HOOPER: It doesn’t make much sense for a guy who hates the water to live on an island.

CHIEF BRODY: It’s only an island if you look at it from the water.

HOOPER: That makes a lot of sense.

This tangential drunken exchange between the shark-hunting protagonists in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) may inadvertently reveal something acute about the ambiguities of island identity. Ireland’s geography, society and ecosystem have been repeatedly – literally and metaphorically – created and recreated through a dynamic symbiosis of sea and land. Processes of deposition and reclamation, of mortality and nourishment, of inclusivity and exclusivity, of constitutional belonging and defining otherness, have all been bound in one way or another to the country’s maritime borders. Irish cultural experiences follow the same variable fluctuations, and from the earliest historical exhibitions of indigenous creativity, the sea has been a source of ubiquitous inspiration and fascination for artists. It appears throughout the romanticised landscapes of Jack B. Yeats and Paul Henry, it infuses and inspires the haunted ecologies of the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Paula Cunningham, and it performs a portentous narrative function in countless Irish ballads. Native literature has regularly narrated tales of death in or beside the water. We need only pause to consider John Millington Synge’s modernist play Riders to the Sea, John B. Keane’s The Field, and John Banville’s 2005 novel The Sea to get a sense of how that natural phenomenon has infiltrated our cultural heritage and memory. Some of Ireland’s most interesting films have framed the magnificence of the shore for concluding or climactic scenes: whether tragically, in Lamb (Colin Gregg, 1985), Adam & Paul (Lenny Abrahamson, 2004) and The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh 2022); affirmatively, in Maeve (John Davies and Pat Murphy, 1981), Into the West (Mike Newell, 1992) and Disco Pigs (Kirsten Sheridan, 2001); or more uncertainly, in The Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles, 1994), The Van (Stephen Frears, 1996) and Nora (Pat Murphy, 2000).

For an island culture these characteristic ambiguities regularly inform, and are informed by, a dialectic of connections and relationships between locations, both core (national) and remote (international). Tom Nairn’s designation of the nation as “Janus-faced” gave a temporal focus to processes of self-invention and reinvention, but the same Roman god might be just as usefully depicted spatially. We engage with, produce and reconstitute our culture and sense of cultural identity by occupying a bifurcated position: always simultaneously looking outward from a centre, and imagining an inward gaze from the peripheries. Local audiences are well attuned to the vagaries of cinematic representations of Ireland by overseas producers, and familiar with how filmmakers have been attracted to situating their characters and stories in the outlying regions of the Emeral Isle. The romanticisation of the remoteness of our island’s edges not only informed the aesthetics and actions of renowned films such as Man of Aran (Robert Flaherty, 1934), The Quiet Man (John Ford 1952) and Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970), but also continued to provide backdrops of idealised mountains, cliffs and atolls in genres as varied as the Rom-Com (The Matchmaker [Mark Joffe, 1997], P.S. I Love You [Richard LaGravenese, 2007], Leap Year [Anand Tucker, 2010]) and the Sci-Fi (Star Wars: The Force Awakens [J.J. Abrams, 2015]). Furthermore, the merging of inward-facing and outward-looking perspectives has consequences for indigenous film production, distribution and reception. International generic precedents, audience expectations and market trends regularly inform decision-making within the national cinema culture. These are clearly identifiable in regional, statutory administrative and financing centres, and throughout policies and strategic plans that set the stage for creativity. Inevitably national approaches to sustaining a healthy cinematic culture – its guiding philosophies, aspirations and principles – are particularly exposed, and must be attentive, to contingencies of international funding mechanisms, market demands and distribution networks. The global production landscape might be imagined or mapped as a series of concentric circles, rippling outwards and lapping back, with influences from both centrifugal and centripetal movements. We are as capable of reiterating Irishness and reclaiming it from the podium of the Academy Awards – in the guise of Daniel Day Lewis in 1989 or Cillian Murphy in 2023 – as we are of rejecting and refusing the performed identity – whether embodied by Julia Roberts as Kitty Kiernan or Kevin Spacey as Martin Cahill. Irish filmmakers have also amply demonstrated their capacity for anticipating and playing to the expectations of overseas audiences, with appropriate representational adjustment. Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan have a keen grasp of the international sensibility, although some critics might query the extent to which their productions have occasionally compromised accuracy in detail for distribution impact. It will be interesting to compare and contrast the box office returns and critical reception of the two recent cinematic adaptations of Claire Keegan’s novellas. Colm Bairéad’s Irish-language reworking of Foster as An Cailín Ciúin (2022) was (in the terms above) “centripetally focused” while, although it was a thoroughly “Irish” story with a predominantly Irish cast, Small Things Like These (Tim Mielants, 2024) was made mostly by overseas film artists with international funding.

