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The writer Seamus Deane once noted a curious contradiction with many of Ireland’s great writers of the 19th and early 20th century. Figures such as Synge, Yeats and Joyce, all developed highly unique distinctive ‘languages’ which often entailed navigating a tightrope tension between established tradition and a basis in reality and the tendency towards insularity, even self-parody. Deane puts it down partly to, that all three and more felt the pull to “articulate the national consciousness”, of what was, all at once, a very old, new and unformed nation. Only to find their aim varyingly diverted, mutated and then defined by the reality that there was no “unity of culture”, to quote Yeats, but a slippery hodgepodge of political, religious, ethnic, and local identities, each with their own diversity of ways of speaking and being. This is certainly true to some degree every part of this wide world but Ireland, repeatedly melted down and alchemized under the pressure of centuries of concerted colonial projects, which often explicitly pitted its various peoples against each other, is a particularly distorted funhouse mirror which artists still scan for stability or otherwise embrace in all it.
Another version of this crisis of identity can be found within Irish cinema whose history has progressed in a series of fits and starts. Marked by the tendency towards mimicking modes and styles of American, British and European cinemas, as well attempts to find new, Irish cinemas, often in recognition of Ireland as a multiplicity scarred by history. The 1970s and 1980s was a particularly rich period with a new spirit of formal adventurism, iconoclasm, and a search for previously ignored subjects, textures and wounds, invigorating both young Irish filmmakers—taking not only some from modernist cinema movements abroad but, in certain cases learned their craft–and filmmakers drawn from elsewhere.
This series presents two films, COILIN AND PLATONIDA and BUDAWANNY, from this period and persuasion. Both are ventures out into Ireland’s much mythicized west, where rather than harp on the hard and fast clichés they use to landscape, its people and its cultural and historical baggage to forge daring, experimental works of cinema which adventurously play with the cliché of Ireland as the pre-modern berth and product of superstition and legend, while countering its most recognizable images with striking ellipses and abstractions.