The Future of an Illusion
Tony Keily considers the achievement of Irish film to date, and ponders what is to come.

There are cold-hearted people out there who will say that, despite the accelerated abundance of homespun celluloid, they can’t think of more than a handful of Irish films produced in the last fifteen years that they would agree, let alone want, to watch again. I would sleep better at night if I knew how to answer them. But then I’m the one who wrote a couple of years back that ‘There is still no sign of anything we could call Irish Cinema.’ [1] And I feel that still applies.

By Irish Cinema I don’t mean something essentialist and over-determined, some kind of greenish ‘national cinema’ springing from genetic imperatives. I mean more a ground or context for filmmaking that could feed into new initiatives, or would at least know how to recognise and receive them. A sense of growth, self-awareness and continuum. A decade and a half of cinematic production has indeed provided, pro-rata for a country of this size, a whole lot of footage. But there’s something missing. Creatively since the mid-90s there have been successive waves of emulation, but rarely anything you could call real initiative. Lack of creative confidence, a certain lack of film culture, sometimes just a lack of common sense. And where isolated initiative has been shown, it hasn’t so much been under-supported as under-appreciated.

Playing hen and egg with the creative malaise is an evident lack of business sense. Unless I don’t understand the meaning of one of three words, there is no such thing as an Irish Film Industry, in the obvious sense that there is no stable production base in Ireland for indigenous feature films and no identifiable market into which to sell what does manage to get made. The size of the domestic box office makes this unsurprising. What’s more difficult to understand is why, beyond a limited service sector for incoming productions, anyone could have thought that an Irish Film Industry was a realistic possibility in the first place. The illusion of this mythological Beast – with the head of a roguish storyteller, a body cast in solid Anglophone gold, and feet clad in bargain basement trainers but still swift enough to carry the ungainly upperparts Oscar-ward – has persisted beyond any reasonable expectation. And our cold-hearted associates will be only to happy to point out that the Beast, when it has got its head in the doors of a cinema at all, has generally collapsed just beyond the steps of the foyer.

See Film Ireland 90, A –Z feature.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 116.