects: the new tax incentives introduced in the UK in 2004 are not currently accessible for television production. Thus Ireland has, unwittingly, gained first mover advantage in that particular and currently lucrative niche market.

However, the television example again highlights the precarious nature of the current structure of the Irish audiovisual sector. Although in December 2006, the Film Board announced that new series of Murphy's Law and The Tudors would shoot in Ireland in 2007, the presence of such productions is reliant on Ireland's constant vigilance in the face of competing incentives elsewhere. In January 2007, an entirely new set of tax incentives came into effect in the UK and the government there was under pressure to further extend even those breaks for use with television production.  The question ultimately posed then is that of how far future Irish governments will be prepared to go to compete in what has become an international incentives race.

 Dr Roddy Flynn is Chair of the MA in Film and Television Studies in the School of Communications, DCU. He is co-author of the forthcoming Encyclopaedia of Irish Cinema (Scarecrow Press)

[1] Luke Clancy. 1994. "Tax breaks encourage renaissance in the Irish film making industry" Irish Times, May 28.

[2] Manuel Castells. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 66.

[3] See Roddy Flynn. 2006. "Irish Film 2005: An Industry in Crisis?" Estudios Irlandeses, Issue 1, pp. 158-162. http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/Issue1/FilmReviews.pdf

[4] James Flynn as Chair of AV Federation Film Financing Committee in IBEC's Film and  Television Production in Ireland Review 2005 – p. 6

[5] Marie O'Halloran. 2004. "Major film studios 'shun' Ireland" IT, IT, July 2, p. 6.

[6] Source: AGB Nielsen Media Research (2007) Top

[8] Speech by John O'Donoghue T.D. Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism Cannes Film Festival On Sunday 21st May 2006 at 6.30pm.

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TG4: 10 Years On

Eithne O'Connell

 

Birth of a Station

On 31 October 2006, TG4, the Irish-language television channel, which had started life as Teilifís na Gaeilge (TnaG), celebrated 10 years on the air. For many years prior to its foundation in 1996, various groups associated with Irish-language issues had lobbied hard for their own station, while other enthusiasts claimed that increased provision of Irish-language programmes within RTÉ's mainstream scheduling would be more appropriate. At that time, there was considerable debate as to the primary audience that a separate, dedicated station might endeavour to serve. This debate was reflected in the two names initially proposed for the channel: Teilifís na Gaeilge or Teilifís na Gaeltachta, i.e. Irish-language Television or Gaeltacht Television. Supporters of the general concept identified the need for some such service as urgent in the extreme in order to counteract the overwhelming and devastating effect of English-language broadcasting on the Irish-language competence of children, in particular, whether in the Gaeltacht, or being reared through Irish outside the Gaeltacht.

Although the idea of an Irish language station had been something of a political 'hot potato' through the 1980s and early 1990s, it eventually received all-party support in 1992 and in 1993, the then Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Labour T.D, Michael D. Higgins of the Fianna Fáil/ Labour Coalition decided to push ahead with the idea. £4.5 million, derived from a 'cap' on RTÉ's advertising, was set aside in the 1993 budget to cover the start-up costs for TnaG. The total cost in establishing the transmission and links networks and the construction of the station's headquarters in the Connemara Gaeltacht was £16.1 million. Annual running costs increased from £10.2 million in 1996 to £16 million in 2001 and Euro 30 million in 2006. These costs are met by the Exchequer, with some additional income arising from advertising revenue (much of it rather inappropriately in English), sponsorship and increasingly, programmes sales. Very significant assistance in non-monetary terms comes from RTÉ which is annually required to provide over 360 hours of programming at no cost to TG4.

