|
Introduction
The films of Bob Quinn, largely unseen in
North America, provide an excellent example of a specifically
anti-colonialist cinema functioning inside of Europe. Although the
ongoing occupation of Northern Ireland is the common lightning rod for
debate about Irish colonialism, Quinn steers away from this topic to
engage in a way that the Irish people,especially those living in rural
areas, are struggling to break away ffrom the legacy of colonialism.
Although he has made over sixty films (and is one of Ireland's most
prolific filmakers) few of them have been exhibited widely in cinemas.
Together these films help to bring ongoing themes into focus. His
experimental/ Godardian featurette Lament for Art O' Leary (1975) and
his documentary Atlantean (1984) both deal with colonialism head on,
while two of his narrative films Poitín (1978) and The Bishop's Story
(1994) deal more with the oppressions of living within a rural
community. His work is certainly insurgent, although aside from Lament
for Art O'Leary he steers away from directly inserting political content
into his work. Rather, he makes films that are radically populist,
arguing for the independence and autonomy of the wretched of Ireland.
Quinn started out working for Irish state
television, Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE). After major changes there, he
left in 1969 to start his own film company, Cinegael, based on the
Conamara islands, where he has lived ever since. He has gone on to
produce an incredibly wide variety of work, including features, shorts
and documentaries. All of his independent films have been made under
Cinegael's umbrella, and Quinn now occupies the position of the wise
veteran of Irish independent cinema. (See Patsy Murphy's essay for the
Galway Film Fleadh's 1993 Quinn retrospective). His latest film The
Bishop's Story was somewhat of a breakthrough in that it is his first to
be released in 35mm. The film however is a reworking of his 1987 film
Budawanny (shot in 16mm, and which I do not discuss here), with a few
new scenes shot in 35mm, some of the narrative reogranised and the
release prints struck in the costlier gauge. "If Budawanny was the old
Testament", he wrote in Film Ireland, "The Bishop's Story would be the
New, the fulfillment of the Old" Across these genres and forms, Quinn
concerns himself with the liberation of the people of Ireland, and the
diversity of his work indicates his recognition of the complexity of
true liberation.
Top
Lament for Art O'Leary
Quinn's "breakthrough' film was also a
breakthrough for Irish cinema as a whole. It marked the first
independently produced film completely in the Gaelic language, and it
was particularly notable for its visual inventiveness. Further, this
fiery nationalistic tale came as its sponsor, Official Sinn Féin, an
essentially socialist arm of the Sinn Féin organisation, was breaking
with the Provisional Sinn Féin, whose goals were more traditionally
Republican. It was a film that provided a glimpse of what an insurgent
Irish cinema could look like.
Lament takes place in present day Conamara,
where a play based on the last great lament in the Irish language is
being produced. The lament, written by O'Leary's wife Eileen, tells the
story of an Irish landowner in the 18th century who returns to his
family's farm, now controlled by the English. It was their defeat of the
Irish chieftains that forced O'Leary into exile, and he now returns and
struggles to come back to the life that he once knew. Quinn moves
between footage of rehearsal in the present and the narrative of the
lament, staged in 18th century costume style. Although the entire cast
of the play is Gaelic-speaking (as befits the population of rural
Conamara) it is being directed by a stodgy English playwright. The lead
actor is a loud, irreverent young man named Art O' Leary, who defies the
Englishman at every turn and is eventually fired. When he comes riding
back into the theatre on a donkey, all hell breaks loose.
The film's correlations between imperialist past
and present are obvious, but a key concern here is the use of the Gaelic
language, which is important when looking at Quinn's work. Although the
play's cast is bilingual, they usually speak to each other in Gaelic, to
the extreme irritation of the director, who sees this as a threat to his
authority. As noted, Lament was the first independent film to be
produced completely in Gaelic (Rockett, 137) and takes as its content
the last great lament written in that language. Quinn clearly frames the
language as a sign of resistance in present day Ireland, a way by which
national identity may be asserted, through the details of everyday life.