The articles in this year’s review reflect, in a variety of ways, this characteristic of cultural “looking outwards and inwards”. Following a pause last year, the return of the Year in Review section of Estudios Irlandeses has allowed us to take some license with the established format, which we hope will satisfy rather than disappoint the reader. Traditionally restricted to cultural productions from only the previous twelve months, because of the absence of critical contributions last year, we have included a number of productions that reach back before that timeframe. A few of the films discussed were produced and/or released in 2023 and, although the Raidió Teilifís Éireann flagship production Nationwide has been on the air since 1993, it could be contended that it reached its age of maturity in 2024. Jorie Lagerwey’s consideration of the long-running weekday evening programme is compellingly informed by the author’s personal experience of immigration to the island around which that magazine show creates its national narrative. By integrating subjective responses to the programme with the perceptive objectivity of a distant eye, Lagerwey evaluates the production with a nuanced reading of its stylistic construction and the images of the purported nation, or national voice, it presents. This timely reflection on the enduring show coincides with the turmoil suffered by the national broadcaster following a series of audits and independent reports that disclosed anomalies in contractual arrangements between the organisation and its top-paid celebrities. Within the context of this affair, it is interesting that the programme is approached for its constancy and having been largely untouched by, and immune to, those developments.

Four of this year’s authors offer reviews, from across the border, on films from Northern Ireland. Stalworth veteran contributor to Estudios Irlandeses Tony Tracy considers the “post-Troubles” films In the Land of Saints and Sinners and The Last Rifleman, both of which were released in 2023, the year of the 25^th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Reading the films against a well-established set of representations of the Northern conflict going back at least as far as Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947), Tracy proposes that historical stories set in that region – which may not even focus directly on “the struggles” – have been interestingly infused by sensibilities and ideological perspectives informed by contemporary politics. Denis Condon finds a similar inflection in the 2023 Rose Dugdale biopic Baltimore by established filmmakers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy. More directly centered on the Irish Republican paramilitary activities than were the films reviewed by Tracy, Baltimore nevertheless displaces certain political questions onto a more mainstream generic representation of the protagonist’s personal story. Many cinematic portrayals of Northern Ireland’s conflict have been charged with diluting the specificities of characters’ motivations to violent action in favour of suggesting a more atavistic or inherent indigenous disposition towards the same, all the while side-stepping essential elements of the political context behind the hostilities. Condon amply, implicitly, demonstrates how a biographical narrative that does not ground itself in the political nuances and background negotiations of the situation (either historical or contemporary with the time of the diegetic setting) need not completely avoid an exploration of, or the justifications for, a character’s activism. In his article, Kane Geary O’Keeffe analyses The Glenarma Tapes from 2023. The Northern Irish found footage horror is clearly positioned by Geary O’Keeffe within a film genre that has been well established (not originally, but most famously, since The Blair Witch Project in 1999), but his reading is innovative in its formal juxtaposition of traditional folkloric narratives with contemporary sociological consequences of the COVID19 pandemic. The expression of social and institutional critiques in the film emerges not in spite of, but on account of, its integration of the northern European folkloric phenomena of the “Wild Hunt” or the “Fairy Cavalcade” with codes and conventions of the identified horror subgenre. Without diluting the regional specificity of the story, the film presents themes with as much international relevance as it offers local reflections on how statutory bodies mishandled their management of the COVID crisis. The last of the four Northern Irish film reviews in this section is offered by Simon Hewitt. His refreshing analysis of Rich Peppiatt’s semi-autobiographical Kneecap, the “phenomenon” 2024 hip-hop Irish language musical, thoughtfully turns his focus from the linguistic attention of many conversations around the film towards an exploration of the sociological implications of the rap genre (from its birth in America to current iterations in the North). Hewitt discusses the counter-hegemonic potential in the characters’ deployment of hip-hop as a popular cultural form, using a fascinating technological point of intervention into his account. In this, he finds innovation in the filmmakers’ disregard for typically confining stylistic, narrative or generic formalities and expectations. Their approach has been to mark the processes of marginalisation – creatively and socially – experienced by characters, by mapping one set of experiences onto the other within the context of Northern Irish identities.

In the wake of a familiar line of American Rom-Com releases specifically located in Ireland, the 2024 film Irish Wish recycles the blueprint with predictable conservatism. Sandra Costello assesses the formal qualities of the film by tracing many of the stereotypical tropes associated with the genre, and investigates how the recurring set pieces of characterisation and narrative continue to rely on unchallenging and regressive models. Costello focuses especially on the definitions of gender roles and how these are played out through representations that deny transformative potential and, with a gentle hint, suggests that the film may be revealing more about the contemporary socio-political landscape of the Unites States than it acts as a useful reflection on the Irish one.