Programming and Penetration

In addition to the average of five hours of Irish-language material broadcast daily in the early years, the channel also carried other public service programming such as Question Time from Dáil Éireann and the European Broadcasting Union's EuroNews, steadily increasing audience share by acquiring exclusive rights for a number of top sports fixtures and by re-broadcasting highly popular GAA footage from the sports archives. Within less than six months of the launch of Teilifís na Gaeilge, almost 65% of the Republic's television sets were able to receive the channel and the nightly audience reach had risen to 250,000 viewers. Three months later, in May 1997, independent research revealed that the station was able to attract audiences of 500,000, i.e. 68% of sets in the Republic, for at least one hour's viewing per week. By May 2001, 730,000 viewers were tuning in each day to TG4 and in 2007, the figure is 800,000. That represents a share of 3.5% of the national television market. Of course, not all of these viewers necessarily tune in specifically to watch Irish-language material. The real breakthrough came for the television station after it was re-branded as TG4 in 1999. The change in name and the restructuring of the schedule was part of a plan to establish it in Ireland alongside mainstream niche broadcasters BBC2 and Channel 4 (Ó Dubhghaill 2005). The precise choice of name incorporating the number 4 also helped to make the channel more prominent in television programme listings, where it started to appear in fourth position after RTE 1, Network/RTE2 and TV3.

'Súil Eile'

The original stated aim of TG4, to provide the Irish people with a worthwhile alternative to what was already available in their multi-channel environment, was captured very well from the beginning in the station's clever slogan Súil eile, which means literally another eye or perspective, i.e. another way of looking or seeing. Its very limited budget, especially in the early years, has placed obvious restrictions on the extent to which TG4 has been able to live up to its own vision. Nevertheless, it has from the outset offered quite an imaginative programming mix, which includes drama, music, sport, travel, soaps in Irish (and Gàidhlig or Scots Gaelic in the initial period) as well as films in other European languages, documentaries and current affairs. Perhaps most significantly, it has consistently identified children as a priority and has offered a wide range of programmes for this audience: dramas, quiz and game shows as well as some animation. In the early years much of this was bought in from other European countries and dubbed into Irish. Later the material to be dubbed became more mainstream, e.g. Sponge Bob Square Pants, The Muppets and even Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Subtitling

While one might expect the station's primary audience to be native speakers of Irish and others fluent in the language, the station's approach has been much more inclusive than that from the outset. TnaG/TG4's early policy of providing English-language Teletext subtitles on all pre-recorded material was evidence of the station's wish to reach out to as wide an audience as possible. The initial use of Teletext technology meant that viewers who needed subtitles could select them as an option. This strategy won praise from many sectors, including the deaf community, and has certainly been a smart move from a commercial perspective, increasing audience reach significantly. Later, the subtitling policy became more heavy-handed, resulting in open English subtitles, i.e. ones which cannot be turned off, being provided on most pre-recorded programmes. There is considerable justification for criticism of English subtitles on Irish-language programmes as research has shown that it is impossible to ignore subtitles whether or not they are needed (O'Connell 2000). Irish speakers end up involuntarily reading English text while ostensibly watching/listening to Irish-language programmes. Moreover, it has been shown that the written word, i.e. a subtitle, requires considerably more cognitive processing and therefore has a much greater impact than the aural word. The result is that almost surreptitiously, supposedly Irish-language broadcasting provision has become largely bilingual.

Back in 1996, it was also the station's long-term policy to provide subtitles in Irish on all pre-recorded programmes where financially possible. Such an approach would be of great assistance to native speakers of Irish, who may not be familiar with a particular dialect or some specialised or new terminology. It would also be of assistance to non-native speakers, adult learners, schoolchildren and those with impaired hearing. In the first year, Irish subtitles were provided for a bilingual Irish/Gàidhlig documentary series and for the Gàidhlig soap opera Machair. But at present very few programmes have Irish subtitles although the flagship soap opera, Ros na Rún, has had them for several years.

Staffing and Structure

The station operates as a publisher/broadcaster with a small core staff who work in areas involving programme-commissioning, acquisition functions, technical and presentation skills and administration. Most of the programmes broadcast are produced by the private sector and by RTÉ although the station has its own dedicated news service Aonad Nuachta Theilifís na Gaeilge, which operates from a state-of-the-art newsroom and studio at TG4's headquarters in Connemara, with the assistance of a Dublin office and a number of regional correspondents.

As constituted from 1996 to the present, TG4 is administered by RTÉ but operates fairly autonomously thanks to the establishment of two bodies to oversee its development: Comhairle Theilifís na Gaeilge and Seírbhisí Theilifís na Gaeilge Teo. In April 2007, after many delays and much debate, TG4 is at last due to become independent. Ironically, the first head of TnaG/TG4, Cathal Goan, who is now Director General at RTÉ, is opposed to the move, saying it was not in the best interest of either TG4 or RTÉ. He and other more independent commentators have raised a number of controversial questions about such matters as future funding arrangements and the use of the RTÉ archive but although TG4 has consistently argued for independence, they have not succeeded in making a strong case publicly for the advantages it might bring.