Significantly, all four of the films discussed here are in Gaelic. That
the stage director is so irritated by the way that this very basic
feature of Irish culture totally excludes him is a testament to the
power that it holds in the proper hands. Gaelic is taught in all public
Irish schools, but too often kids (city kids, anyway) see it as
irrelevant, although it is still often spoken as the primary language in
many rural areas. Quinn here puts language in a specifically insurgent
context, explicitly showing the power of merely living as a member of a
culture that modernity would have everyone forget.
Indeed, critiques of modernity run throughout
Quinn's work, and these are visible here. What the Lament pines for is
for O'Leary's family farm to be restored to him, for tradition to be
continued. This is the reason that O'Leary came back to Ireland at all,
having served in the European mercenary bands as so many Irishmen did
after fleeing the English takeover (most of these exiles did not return
to Ireland, giving O'Leary's tale an added nationalist zing). It is the
English colonialists who interrupt this tradition, just as in the
present day it is the snobbish Anglophile who does his best to undermine
the Cast living like people in Conamara live. . Throughout the film the
English director exhibits a rather classic colonialist approach to the
indigenous culture: confound these ungovernable people, all I'm trying
to do is teach them a little culture! A big part of the Lament for Art
O' Leary project is to lay bare the ideology of 'acculturation', which
is typically associuated with modernity. Just as the English robbed
O'Leary of his land in the name of 'progress', the Englishman here hopes
to rob O'Leary of his culture and the means to express that culture.
Lament is certainly the most formally inventive
of the films under discussion here, with fragmented editing that jumps
freely between past and present. Indeed, in places the film is edited at
breakneck pace, equal parts Eisenstein and Brakhage. The most obvious
reason for this liberty between time periods (in some scenes a line will
be spoken in the present day and then answered by the character's 18th
century counterpart) is to emphasize the link between imperialism and
the past, but there are clearly other motives at work here. O'Leary's
occasional direct addresses to the camera, and the clearly artificial
way that the narrative is constructed gives the film a feel of
analytical distanciation..
Indeed the narrative is specifically anti-illusionistic,
and Kevin Rockett notes that the style "draws attention to the film's
construction and thereby invites the audience to participate in
uncovering its meaning" (138). This Brechtian strategy was all the rage
in insurgent filmaking circles of the 1970s, recalling Fernando Solans
and Octaviano Getino's statement that "a revolutionary cinema is not
fundamentally one which illustrates, documents, or passively establishes
a situation: rather, it attempts to intervene in the situation as an
element providing thrust or rectification" (56, Italics theirs)
Furthermore, the two observe that Third cinema
deals with "the great themes - the history of the country, the love and
unlove between combatants, the efforts of the people that awakens - all
this is reborn before the decolonized camera" (64) and all of this forms
the storyline of Lament. Its correlation with Third cinema is important
and hardly surprising, especially considering that during the sixties
(and to a great extent to-day), Irish nationalism took much inspiration
from Third world liberation movements. Bob Purdie writes that in the
late 60s "nationalists and separatists were able to see themselves in
the reflected glory of the third world" (84). What we see throughout the
cinema of Bob Quinn, but especially in Lament, is Irish cinema as Third
cinema.
The film was paid for in part by what is now
known as the Worker's Party. It was then known as Official Sinn Féin,
and was at that time in the midst of a split with the republican element
of Sinn Féin, the Provisionals and the Irish National Liberation Army.
The Officials were less interested in utopic dreams of nationalism than
in the nuts and bolts of socialist organizing. The president of the
Worker'sParty said of the film that 'Courageous campaigns of resistance,
however noble their inspiration, will fail like the gesture of Art
O'Leary if they try to ignore realities....Romantic acts of heroism or
defiance may inspire people but will never organise them" (cited in
Rockett, 138). But while O'Leary's lone act of defiance is defeated,
this image of collective organizing is present in the Gaelic speaking
amateur players. The final sequence of the film is their attendance at
the 18th century funeral of the martyred O'Leary, following which they
retire to a pub filled with traditional music.
