Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture, and Politics

by Oliver William Pattenden

In recent months the apparently intractable and interminable conflict in Northern Ireland seems to have reached a peaceful resolution. The historic breakthrough occurred in May with the signing of a power sharing agreement in Stormont by legendary rivals Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness. The Stormont Agreement promises a period of unprecedented cooperation, fulfilling the objectives of the initial Good Friday Agreement of 1998. A statement was made by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), following the noteworthy events in Stormont, renouncing their brutal campaign of violence. Their more widely publicized counterpart, the Real IRA, has since matched the UVF's decision with a similar resolution to forego violence.

With a coalition government now in place, there would appear to be a realistic hope for a stable future in Northern Ireland. Since a period of unrelenting violence, known as "The Troubles," began in the late 1960s, it has been impossible to separate the conflict involved from questions of national identity, particularly as these events served to crystallize Northern Ireland in the consciousness of the international media. While the contesting parties vehemently thrive on their respective identity, the collective experience of the Northern Irish has so far been built on the historic contention between nationalists and unionists. The turn of events we are now witnessing in Northern Ireland surely raises fundamental questions about the future of national identity in Northern Ireland's increasingly active cinematic output.

Against this background of social transformation, John Hill's Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture, and Politics, the first such comprehensive work on Northern Irish cinema, could not come at a better time. Northern Ireland is at a crossroads, and this is certainly the case for its cinema production as well. Much of Hill's book explores the use of cinema to refract the social conflicts in Northern Ireland and, particularly, the fractured identities portrayed in Northern Irish film. Structured essentially as a chronological road map of films produced in Northern Ireland, Cinema and Northern Ireland delineates the various attempts to establish a successful working film industry in Northern Ireland. Because of the attention paid to which of the contesting groups had greater influence in the film industry, Hill's informed and frequently engrossing text ultimately serves as a broader analysis of Northern Ireland's cultural history, as well as a meticulous catalog of film production in Northern Ireland.

Of course, Hill's book is not the first work published on Northern Ireland's complex relationship with cinema, but the sparse work done in this area prior to Cinema and Northern Ireland has typically been in the context of either Irish or British film, often addressing how Northern Ireland is represented or judged within these other national cinemas. Hill incorporates British, Irish, and American film in his discussion, allowing a fair amount of border crossing in his work. The focus of the book is on film broadly related to Northern Ireland, rather than exclusively featuring films produced in Northern Ireland. This fluid approach is canny, allowing Hill room to express the various forces at play in the Northern Irish film industry, and also to launch a discussion of the different national identities found in Northern Irish culture.

As a documentary record of the early years of Northern Irish cinema, Hill's scholarship here is impeccable. He details the fraught relationship between government organizations and the entertainment industry, and highlights the struggle of this small nation to make its stamp on the international market. Much of the early film industry in Northern Ireland was based on the production of propaganda or tourism films that served a purpose beyond just entertainment. In these pictures, Hill unearths the fascinating effort by Northern Irish filmmakers to search for both a national identity and a medium through which to express their sense of nationhood. Inevitably, it reverts to a debate between which external force is more representative of Ulster: rural Ireland or industrial Britain.

Unavoidably, much text is devoted to Richard Hayward, the most active entrepreneur and star in early Northern Irish cinema. Hayward created a series of films, mainly musical comedies, in the Thirties and Forties, which were meant to capture some authentic aspect of a noble Northern Irish tradition. Rather than work to differentiate the six counties of the north from the rest of Ireland, however, Hayward's films were completely steeped in the symbolism and conventions familiar from tried depictions of Ireland, and thus, Hayward ultimately failed to establish a unique national identity in Northern Irish cinema.

Despite Hayward's undoubtedly important role in the initial establishment and sustenance of the various early film industries in Northern Ireland, Hill finds Carol Reed's drama Odd Man Out (1947) to be a real point of generation for future filmmakers in Northern Ireland. Largely this is due to the film's status as the first indigenous film to address the experience of an IRA gunman, but Odd Man Out is also an archetypal film in both form and structure. This enigmatic film is fascinating in its ability to be at once both deliberately vague about its content, and tellingly specific. For instance, as Hill notes, Odd Man Out is clearly filmed in Belfast, highlighting several of the city's recognizable features. However, the film also goes to great lengths in refusing to name the city as such, thus averting any explicit political message. In establishing Odd Man Outas the prototype for the Troubles cinema that would follow decades later, Hill builds up to the point that much of the Northern Irish cinematic output is constructed to express the national trauma at the experience of The Troubles.

If Odd Man Out is as vastly influential as Hill would have us believe, then it is clear that the only sense of a shared national identity that the Northern Irish can take from their cinema is one of violence, qualified by repression. The film's avoidance of any labeling or explicit references to the political situation, and its general evenhandedness with the IRA and the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) also underlies the communal apprehension at confronting the consequences of their unstable society. Hill carries this into his analysis of Troubles-related films by demonstrating the problems of addressing a social issue that by its very nature invites polemic responses.

What John Hill does make abundantly clear is that no cultural product of Northern Ireland can be analyzed or discussed without some consideration for how it relates to The Troubles, Northern Ireland's defining attribute. Hill approaches a set of films produced in recent years that avoid The Troubles by addressing them as deliberately choosing to exclude any conflict, something which, to Hill, reflects the cultural context just as much as any explicit Troubles film. In particular, Hill notes the impossibility of depicting personal relationships that exist outside of the social constraints without reading them as fantastical or pointedly political. He does this to great effect when discussing Mickybo & Me (2004), a coming-of-age story that Hill invokes to demonstrate how recent cinema has maintained the ambivalence brought on by lingering social realities of The Troubles, despite the more hopeful era brought on by The Good Friday Agreement.

Despite all the positive news filtering in from Stormont, one can't help but feel that the expectations of a unified society will always be haunted by its fragmented past. Hill's model points to inherent problems in the foundations of national character that suggest that, even if the fighting has stopped, the long-term repercussions of the social conflict in Northern Ireland will be played out in the country's cultural products for many years to come. While the power-sharing scheme in the government is a logical and essential solution to the problems of a divided nation, it nevertheless functions to further expose the issues of a fractured national identity. If a shared national identity is ever to exist in Northern Ireland, ironically it will be created out of the shared experience with the struggle to overcome past divisions and create a stable nation.

Hill covers an awful lot of ground in Cinema and Northern Ireland. Without doubt, it is a landmark book that will become an essential text in both Irish and British cinema studies. Most importantly, however, Hill has done much to establish Northern Irish cinema as a distinctive area of study. Given the profound and genuine cultural transformation taking place, John Hill's book comes at a time to influence and inspire further attention and scholarship on a still developing national cinema.

Click here to buy Cinema and Northern Ireland.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXII No.4 2007

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