Impact

It is still rather early to attempt to evaluate the significance of TG4 after just a decade during which it has been underfunded and 'in limbo' in relation to independence from RTÉ. However, reviews in the Irish and English language media on the occasion of its 10th anniversary indicate that the general public and even its main critics back in 1996 feel the station has made a good start and has carved a name for itself with some innovative broadcasting. Nonetheless, there has been genuine concern and well-founded criticism from the very beginning relating to the station's poor funding and its consequent inability to offer a) full, continuous daily schedule through Irish and b) the same working conditions and remuneration to its employees as enjoyed by colleagues in RTÉ. Indeed, in November 2006, there was a threat of strike action on pay and conditions by employees (Reported in FOINSE 25 November 2006). There has also been criticism of the fact that the station does not appear to have a clear language policy and there is criticism of the standard of Irish spoken, not only by guests and interviewees, but also by some of the core or anchor personnel and actors in some broadcasts. TG4 has responded that the varieties of Irish to be heard on the station accurately reflect the realities of current Irish language usage, warts and all, rather than some linguistic utopia. The actual and potential impact of TG4 on the Irish language in its first ten years was one focus of a recent conference organised in November 2006 by DCU and NUIG. It is hoped that the proceedings, which are to be published in 2007, will act as a base line for further research in this area (O'Connell et alia 2007).

TG4 has certainly had a positive impact on employment numbers in the audiovisual sector. It now spends more than Euro 20 million per annum on independent Irish productions, supporting approximately new 350 jobs in small, private sector companies throughout Ireland. Moreover, as a result of the availability and use of the latest technology, many employment opportunities created directly or indirectly by TG4 have benefited those in 'remoter' parts of the country, particularly the Gaeltacht areas, though Connemara seems to have fared better than the Kerry or Donegal Gaeltacht areas. There are several factors involved in the current prominent position of Connemara in the audiovisual sector. One is surely the fact that during the 1980s, Údarás na Gaeltachta identified the strategic development of the audiovisual industry in the area as a goal (Walsh 2006). Another is the fact that Connemara is the Gaeltacht with the largest critical mass of speakers. Its leading position is unlikely to be challenged in the foreseeable future, not least because both the largest Irish-language post-production company, Telegael, as well as the head quarters of TG4 are located there. What the future implications of this will be for the relative prestige and usage of the Ulster, Munster and Connacht dialects, remains to be seen.

 Works Cited

Mac Dubhghaill, U. 2005. "Harry Potter and the Wizards of Baile na hAbhann: Translation, subtitling and dubbing policies in Ireland's TG4, from the start of broadcasting in 1996 to the present day". Paper presented at Mercator Media Conference October 2005, Aberystwyth, Wales.

O'Connell, E. 2000. "The Role of Screen Translation: A response". Current Issues in Language and Society, Vol.7, No. 2, 169-174.

O'Connell, E., Walsh, J. and Denvir, G. (eds) (forthcoming) TG4@10- Proceedings of the 'Súil siar, súil ar aghaidh' seminar.

Walsh, J. 2006. The influence of the promotion of the Irish language on Ireland's socio-economic development. Unpublished doctoral thesis DCU: Dublin.

 Dr. Eithne O'Connell is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University.

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The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006)

Ruth Barton

 

The top grossing Irish film in the 2006 box office was also its most controversial. Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley won the 'Palme d'Or' at Cannes in May '06, was released in Ireland in June '06 and had become the highest grossing domestically produced film ever by August '06. The film was also winner of 2006 Best Irish Film at the Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) awards in February 2007.  Set during the War of Independence and the Civil War, the film starred Cillian Murphy alongside a mix of professional and non-professional actors, and followed the fates of two Cork-born brothers who, in the best tradition of the Civil War narrative, ultimately ended up on opposing political sides of the conflict.

