30 Years On - The Arts Council and the Filmmaker

IFC, Dublin 28 March - 1 April. Overview by Ted Sheehy, curator.

The history of Irish filmmaking is a history of hesitant beginnings, each built upon a fragmentary foundation laid by its predecessor. Filmmakers who applied to the Arts Council for funding were originally refused on the basis that film was not cited as an art form in the 1951 Arts Act. The 1973 Arts Act added film to the Arts Council's remit and from then on, to quote the Council's report for 1974, 'The Council concerned itself with the question of how it could best assist film production in Ireland.'
That assistance brought to an end the history of hesitant beginnings for Irish filmmaking. The Council's first grants to filmmakers were given in 1975, for Cathal Black's Wheels, for Joe Comerford's screenplay for High Boot Benny, and for Bob Quinn's sculpture documentary, Cloch, all of which are in this programme. That High Boot Benny was not produced until 1993 is evidence of the particular obstacle course that filmmakers have to negotiate.

Obstacles aside, a film may need a long gestation, with many changes along the way. Alan Gilsenan's All Souls Day (1997), also in the programme, started out as a treatment based on Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' in 1989. Bob Quinn's Budawanny (1987) started out in 1985 as an adaptation of Pádraic Standún's novel Súil le Breith and then became The Bishop's Story (1994).

The act of making a film is often a tussle between process and obstacle. The other tussle - between authorial vision and collaborative work practice - began to ease with the emergence of portable video technology in the late 70s. The current relatively low cost, high resolution, digital technology means the capture, treatment and post-production of the moving image is more accessible and controllable by the artist than ever before.

This development is perhaps best represented in the programme by a selection of work that might loosely be termed 'experimental'. It ranges from Joe Comerford's short video/film mix Waterbag to work from Vivienne Dick, Clare Langan, Paddy Jolley, Grace Weir and Paul Rowley, whose recent feature length project, As Láthair, will be screened.

The programme also contains more conventionally-produced short and feature narratives, some of which have not been seen for some time - Robert Wynne Simmons' The Outcasts, Paddy Breathnach's The Long Way Home, Johnny Gogan's The Bargain Shop, the City Vision group's Sometime City, Pat Murphy's Anne Devlin, Mark Kilroy's Hard Shoulder, Damien O'Donnell's Thirty Five Aside, and Margo Harkin's Hush A Bye Baby.

There is also a significant range of documentary work - an episode of Louis Marcus's The Heritage of Irelan', Frank Stapleton's collaboration with Noel Browne, Requiem for a Civilisation, Carlo Gebler's portrait of Francis Stuart, Sean Ó Mordha's overview of Irish art from ten years ago, and John T Davis's The Uncle Jack.

Taken together the films represent a remarkably consistent level of engagement with the language of the moving image. The programme will act as the focus for discussion about several issues not least of which are preservation of and access to our near contemporary films, and the place of the filmmaker as artist in a globalised cultural landscape increasingly dominated by commercial imperatives.

Note: In addition to the formal screening programme at the IFC we hope to make as many of the Arts Council funded films as are on video (BETA/VHS) available for viewing in a room with monitors set aside for that purpose. Any recipient of an Arts Council Film & Video award whose completed project is available on video should contact Ted Sheehy at screen@ireland.com to arrange for their film's inclusion in this viewing facility.

See IFC brochure or the FII website for details of screenings.

This article is printed in Film Ireland 91