Performance of Myth: The Legend of Longwood (Lisa Mulcahy 2014) --Pg. 301-304 (original) (raw)

Vanishing Point: An Examination of Some Consequences of Globalization for Contemporary Irish Film

2003

"In the following article, some films produced with the support of Bord Scannán na hÉireann (The Irish Film Board) since its reconstitution in 1993 are examined in light of the work of global anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and his theory of global cultural flows. The article suggests that cinema, primarily of Hollywood origin, has had a notable influence on the development of Irish society and Irish film. Contemporary Irish film itself also reflects the failure of Irish history to excite the imagination of Ireland's youth as effectively as the seductive depictions of America's past as mediated through the Western and gangster films. Indeed, films made in Ireland today reflect the influence of both these genres. However, as the key to the Hollywood continuity style of film-making is its own self-effacement, this has sometimes been reflected in the effacement of people, politics and place in contemporary Irish film as film-makers endeavor to attract a global audience for their work. Films considered include The Boy From Mercury (Martin Duffy, 1996), Nora (Pat Murphy, 1999), Circle of Friends (Pat O'Connor, 1993), Dancing at Lughnasa (Pat O'Connor, 1998), Saltwater (Conor McPherson, 1999), Ailsa (Paddy Breathnach, 1993), I Went Down (Paddy Breathnach, 1997), The Disappearance of Finbar (Sue Clayton, 1994/95), When Brendan Met Trudy (Kieron Walsh, 2000), High Boot Benny (Joe Comerford, 1993), Broken Harvest (Maurice O’Callaghan, 1993), The Boxer (Jim Sheridan, 1998), Some Mother’s Son (Terry George, 1996), Nothing Personal (Thaddeus O’Sullivan, 1994/95), and Sweety Barrett (Stephen Bradley, 1998)."

Deterritorializing Irish Filmmaking: Lenny Abrahamson, Gerard Barrett, and Donal Foreman

Nordic Irish Studies Journal, 2016

Despite widespread globalization and transnational cinematic production and reception in Ireland and around the world, the stakes surrounding an emphatically Irish national cinema remain high for Irish cultural critics, scholars, and filmmakers themselves, exemplified by John Michael McDonagh’s disparaging comments about Irish cinema and Irish director Mark O’Connor’s ‘manifesto’ at the 2012 Galway Film Fleadh, which called for a new ‘New Wave’ of Irish cinema. The belatedness of O’Connor’s statement, and the fact that Ireland had an avant-garde ‘First Wave’ in the 1970s and 1980s, speaks to the continuing discussion of emergent movements in small national cinemas. Contemporary Irish cinema exists primarily as a point of reference within larger transnational aesthetic and financial networks across Europe and North America. However, many filmmakers emerging from Ireland have addressed the tensions of national cultural production in a globalized landscape, making their work a productive space through which to theorize the place of the nation within wider transnational formations. The films of three contemporary Irish filmmakers, Gerard Barrett, Donal Foreman, and Lenny Abrahamson, especially in the latter’s most recent films, address the complexities of the ‘national’ in transnational contexts, and speak to the current conditions of Irish populations both within Ireland and across the world. Published in Nordic Irish Studies Journal, Vol. 15, no. 2 (2016)

Review of Stanley Corkin, Starring New York (2011)

History News Network, 2011

Stanley Corkin looks at a certain genre of Hollywood film set in New York during the 1970s, films that reflected and reflected upon that city’s economic, demographic and cultural transformation from a declining industrial metropolis to what Saskia Sassen and others have called a “global city.” Corkin’s ambitious study uses the vast literature of recent urban sociology and geography (by Sassen, David Harvey, Neil Smith and others) to interpret nearly two dozen films produced between 1969 and 1981 by a new generation of Hollywood film makers, who broke free of the restrictive studio-based production system to begin a renaissance in independent American film.