 

What I would like to explore here is not so much the content of the film, which is very much in the mould of Loach's oeuvre, but the responses to it from a variety of interest groups who made the most of the media's fallow summer period to express their disparate and often conflicting opinions on a film that was widely perceived as a 'corrective' to Neil Jordan's earlier Michael Collins (1996). Here was the Fianna Fáil film that would set the record straight on Jordan's romanticisation of the Civil War hero whose short life and political career promised a future that was rudely usurped by de Valera and the party he led into, and maintained in, power.

As didactic as one expects Loach's work to be, The Wind that Shakes the Barley did not invite debate as a consequence of its own narrative construction but because of its provocative position-taking. Unsurprisingly, the first shots fired in the ideological battleground were by those who had not seen the film. Simon Heffer, biographer of Enoch Powell, shared his feelings with his Daily Telegraph (June 3) readers thus:

Talking of hypocrisy, has there been any more nauseating lately than that of the bigoted Marxist film director Ken Loach on winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes? … He hates this country, yet leeches off it, using public funds to make his repulsive films. And no, I haven't seen it, any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was.

Whatever about his sentiments, Heffer's labelling of Loach's film as British is contentious; for Irish critics, politicians and the Irish Film Board this was indisputably an Irish film. Financing, in fact, had come from an amalgam of sources; officially the film was an Irish/UK/Spanish/Italian/German co-production and various accounts produce different budgetary figures. It seems that, of a budget of €6.4m, €3.6m was raised under Section 481; the balance came from the Irish Film Board, the UK Film Council's New Cinema fund and Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, with smaller contributions from the other partners. The film was shot in Ireland and post-produced in Britain, probably for the last time after British chancellor, Gordon Brown's, announcement that from now on tax relief would only be applicable to those films produced in Britain.

Financing is, obviously, only one measure of a film's identity; and we could argue that its nationality, if it must have one, could equally be decided by creative intent. What's interesting here is that both the principal territories with an investment in claiming the film read it as a reflection on their own particular political and historical concerns. For Loach, The Wind that Shakes the Barley was an anti-imperialist film that covertly critiqued British involvement in Iraq, not the first instance of a British artist using the Irish situation to make a statement about their own country's military/political campaigns, nor indeed the first time that Loach himself had done this, an earlier example being his Troubles film Hidden Agenda (1990). On the Irish side, the film was appropriated by both Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin as vindication of their own origins. The latter even went as far as producing a fund-raising T-shirt (available on-line and in the Party shop) with the title, 'The Wind that Shook the Barley', emblazoned over an uncredited photo of an IRA flying column. True to their dual financial imperative, the two British tabloids with editions in Britain and Ireland, the Sun and the Daily Mail, offered hyperbolic readings of the film that were as 'pro' in one territory as they were 'anti' in the other. Thus, both their Irish editions lauded the film's success in Cannes, while their British editions savaged Loach in language similar to that employed by the Telegraph. "Cillian's men give Brits a tanning in Cannes" read the headline in the Irish version of the Sun, while its UK big brother shrieked that, 'Top Cannes film is most pro-IRA ever'.

At home, the letters' pages reflected the divided opinions expressed in the media over Loach's depiction of Irish history. The highest profile engagement between two political and (nominally) artistic perspectives came from Kevin Myers, now a columnist for the Irish Independent after a long career with the Irish Times, and Professor Luke Gibbons writing in Myers' old paper. In an essay on The Wind that Shakes the Barley, printed in the June 17 edition of the Irish Times, Gibbons discussed the film's commitment to highlighting the social and historical divisions of the Civil War, praising Loach for de-romanticising Republican history. He also took issue with the current idea that the murder of landowners in Co. Cork was an early example of 'ethnic cleansing', praising the film for its depiction of its representative Protestant as an informer. It was this point in particular that drew the ire of Myers: "there we have it," he wrote in his column of June 28 in the Irish Independent, "in a single poisonous paragraph; all the exonerative filth, all the moral caveats, all the easy generalisations, all the special sectarian pleasing, all the moral separatism, by which the Irish republican agenda proceeds". Happy to state that he had not seen Loach's film, Myers concluded by pouring scorn over the notion that Gibbons could be 'Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame', an appointment that in Myers' opinion, was as ludicrous as the spelling of the family name. Awarded a right-to-reply, Gibbons wrote a detailed response (July 1), in the Irish Independent refuting Myers' political and personal jibes.