Top
Poitin
Quinn's next film was the recipient of the first
script grant from the newly-formed Arts Council (Rockett 129). The
legitimacy that such a grant might bestow was quickly dispelled when
Poitín was completed in time to be aired on St. Patrick's Day, 1979. The
Irish public was outraged, and calls to ban the film rang out. The
reasons for this kind of agitation are not hard to see: Quinn's tale of
a hermetic distiller paints a picture of the West of Ireland utterly
opposed to conventional romantic notions of the area (he notes, in Film
Ireland, that he made the film as a response to The Quiet Man).Quinn
here seeks to espose the elements of the Celtic identity that are most
unappealing to the bourgeois/Europeanised sector of Irish society.
However, Quinn goes out of his way to avoid romanticising this
existence, showing it to be defined by alienation and frustration.
The story focuses around Poitín, an incredibly
strong Irish liquor (roughly equivalent, culturally and alcoholically,
to moonshine). Cyril Cusack plays an old distiller who lives on the
Connemara islands with his grown daughter (Mairéad Ní Conghaile) and
employs two outcasts to sell the stuff. When a bunch of the liquor
entrusted to the selling agents is seized by the police, the two steal
it back and sell it off, getting drunk on the proceeds. When they get
thrown out of the pub where they had been sloshing themselves all night,
they make for the distiller's house in search of yet more liquor. They
generally abuse Cusack's character and attempt to rape his daughter, but
he has the last, dark laugh whem he convinces them to row out into the
middle of the water outside his house in a leaky boat.
Colin McArthur, in his essay "The Cultural
Necessity of a Poor Cel;tic Cinema", proposes an oppositional
relationship between 'homo oeconomicus', standing for Aryan European
culture, and 'homo celticus', Celtic culture. He identifies the
following traits: "urban/rural, civilized/uncivilized. barbered/hirsute.
cultured/natural, 'masculine'/'feminine'" (118). He identifies the
Celtic features as "all the negative features the European Bourgeois did
not wish to have". McArthur's specific cinematic context here is not
Irish but Scottish cinema, but he seems to have been talking about the
very aspects that make Poitín so upsetting to respectable society and
such a vibrant variation in the Irish nationalist struggle.
The way that Quinn represents the two selling
agents is of prime concern, for they are everything that McArthur
identifies as nasty and Celtic. One is merely a big oaf who does'nt say
so much (Donal McCann) and the other, the proverbial brains of the
operation, comes across as a very crude tough guy type (Niall Tóibín).
Both are living on the fringes of this already marginalised society, and
both are on the dole. They are, in short, a pair of no good bums. And
yet, they are the two characters that Quinn spends the most time with,
not the eccentric distiller. He forces his viewer to come to terms with
their need to identify with characters that fit the Bourgeois norm by
giving us anti-heroes that defy such norms in a loud, sometimes
(self-)destructive way. Quinn, through these outcasts, shatters the
stereotypes of the rugged men of nature struggling to forge a place for
themselves along the rugged coastline. He insists that they be seen as
products of a culture that is brutal and impoverished, which, as Rockett
points out, is comparable to an urban existence(129).
Most important in the anti-romantic perspective
that Quinn adopts here is the way that he shows Western life to be
defined by frustration. The selling agents have their valuable poitín
stolen by corrupt police officers, but even when they steal it back they
are not satisfied. The scene where the selling agents arrive to
terrorise the poitín-maker is really the harshest indicator of this kind
of perpetual frustration: they flail about aimlessly and destructively,
yelling for more poitín, which the distiller insists he does'nt have.