Returning to Ireland’s production scene, Rachel Gough analyses the latest feature length production by Irish filmmaker Pat Collins. Adapted from John McGahern’s award-winning novel of the same name, That They May Face the Rising Sun could not be a more antithetical representation of Ireland and Irish communities to the ones depicted in Irish Wish. Gough draws attention to this quality directly in a nuanced reading of the film’s relationship with character and community: both elements deeply set within cultural traditions and personality dispositions, and against rural landscapes that have always made Collins’ work immediately identifiable and beautifully authentic. Gough celebrates the restraint of Collins’ “watchful distance” as he allows his story to unfold, conversation by conversation and event by event, as if a mere reflection by an entirely sympathetic observer. Collins’ attention to detail brings an undeniably genuine texture to the film and, in the light of so many cinematic representations of the country by overseas film producers, one might be justified in asking how much we benefit from hearing and seeing our stories when told by indigenous filmmakers. The question may arise if one compares Tim Mielants’ Small Things Like These with Colm Bairéad’s earlier adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Foster. Stephanie McBride’s article here mentions An Cailín Ciúin as a starting point for a detailed analysis of the 2024 film by Mielants and goes on to discuss the strength of the representational nuances in depicting a particular moment of the nation’s history and the shameful violence perpetrated by Church and State against women incarcerated in its Mother and Baby Institutions. McBride pays particular attention to the visual and aural silences of the film’s cinematic formalities – perhaps not quite classifiable as “slow cinema” – but that nonetheless bring a gentle internalised sensibility to the story, and invite interpretation and engagement by avoiding moralising dogmatism. Ultimately, McBride suggests that the film is a welcome antidote to the more benign representations of the country currently on screen, and a courageous confrontation with the darker areas of our national story.

Whether real or overstated, the perceived ubiquity of Ireland’s cinematic presence on the global stage has not dampened the energetic and entrepreneurial work done by those with a vested interested in promoting Irish film at home and abroad. As a new venture in this respect, the recently launched online platform Eiretainment promises to introduce audiences to both mainstream and marginal indigenous cinematic work. David Mackey offers a description of the ambitions behind the new initiative in a contribution informed by an interview with its founder Simon Maguire. Mackey tests Maguire’s unwritten manifesto and expressed intentions for the project by discussing two of the short films currently available for streaming there. The chosen films are themselves thematically interested in notions of social marginalisation and alienation and are therefore worthy candidates for consideration on a service that purports to represent and advocate for peripheral voices.

The last two articles in this section look at theatrical performances, in a new undertaking which we hope will be favourably received as it develops over the coming years. Graham Price analyses a recent performance by Stephen Rea as the titular character in Krapp’s Last Tape, directed by Vicky Featherstone at the Gaiety Theatre last October. Price’s inventive personal reflection considers the metatheatrical quality so central to the conceit of Beckett’s play through which the audience experiences itself as witness to the character’s self-reflection as the old man listens to recordings of his younger self. A vicarious alignment occurs as the spectator becomes a witness to the act of re-encountering one’s youth. Price points to a “fortuitously” distinctive quality of Featherstone and Rea’s production in which versions of the actor’s recorded voice, already made for an earlier staging, are reused. The article celebrates the playwright’s construction of an inherently high modernist form of both play and performance echoing classical theatrical traditions as the Beckettian protagonist facilitates the viewer’s access to his portrait (unlike Joyce’s equivalent) as an old man. In her theatrical review Kate Antosik-Parsons occupies a fittingly subjective perspective in describing the personal experience of an ensemble of pieces brought together as Livestock: Creation Myths. Performed at the MART Gallery in September, the dramatic event featured six installations that created a range of immersive encounters for audiences, each one inviting reflection on humanity’s relationships with non-human animals, the environment and ultimately our own identities. Antosik-Parsons describes the design and the execution of the segments, carefully delineating the aesthetic specificities of each one – EL Putnam’s Imbue with Spirit, Olivia Hassett’s What Myths We Create, Karmel Daly’s Éiriu, Ruaidhrí Maguire’s Night Angel, Bobby Fitzgerald’s Earthman Bob and the Daisie Chain and Aifric Prior Beliere’s Book Beat – as well as proposing suggestions on the overarching themes connecting them. Antosik-Parsons concludes her appraisal affirmatively by identifying a key objective of the artists and performers: by creating a sensory and visceral array of engagements it is hoped that the self-reflection and deeper soul-searching of spectating participants might bring about genuine transformation. At best, it will awaken awareness of the consequences of limiting our understanding of our lives to entirely anthropocentric positions.