Those who remember the many column inches devoted to Jordan's Michael Collins, will conclude that little has changed in the ten years that bridge the release of both films. This too was marked by the exchange of political analysis and personal abuse, again often articulated by historians and columnists who took some pride in asserting that they had not seen the film. Both films were enormously successful in Ireland and less so elsewhere, reminding us, if nothing else, that history in Ireland is still a vibrant, contentious and popular topic.

Dr Ruth Barton is O'Kane Senior Research Fellow at the School of Languages, Literatures and Film, UCD. Among her books are Acting Irish in Hollywood: From Fitzgerald to Farrell, (Irish Academic Press, 2006); Irish National Cinema, (Routledge, 2002) and Jim Sheridan, Framing the Nation (The Liffey Press, 2002).

 

 

The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006)

Directed by Ken Loach

Script by Paul Laverty

Principle Cast: Cillian Murphy, Padraic Delaney, Liam Cunningham, Gerard Kearney, William Ruane

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Attack of the Killer Cows! Reading Genre and Context in Isolation (2005)

Barry Monahan

In his 1993 essay "Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity", Jim Collins sets out to map certain tendencies that he identifies in contemporary mainstream cinema.  Collins draws on four generic groups previously classified by John Cawelti in a 1978 article and reduces them to two categories.  He separates films into those that work through a parodic intertextual referencing of genre (what he calls "Eclectic Irony"), and those that treat genre convention seriously (designated as "New Sincerity").  Although he does not make direct reference to the horror genre, it is one that developed a clear line of parodic self-referentiality  throughout the decade in ways that would make it easily placed within the first set.

 

Nor is this tendency –inherently related to tonal affects that the horror and comedy share– simply isolated within American mainstream practice, and many examples of the horror comedy or the horror effected comically have emerged over the last fifteen years from minor national cinemas: recently, among them, Cabin Fever (Eli Roth, US Independent, 2002), Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, Britain, 2004) and Boy Eats Girl (Stephen Bradley, Ireland, 2005) (See Barton 2006). 

Irish productions since 1990 have frequently displayed the same formal and stylistic tendency to address generic conventions through parody or self-referential mockery that creates its comedy by juxtaposing the local recognisable with universal genre structures.  The comedy works because in different ways the local semantics fail to sit comfortable with the generic syntax.  In fact, as burgeoning national cinemas emerge into mainstream circuits of production and distribution, for reasons of economy, technology or aesthetic exploration, it is common to see degrees of address to established genres.  There is also evidence of tendencies during different phases of a national cinema of placing national characteristics against the mainstream tropes, semantics or coding of established genres, and while it is not always necessarily done for comic effect (Godard's A bout de souffle from 1959 is one prominent example), more often than not, such genre blending is designed to work comically (Monahan,  2007).  These are films that work through, and expect the audience to enjoy, a dialogue with genre conventions.  They acknowledge implicitly a level of spectator sophistication and the ability to recognise the genre play and the referencing of mainstream generic language. 

However, another identifiable phase of development of a minor cinema (one not necessarily chronologically separate from moments of parodic genre play), occurs when a genre is treated seriously.  Such films no longer talk through the generic language from outside genre performance, rather they perform the genre sincerely, with a level of sophistication that displays both a respect for the confined regulation that informs genre production and consumption, and also marks the extent to which genre limitations may, in fact, be creatively liberating.  Here, I would like to propose that Billy O'Brien's 2006 feature Isolation displays consistent creativity in its application, evocation and arrangement of the language of the horror genre.  This is marked, above all, by a credibility –as narrative and character verisimilitude– that is perfectly managed without allowing (as is eminently possible in the genre) the ridiculousness of the incredible to become deliberate comedic generic failure, eclectic irony, or genre parody.  

