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Declarations of Independence
Using a DV camera and a small pool of talented actors, Colin Downey and Ivan Kavanagh may just have started a two-man New Wave in Irish Cinema. Working without support from the funding bodies, they write, produce, direct, shoot, record, edit and mix their own films. Manus McManus gets enthusiastic.
In Colin Downey’s Oedipal drama, Dream Diary, a schoolgirl catches her widowed father looking at an erotic drawing. She berates him in the only actual dialogue in the film (other speech being delivered in voice-over). It is a moment of delightful invention: her brief tirade is composed of vowels separated by the sound of hammer strokes. After the remonstration she remarks, ‘Father had never seen me so angry.’ The scene indicates Downey’s startling originality, and, perhaps, his awareness of it: for his individuality was something that he had previously suppressed in an attempt to conform to what he regarded as the established way of making films in Ireland.
Fresh out of the National College of Art and Design, where he studied fine art, he surveyed what he refers to as ‘the canon’ and tried to figure out where he might fit in. ‘I just watched lots of Irish stuff and thought, “Well maybe, with the debts after college, I’ve got to make this pay off. I’ve been to this festival [his graduation piece, a short film shot on Super 8 mm, was accepted by the Galway Film Fleadh]: how can I come back and win it and try to make some kind of progression for myself?”’ To that end, he made what he terms a ‘jolly-up’ film. It drew a surprising and salutary response from the Fleadh: they told him that it was ‘too mainstream’. When he replied that he hadn’t set out to ‘make Tarkovsky’, they told him that that was the kind of work he should be attempting.
Around this time, Downey, who is from Navan, was attending a writer/director/producer course in Filmbase. ‘There were some great people there,’ he says, ‘but I just thought, “Everybody seems to want to get development money and maybe never make a film.”’ The notion of waiting three to five years to get a project into production didn’t appeal to him. ‘I wanted to make films. And I felt people were looking at me like I had two heads: “Why are you [running off] making films? You’re not making progress. There are other people here who have got development money.” It was only really then that I said, “Right, well I’m just going to do what I want to do, and to hell with it.” And only then, when you get that confidence into the work, people say, “Where’s this coming from? This is really interesting.”’ And it is. That confidence means that Downey’s work is informed by imagination, and not just by will. As a result, he often makes unpredictable and exhilarating moves in his films. All the surprises feel right: they have the ensorcelling logic of dreams.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 117.
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