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Unnatural Selection?
Michael Open examines how economics informs the perception of Irish cinema.
Intuitively, of course, most readers of Film Ireland have a sense of what ‘Irish cinema’ is. But is it really that cohesive? I want to spend a substantial part of this article teasing out the difference between the totality of Irish cinema and the perception of Irish cinema as part of world cinema. Firstly, let us be clear what we mean by a ‘national cinema’ and see if Irish cinema fits that concept.
The simple fact is that any national cinema is bound to be diverse in its thematic concerns – there will be comedies and dramas and serious sociological documents and whimsical divertissements. However some national cinemas do manage to seem cohesive. Japanese films, for example, because of the very evident differences in culture from those set in western countries, seem to be distinctive. And Swedish cinema, because of the dominance of Bergman during the first three decades after WWII, seemed to be much more cohesive than it actually was.
Here it is worth mentioning what I call the ‘sieve of economics’. During the (very long) time that I ran Queen’s Film Theatre (QFT) in Belfast, numerous times patrons came up to me and praised our work of showing ‘foreign films’. Often their remarks ended with an expression such as ‘...and French films are so much better than American ones!’ Of course I knew what they meant, and appreciated the cultural sensitivity that their remarks exhibited, but, as time went on, I was increasingly drawn to point out that French cinemas are not over-flowing with the works of Godard or Resnais, or, more recently, Jacques Doillon or Claire Denis. French cinema is capable of producing comedies just as crass as American Pie and action movies just as artless as the Die Hard cycle.
The point here is that we see the ‘best’ of films from countries around the world, and ‘most’ of films from Ireland (and, to a lesser extent, the UK). Ironically, this is true of American films too, though in that case the ‘best’ is a concept that is structured by a perception of profitability shaped in the multiplex. The ‘best’, in relation to the films from France, Spain, Taiwan, or wherever, is a ‘best’ shaped in the ‘arthouse’. The film that, it is perceived, will not attract an audience either in the multiplex or the arthouse, will simply not be distributed.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 121.
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