Three interconnected aspects of the horror film –categorised here under the general headings aesthetics, theme and narration– are drawn together with both textual and textural respect for the horror genre's precedents, but also with the appropriate dramatic self-reflexive generic intertextuality by which all genres work.  The tone is established with formal fragmentation of image and text during the credit sequence, and Adrian Johnston's soundtrack –as is typically the case with Romero, Carpenter and Argento– intensifies the mood disproportionately in relation to the images.  In this way, the soundtrack assists the suggestion of the presence of an extra-diegetic being; a force with supernatural power entirely beyond the control of the diegetic characters and the narrator.  Throughout the film, unmotivated point-of-view shots reaffirm this presence with Robbie Ryan's continually budging hand-held camera whose perspective is usually restricted or masked by walls, doors, peep-holes, and other shadows.  Typically, this manner of blocking the view, and thereby hindering knowledge, is a particularly effective objective correlative for the uneven epistemological provision that is critical for the horror genre, one that I will deal with below.  Even the closing scene, which reveals ultrasound scan of the womb of the pregnant 'final girl' in the maternity hospital, embodies literally as it dramatises the possibility for what is most threatening about the horror film: the fact that the terror is ultimately beyond narrative control and arrangement.  The story does not achieve a typical point of closure, rather it suggests a lack-of-finality and the ever-possible return of the monster in a sequel.

As order, and a basic faith in epistemological regulation and empirical expertise, is converted into disorder, the narrative struggle for the characters is always one of seeking to impose control over that which has become overwhelming.  As the deformed embryos of the cow on which the German biologist has been experimenting begin to grow at an unprecedented rate, the incredibility of the situation is managed by conventions that facilitate the genre's verisimilitude.  Knowledge is constantly unevenly dispersed between ignorant and informed characters and film spectators, with rapid and frequent modulations and u-turns that redefine positions of safety, survival and threat.  Unlike the sustained withholding of significant information that is characteristic of dramatic irony that contributes to tension and anagnorisis, it is specifically the undermining of faith in the empirical positivistic sciences and the alternating rapid disempowering and empowering of characters and spectators that adds to the horror's emotional affect.  This inevitably leads to some of the more problematic lines in such films, as the description on what has taken place 'scientifically', necessarily directed at other innocent characters, is effectively designed to inform us.  Both John, the ambitious and corrupt German biologist, and Orla his assistant will inform us of the severity of the potential national threat, but as this information is passed we can be certain that, true to the genre, we will be aware of their demise before they are.  An example of such transferral of information occurs in one sequence, shortly after an impromptu autopsy on the calf's womb, which begins with Dan and Orla staring at unrecognisable embryonic growths.  We wait in suspense until Orla enlightens us as to what exactly is lying on the table.  A shift occurs on a shock effect beat when, immediately after she has said, "They could never have lived", one of the embryos twitches, levelling our respective 'knowledge positions'.  Our position is brought to one of knowledge superiority in the following scene when we return to the operating table, to find one of the creatures crawling off the table top, in the absence the other characters.

This shifting of knowledge perspectives also introduces another key aspect of the regulation of epistemological orders that is objectively dramatised in the horror: the transgression of borders by the association of space with knowledge.  This spatial delineation is dramatised both in terms of biology, as the parasite invades human inner-space, geography and architecture as signs are posted warning "Keep Out", and "No Entry" and informed characters frequently warn others to "Stay away!", "Keep back!" or "Don't go in there!". This tonal aspect of the genre largely motivated Barbara Creed's application of Julia Kristeva's notion of the 'Abject' to the horror.  All of the distinguishing attributes of the abject appear in O'Brien's film, although the parasitic nature of the monsters inverts its operation by insisting a reintroduction of the abject, back to the farm, into the body and, ultimately, into society.  While genetic mutation renders concretely and metaphorically the fundamental instability of narrative, character and spectator relations in the genre, it is the inability fully to reject, avoid, dispel and discard the monster that provides much of the horror in Isolation.  Socially, however, those forced outside the boundaries –the travellers– may be read as one aspect of the film's abject as their caravan is frequently framed in front of the 'No Entry' sign and because much of the dialogue about, or directed at, them supports their social alienation.  At one moment, in an interesting revision of the common horror utterance "I'll be right back!", they are warned: "Be outta here by tomorrow!"          

Ultimately, however, as the title points simultaneously to the idea of quarantine and remote geographical separation – both usefully applicable in the operations of the genre, the film can be contextualised against very real contemporary fears about the possibility of a pandemic proliferating from farm lands.  With the threats to humans from 'Mad Cow' disease, the devastating effect of 'Foot and Mouth' disease, and the more recent scare surrounding Avian Flu, rural iconography has never been more easily de-romanticised as holocaust-like images of major culling were framed against the countryside landscape.  Billy O'Brien's film applies generic formula with a precision, authenticity and 'New Sincerity' that readily assists an horrific fictionalisation of images so recently produced. 

