Conn Holohan

This book takes a comparative approach to contemporary Irish and Spanish cinema in order to examine the ways in which the films produced have been marked by Ireland and Spain’s distinctive encounters with modernity. In successive chapters, the book explores the representation of gender, sexuality, space and history within contemporary Irish and Spanish film, arguing that these representations should be read in relation to the particular process of modernisation which occurred within Ireland and Spain, whereby an insular, conservative national culture was supplanted within a short period of time by an urbanised, European secularism. Within these representations, it argues, can be uncovered attempts to reconstruct a national narrative within this new cultural context. It traces these cultural shifts through a detailed analysis of the aesthetic strategies and thematic concerns of the films which have emerged from Ireland and Spain over the last fifteen years.

By establishing specific idiosyncratic features shared by Irish and Spanish films, this book places Ireland’s cultural and cinematic development firmly within a European context. By concentrating on genre films, it illustrates how films which are not specifically concerned with issues of nation are nevertheless marked by their national context. Furthermore, it argues for the importance of reinstating the nation as an interpretative category, one which allows the assertion of a politicised national identity within an increasingly globalised entertainment cinema.

Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger’s Tales is an interdisciplinary collection of essays by established and emerging scholars, analysing the shifting representations of Irish men across a range of popular culture forms in the period of the Celtic Tiger and beyond. From the self-stylings of GAA star Paul Galvin to theatrical depictions of an Irish masculinity in crisis, the essays firmly situate these diverse images of Irish manhood within the social and cultural contexts which produced them. Taking as its overall context the social changes instigated by the economic boom of the 1990s, the book traces the effects of these changes into popular understandings of what it is to be an Irish male. Through insightful analyses of film, theatre, literature and more, the essays in this collection argue that Irish masculinity has become a more heterogeneous concept within this period whilst critiquing the gender binaries which continue to structure Irish society and culture.

Through a detailed textual analysis of John Stahl’s Imitation of Life, this article explores the manner in which 1930s domestic melodramas visualise the home as a space apart from the public sphere of economic exchange. Drawing on phenomenological understandings of cinematic space, the article argues that careful attention to framing and camera movement within Stahl’s film reveal the set of exclusions and displacements through which its image of home becomes possible, and enables us to more fully understand the spatial assumptions through which melodrama produces its moral universe.

State support for filmmaking in Europe is predicated upon the argument that films make an important contribution to the cultural life of the nation. Indeed, films, along with other cultural objects, contribute to the imaginative construction of both Europe and its constituent nation-states as 'home' for those who reside there. This has led to the charge that state-subsidized filmmaking constitutes a culturally reactionary response to the cosmopolitan flows of global culture and capital. However, drawing on Fredric Jameson's concept of cognitive mapping enables us to reconceive of the home as a progressive spatial category that expresses the imbrication of the local and the global in contemporary media culture.
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Whilst the imaginative act of home-making is intensely personalised in the relationships we construct to our own spaces of habitation, the symbolic potency of the home-place within Irish cultural and political discourse suggests that the understanding of what it means to be at home is always also a shared one. As an examination of Irish cultural discourses over the past decades reveals, that understanding necessarily shifts over time in response to wider social, economic and cultural changes. This essay traces how such shifts have found expression within Irish cinema, how cinema as a medium has articulated a changing relationship to the ‘symbolic fiction’ that is home. In particular, it tracks a movement within Irish films from the traditional association of home with a specific, bounded place, to the image of an Ireland which conceives of itself inhabiting a fluctuating global space. It suggests that both these images of belonging express a tension between what might be termed local and global perspectives on space; indeed that the purpose of home as an imaginative construct is to negotiate between those two seemingly divergent understandings of the physical and social spaces in which we live our everyday lives. Furthermore, in the troubled home-places of recent Irish cinema, it discerns a collapse of home’s comforting fictions as Irish society experiences a visceral encounter with the economic forces which determine our ability to imagine a space in which we belong.

In cinema, as in everyday life, the home is imagined to have distinct spatio-temporal qualities which distinguish it from its spatial surrounds. By paying close attention to the qualities which cinema confers upon the home, we may learn something of what is at stake in our desire for spatial belonging. In this paper, the tension between our emotional commitment to the home-space and the necessary repressions which such commitment entails is explored through detailed analysis of the 2008 French film Home (Ursula Meier) . As suggested by its title, this film brings to an explicit level the narrative and visual investment in the home-space which remains implicit within most narrative cinema. By reading the film through the spatial theories of Marc Auge and Doreen Massey, as well as through the generic prism of melodrama, this paper will seek to situate the home within the spatio-temporal categories which collectively constitute our globalised postmodern culture.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Deleuze’s contribution to film theorizing was largely ignored within the field of film studies during the decade following the publication of Cinema 1 and 2. In an era of film writing which was seeking to distance itself from the theoretical excesses of the 1970s, Deleuze’s approach seemed to lack both the empirical rigour and the modesty of aim which was required of any critical engagement with film form. The problem with such a wholesale rejection, however, is suggested by Annette Kuhn in her introduction to the fiftieth anniversary issue of Screen, in which she claims that the retreat from Grand Theory that has occurred within film studies over the past three decades has also ‘entailed a wholesale distaste for the essential activity of conceptualization, of theorizing’ (p5). Thus, in turning away from any over-arching theory of cinema and its institutions, we are forced to question what constitutes film analysis’ proper object of enquiry. Is film analysis an exercise in description, seeking to isolate discreet elements of the cinematic process for empirically verifiable analysis? Or is its nature always inevitably prescriptive, containing within its forensic enquiries an implied vision of the cinema that could be?

