[Commlist] new book: Irish cinema in the twenty-first century

I am happy to announce the publication of my new monograph,/Irish cinema 
in the twenty-first century. /It is out in the US next month.

Big shout out to Manchester for agreeing to a reasonably-priced 
paperback alongside the hardback and e-Book.

My blog is here:

http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/articles/irish-cinema-in-the-twenty-first-century-whats-left-of-the-national-by-ruth-barton/

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Irish cinema in the twenty-first century: what’s left of the national? 
by Ruth Barton

When I wrote my previous monograph on Irish cinema, Irish National 
Cinema (Routledge, 2004), I was one of a series of writers trying to 
tease out just what a national cinema might be. Even then, I realised, 
it was whatever you chose to piece together from an à la carte menu of 
titles. It had to include a cinema that spoke to and for the Irish 
diaspora, one that questioned the national, and one that addressed 
multiple ways of being Irish. The old methodologies of defining a 
national cinema by its funding sources were no longer fit for purpose, 
too rigid for an increasingly borderless industry.

If it was challenging in 2004 to identify what an Irish film might be, 
by 2019, as my new monograph, Irish cinema in the twenty-first century, 
is published, it seems like a rabbit hole better avoided. I needed to 
write a new study of Irish cinema to do justice to the flow of new 
productions, many of them in genres that I hadn’t previously associated 
with Irish filmmaking. In 2004, the Irish horror film, the Irish 
documentary, and Irish animation barely existed. Now they are 
flourishing. The National Question has been resolved (or at least 
parked) with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998; the Celtic Tiger is 
history; the Crash has come and gone, and we are once more the most 
globalised country in the world. The new environment of filmmaking is 
dominated by co-productions, by the possibilities of the digital, and by 
the threat of alternative screens. Rural Ireland has been displaced by 
the city as the locus for exploring identity politics. Everything 
belongs in inverted commas, not least ‘Ireland’. Still, some things 
remain the same – women’s narratives are as marginalised as they ever 
were, as are convincing representations of Ireland’s minorities, be they 
Travellers or new immigrants.

Irish cinema in the twenty-first century is my attempt to address the 
place of the national in a small-nation cinema. Not all Irish filmmakers 
tell Irish stories. Lenny Abrahamson broke through on the global scene 
with his stunning Room (2015). Yet long before that, he made Adam & Paul 
(2004), a Beckettian dark comedy about two Irish heroin addicts that 
still rings true in Dublin today. British directors have a habit of 
making Irish history films, as did Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the 
Barley, 2006) and Stephen Frears (Philomena, 2013). Irish film 
production is inherently transnational. Yet, that doesn’t mean that 
Irish filmmakers are no longer interested in telling local stories. Far 
from it. Many of the films I discuss in Irish cinema in the twenty-first 
century are intensely engaged with issues of Irish identity. Perhaps 
most local of all are the documentaries, few of which have made any 
impact outside of Ireland and the festival circuit. Digital equipment 
has opened the door to mini-budget productions such as Gerard Barrett’s 
Pilgrim Hill (2013), a film rooted in Irish rural trauma. But funding 
does not determine all, and, despite his protestations to the contrary, 
John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary (2014) speaks directly to the concerns 
of contemporary post-Catholic Ireland.

As a national cinema, there is no sense that the nation Irish cinema 
constructs in its documentaries and fictions matches any one person’s 
understanding of what Ireland may actually be. The Ireland of cinema is 
a protean space, made and remade with each production. It is ‘Ireland’ 
not Ireland. This book has an image of our most successful female star 
in decades, Saoirse Ronan, on the cover. Yet Ronan has only made one 
Irish film, Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015) to date. Irish cinema will be 
more interesting when it engages better with all its constituency. In 
this, as in many respects, it is not alone amongst national cinemas. My 
hope for this new monograph is that writers on other cinemas will see 
reflections of their local concerns in what I have discussed. Most of 
all, it was written out of my own interest in exploring Irish filmmaking 
beyond the instant review or the aggregator site. In doing so, I hope to 
have created a space for others to argue about what Irish cinema might be.

Ruth Barton is Associate Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College 
Dublin. She has published widely on Irish cinema and her works include 
Irish National Cinema (2004) and Acting Irish in Hollywood (2006). She 
is a regular film critic on RTÉ radio’s Arena. Her new monograph, Irish 
cinema in the twenty-first century, is published in 2019 with Manchester 
University Press.

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