This comes to an (anti) climax when Toibín tries to rape the daughter:
his attempt ends in impotent failure. The one thing that McCann loves,
his dog, ends up getting killed by the distiller, and he discovers the
body in the final scene, as they are sinking in the boat. Life in this
harsh rural environment is shown to be a constant struggle for only
minimal payoff: the hope of living to get drunk another day. In the end,
even this goal is frustrated.
The film does, however, strike a blow for Irish
nationalism in the way that Quinn insists on privileging the perspective
of the marginalized, all in the name of showing us what its like to live
in 'the real Ireland', which is how he identifies the Western Shore.
Again a critique of modernity is implicit: it is the police, the only
representatives of 'respectable' society in the entire film, who
initiate all this trouble. It ends up that the poitín maker has his own
mechanisms to deal with these treacherous employees, and this eventually
works quite well. The society that Quinn evokes is harsh and frequently
violent, but it is a distinct, fully functioning one not recognising the
laws of 'civilized' Ireland. Martin McCloone ironically notes that
"Poitín offer a deliberately unromantic view of the West of Ireland
which, in cultural nationalism, was the repository of all those Gaelic,
rural values which were to be the basis of Ireland's anti-modernist
utopia"(159). Quinn certainly repudiates the romanticism attached to
those 'Gaelic, rural values', but what this film is about is recognition
that such values exist and continue to exist, not just in the way
imagined by mainstream representation. The film ceratinly does not
celebrate this rural way of life, but it does insist on its accurate
representation, and in so doing validates it in a way that no romantic
tale of man against nature ever could.
Again, a correspondence with third cinema is
quite evident. While the film's style is not as flamboyant and jarring
as Lament, it does reject Hollywood norms through its heavy use of long
takes and long shots coupled with zooms, and this striving for an
alternative film practise, even on a basic aesthetic level, is part of
the Third cinema manifesto. Poitín is not actively agitational, but its
rejection of bourgeois norms of representation is just as oppositional
as anything in Lament. The film is a tract on what is a third world
country within industrialized Europe, and it is made in direct
opposition to conventional modes of cinema, both narrative and visual.
Top
Atlantean
Quinn's most widely-discussed documentary has
been the three-part work Atlantean, made for Irish state television. The
film challenges the very notion of Celtic identity, arguing that the
Irish are actually descended from seafaring peoples that also populate
North Africa. The film once again rejects 'respectable' Aryan notions of
Irish identity, in favour of a nationalist vision that validates the
lives of those who work close to, and work hard on, the Irish land.
Three examples that Quinn offers of overlap
between Irish and Middle Eastern culture are particularly instructive.
The first is that of music, or 'spoken song'.which has been a key part
of the culture of both Ireland and the Middle East (Morocco and Egypt
are his primary examples). One sequence features Quinn cross-cutting
between a man singing an extremely old Irish song in Gaelic and a
Moroccan man singing in Arabic, with remarkable similarity in both tempo
and tone. Both styles of music, it seems, are called 'speaking songs' in
their respective languages. The second example that Quinn uses is of
sails: a certain kind of two-piece sail has for hundreds of years been
the standard for fishing villages on the western shore, and the same
design is found in coastal villages throughout North Africa. He also
finds commonalities between Arabic and Gaelic, far more, he argues, than
exist between Gaelic and English. While many museum experts and
academics are consulted, these sorts of reference points center the
investigations firmly within coastal, rural life. Indee, his entire
argument centers on the notion that small ships served to link Africa
and Ireland, which are actually not that far apart by seafaring
standards and whose main coastal towns spring up along points that would
have been logical trading centers between the two continents.
Quinn at one point admits that he never would
have thought such links to be a real possibility, but this was because
he had a 'colonised mind'. In another sequence, where he is traipsing
about in Morocco, he observes that everyone here speaks French and
Arabic, in much the same way that everyone in the West speaks both
Gaelic and English. In each place, the indigenous population has been
forced to adopt the language of the colonizer. It is this common concern
that informs the entire film, a quest to bring out Ireland and the
Middle East's common heritage of struggle and rebellion, each one forged
in the hope that the people who live there might be able to return to a
way of life other than what is forced on them by powers outside their
culture. The nationalist aspirations are more pronounced in this film
than in any other of the films under discussion except for perhaps
Lament. The irony of this is that nationalism is brought out through
quite a radical challenge to the very essence of the national identity.