In distinguishing between ‘Theory’ and theorizing, Kuhn seeks to move beyond any one ‘hypostatized’ image of Theory for an understanding of theorizing as an open-ended process of enquiry. For if a fixed notion of ‘Theory’ works to close down what may be considered knowledge, the task of the film theorist nevertheless remains to produce new knowledge through theorization, through the creation of concepts. It is Deleuze’s commitment to concepts that perhaps explains the belated ‘Deleuzian turn’ within film studies since the turn of the millennium. For Deleuze, the goal of film theory is to create concepts that ‘relate only to cinema…Concepts proper to cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically.’ If, by the 1980s, Theory in its dominant forms struggled to yield useful new insights into the cinematic experience, then Deleuze’s cinematic concepts have offered film studies the possibility of a reconnect between the filmic object and the theorizing process.

The focus of this chapter, therefore, is on the use value of Deleuze for film studies. It considers some of the insights of his two Cinema books into the nature of the cinematic process, focusing in particular on cinema’s privileged relationship to time. However, it  also acknowledges the impossibility of separating Deleuze’s writing on film from his wider body of work and  examines how film theorists have productively applied his understanding of difference or the process of schizoanalysis to a variety of texts. Any understanding of Deleuze’s impact upon film studies must necessarily address the relationship between his ideas and the other key explanatory frameworks that have dominated the discipline, in particular psychoanalysis.  However, underlying any such comparisons or evaluations are the questions raised regarding the nature of film theory and its proper goal. To this end, this chapter ultimately argues that Deleuze offers us an understanding of film theory as creative intervention and an ethical standpoint towards the history of the image which is predicated upon an adequate understanding of time.

By foregrounding the formal choices through which it depicts its image of violence, Wind forces us to consider how the image might ethically respond to violence. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this article argues that Wind positions the viewer to understand time as a force for change

Hamid Naficy’s analysis of migrant cinema focuses on the varying relationships to the home-space within e ́migre ́ films, shifting between outward-looking journeys of aspiration and imaginative returns to the lost homeland. The central narrative concern in such films is the search for a space in which to belong. Felicia’s Journey depicts a young girl’s migration from Ireland to the Midlands of England in search of the home that she fantasises finding with her former lover and father of her unborn child. Her encounter with the psychopath Hilditch brings the question of home-founding to the fore and reveals the fantasy and distortions of memory which underpin all constructions of home.

Sunday (John Lalor) presents us with a moment of character revelation that undermines the gender stereotypes that have dominated Irish cinema. Its force lies in its refusal to contextualize this revelation through narrative, thereby ensuring that it retains its power to disturb,

Despite its association with social criticism, the road movie genre frequently privi- leges a western, male subjectivity and presents unquestioningly his right to travel into the other’s space. The films of Tony Gatlif frequently depict westerners travelling into North Africa and eastern Europe; however, the romanticism inherent in this movement is undercut by the films’ insistent marking of these journeys as error. Deprived of the privileged relationship to space enjoyed by the classic road movie protagonist, Gatlif’s characters are instead enveloped by the spaces through which they journey in a manner that recasts the oppositions such as inside/outside and centre/periphery through which western spatial privilege is maintained. This article focuses in particular on Gatlif’s 2004 film Exils and its depiction of the exile’s return to his homeland.

The tendency to consider representations of sexuality as metaphors for the nation is recurrent within writing on Irish cinema. This has led to a critical under-engagement with the representations of sexual identity and homosexual desire that have occurred within Irish film. Through examining two films which have emerged out of Ireland since the turn of the century, About Adam (Gerry Stembridge, 2000) and Goldfish Memory (Liz Gill, 2003), this essay critiques the dominant critical focus within Irish film studies on issues of nation, suggesting that this has deflected a more rigorous attention to the manner in which films such as these engage with issues of sexuality. From this perspective, their celebratory take on contemporary Ireland’s freedom from its sexually repressive past are viewed as somewhat less progressive than they may first appear.