Works Cited

Barton, Ruth. 2006. "Boy Eats Girl". Estudios Irlandeses  pp. 162-163. http://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/Issue1/FilmReviews.pdf

Collins, Jim. 1993.  "Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic irony and the New Sincerity"  in  Film Theory Goes to the Movies  Collins, Jim et al.  (eds) New York: Routledge,  pp. 242-263.

Monahan, Barry. 2007.  "Playing Cops and Robbers: Recent Irish cinema and genre performance"  in  Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism  McIlroy, Brian  (ed). New York: Routledge, pp. 45-57.

Dr. Barry Monahan has lectured in Irish, European and early-American cinema at Trinity College, Dublin and at University College Dublin.  He has published articles on Irish film history and contemporary Irish cinema, and is currently researching work by Abbey Theatre players and repertoire writers on screen.

Isolation (2005)

Directed by Billy O'Brien

Written by Billy O Brien

Principle Cast: Essie Davis; Sean Harris; Marcel Iures; Crispin Lett ; John Lynch; Ruth Negga; Stanley Townsend

Original Music by Adrian Johnston 

Cinematography by Robbie Ryan

Produced by Bertrand Faivre, Ed Guiney, Ruth Kenley-Letts

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Capital Letters (2004)

Debbie Ging

Given the paucity of Irish films that deal with immigration or other aspects of minority-ethnic experience or identity, it is perhaps unsurprising that the few productions which have ventured into this territory have borne an impossibly heavy 'burden of representation'. They tend to run the risk of being criticised either for presenting an unrealistically upbeat vision of multicultural Ireland or for portraying immigrants as victims and thus peddling negative stereotypes. Short films such as Buskers (2000) and Yo Ming is Aimn Dom (2003) seem to get it right by refusing to ignore that immigration has the potential to produce conflict, yet at the same time demonstrating that both majority and minority cultures are positively transformed by adopting an intercultural approach to multi-ethnicity. Of The Nephew (1998), on the other hand, Harvey O'Brien has commented that the racial angle, while having the potential to give the film some edge, is "peculiarly muted and confined to one or two punchlines and an embarrassingly bad scene where farm-hand Phelim Drew sings a rap version of 'Whisky in the Jar'. It seems that Ireland is not quite ready to face up to its racial demons yet, though I suppose it is notable that a black character features so prominently in an Irish film at all" (Harvey's Movie Reviews, http://homepage. eircom.net/~obrienh/neph.htm)

It would appear that Irish filmmakers are reluctant to tackle politically sensitive issues of which they have little or no direct experience, while the lack of minority-ethnic professionals working in the industry means that 'authentic' or non- western perspectives on events are few and far between. However, even when minority-ethnic writers, producers and directors do gain a foothold in a particular country's film or television industry, the pressure to speak on behalf of an entire community –bound together in terms of cultural or national origin but heterogeneous in other ways– may well conflict with their own artistic and political goals. What pleases critics, academics, policy-makers and audiences may differ considerably, and opinions on what is acceptable, desirable or authentic will always be contentious. In this respect, Ciaran O'Connor's Capital Letters (2004) is an encouraging example of how a powerful message can be delivered about racism and globalisation within a film that is not explicitly about ethnicity or questions of intercultural conflict or coexistence. O'Connor recognises the limits of how this story can be told and wisely confines his social critique to the misogynist and racist power structures within the Irish criminal underworld which allow human trafficking and prostitution to thrive rather than attempting to (over)interpret his protagonist's culture or experiences.

Capital Letters opens with a young black woman Taiwo (Ruth Negga) being delivered to a Dublin backstreet in the back of a transit van. Unaware of the fact that she has been 'imported' by ruthless brothel owner and gangster McManus, she is nonetheless suspicious and fearful, and succeeds in escaping, only to be spotted and picked up by Keeley (Karl Shiels), a small-time criminal in the trafficking business. Keeley decides to keep Taiwo for his own financial gain, and offers her a bed, food and the prospect of a job in exchange for a percentage of her earnings. A tender if somewhat ambiguous relationship develops between the two and Keeley finds her a job serving drinks in a lap-dancing club.