It is a common heritage of work and struggle within the confines of
rural life that Quinn advocated through his vision of nationalism,
however, and it is a vision quite consistent with the perspective of his
other films. It carries on his project of eradicating the identity
forced upon rural people by those in positions of usually illigitmate
authority, a classic anti-colonialist mission.
The film is made with many standard documentary
techniques, but Quinn is a common presence and this helps to undermine
any notions of anthropological 'objectivity'. He narrates the film from
a first person perspective, he is seen in a good chunk of it, and he
constantly questions his own conclusions, frequently noting how he had
originally dismissed them as "eccentric" or "foolish". Like Lament,
Atlantean invites engagement on the part of the viewer through Quinn's
professed self-doubt, and works through a structure that is essentially
anti-illusionist. As a result, Atlantean is not the last word on the
origin of Irish culture, nor does it strive to be. Rather, its most
important facet is that it adds another word. Quinn, through this film,
looks to upset Ireland's place in European identity, striving to veer
away from the conventional, Aryan notions of culture more palatable to
respectable society.
Again, a critique of modernity is what helps to
give this film much of its bite. it was broadcast not long after Ireland
had been voted into the European Union, a historical event that served
to usher in what was thought of as 'the new Ireland'. Seen in this
context the film is clearly a reaction against this wave of
cosmopolitanism. Rather than seeking an internationalism based on mutual
economic enrichment, Quinn here argues for an internationalism based on
shared struggle, not only against colonialism but also against the
brutalities of coastal life. Quinn once said that he made these films
for those ' isolated by language ...from the American-English world'
(cited in Rockett, 137). Those are who this reading of history is for as
well. It seeks to answer this isolation not by begging for its
eradication (and for the gentrification of coastal culture) but by
creating a viable alternative, viable from both a scientific and
political perspective.
Top
The Bishop's Story
Quinn's most recent film is also his mopst
ambitious, released in 35mm and playing in many film festivals and
cinematheques. Following the story of a Bishop who violates the laws of
the Catholic Church, The Bishop's Story takes place in a small village
on Clare island and Quinn again shows the West to be harsh and
impoverished, but nonetheless where a fully autonomous culture is
surviving. The film is also anti-authoritarian, but in a more subtle,
sadder way than Quinn's fiery earlier work. The film is visually
innovative, although its minimalist style is the polar opposite of the
frenzied Lament twenty years earlier. The Bishop's Story is much quieter
than Quinn's earlier work, although it displays all the same
commitments.
The film opens with two men, one an old Bishop
and the other a middle-aged priest, in a drying out house for alcoholic
clerics. As the two men get to talking, the Bishop tells the story of a
'minor indiscretion', one that he says happened so long ago that its
hard to consider it very important. The narrative then flashes back some
twenty years when the Bishop, then a priest assigned to a small village
in the Islands, assumes his new post. But a troubled woman with whom he
was once in love makes her way to the island, and he allows her to live
with him as his housekeeper. The respectability of this relationship is
shattered when they sleep topgether during a stormy night. She becomes
pregnant, and although he at first tries to hide their relationship, he
clearly has no intention of forsaking the woman, so eventually comes out
with it. Naturally the Church authorities are appalled.
The culture of the Clare Island village is
evoked in a way that is again anti-romantic, but which nonetheless pays
respect to the powerfully coherent community that has been formed here.
The villagers, most of them fishermen, are clearly very poor and the
village itself has very little development. When one of the parishioners
is giving birth, the bishop chats with her husband, who notes that
without kids there's no future, but that there does'nt seem to be any
future for them here. Indeed, this is an island stuck in the past,
although no real effort, or any desire, to jump into modernity is ever
enunciated. Like in Poitín, the island clearly has its own codes of
behaviour and its ways of punishing those who defy them, as illustrated
by the death of the man who rats out the Bishop. Furthermore, the real
moment of realization that the Bishop is 'living in sin' comes when the
village's population is gathered at a pub for a dance, and the Bishop
puts his arm around the woman, telling her 'its wrong to lie to people
like this'. He here opens himself up for judgement by the collective,
his confessional sermon the next morning serving almost as an
afterthought to this. The Bishop, himself a figure endowed with
authority by conventional structures, here knows the absolute necessity
of submitting himself to the will of his community. THis village is a
fully functioning, self-governing collective.
The life that Quinn evokes here is one of
perpetual struggle, and his characters are the same downtrodden rural
proletarians that we saw in Poitín. As in that film, Quinn does his best
to respect both the harshness of the land and the harshness of the
people who continue to work it. While the dysfuntion of their lives is
not laid as bare as it was in the earlier film, the harshness of their
life is one of the film's crucial elements, making the Bishop's fall
from grace at the hands of the Galway-based outsiders (the church
officials) all the more blasphemous.
The film's distrust of authority figures then is
certainly linked to the advocacy for a rural existence.. When the priest
comes clean, the villagers themselves are less than appalled, and it is
only when one of them spitefully spills the beans to the powers that be
that there is any problem. Quinn, who had already striven to revise
Irish religion in Atlantean, clearly has problems with the authoritarian
nature of the church, framing is as a kind of colonization from within.
He writes in Film Ireland that the novel upon which The Bishop's Story
is based 'appealed to me because it revealed a unique tolerance towards
sexual peccadilloes that I had long discovered existed inConnemara and
which survived in no other community in this theocratic state'.From a
former Official this hostility is not surprising, and Purdie notes that
'the main barrier to socialist ideas in Ireland was the Catholic Church'
(88). The villagers adhere to the church in that they attend mass, etc.,
but Quinn shows that they have a certain attachment to occult religions,
based no doubt on the Gnostic Christianity that he suggested in
Atlantean was at the heart of Irish religion.
The most heartbreaking aspect of this
anti-authoritarianism is in the scenes in the clergy rest home. The now
aged and bitter Bishop cynically tells his young companion that faith is
not something that a man of his position could afford, and that this is
common knowledge among clerics of any influence. Quinn shows this man,
in anti-romantic fashion, as hardened by the forces he's tried to serve,
and ultimately broken by this theocratic/bureaucratic complex that is
the Catholic Church. These are quiet and understated scenes, and their
impact is shattering.
Visually the film is striking not only for its
minimalist black & white photography but for its use of silent film
under titles to translate the Gaelic dialogue. Long takes and long shots
prevail, but unlike Poitín there is not a lot of camera movement, and
Quinn's compositions are most often spare and high contrast. The film's
pictorial grace and apparent artificiality, constantly reinforced by the
intertitle cards, again brings the film into the realm of
anti-illusionistic. Quinn this time is calling attention to the illusion
itself, inviting his viewers to take pleasure in it but reminding them
that this is only a movie (and a silent movie at that!). The minimalist
editing and composition is certainly meant as a visual antecedent to the
lives of the villagers, again an answer to the sugar coating that
Hopllywood so often practises when photographing the Irish landscape. It
is certainly ironic this revisionism is resurrected through the
resurrection of classical film conventions, but the impulse to go back
to a technologically primitive cinema aesthetic is yet another
manifestation of Quinn's skepticism towards modernity, and a way of
paying deference in representing a community still very much stuck in
the past.
The film emerges as the culmination of Quinn's
ongoing concerns: representation of the west, the oppression of
'cultured' authority and the proletarian struggle against it, an an
interest in alternatives to conventional narrative form. |
