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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
4 8
July-August 2018
I
T’S NOW 25 years since Neil Jordan’s border-
crossing landmark
The Crying Game
was
nominated for six Academy Awards, including
Best Picture. It was an outstanding achievement
for a low-budget, thematically complex film that
had failed at the UK box office, and followed a similar
success to for Jim Sheridan’s highly local
My Lef t Foot
,
which had had garnered five nominations and two
wins a couple of years earlier in 1990. As it turned
out,
The Crying Game
won in just one category, best
screenplay. But it went on to re-write the script for
Irish film.
24 hours later, during a hastily convened celebra-
tion par ty at the Irish Film Institute, Ireland’s new (and
first) Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht
Michael D Higgins declared that he would re-establish
the Irish Film Board and locate it in Galway, a gesture
that connected it to the symbolic wellspring of the
Irish imaginary since Yeats.
Soon afterwards, he built on that initiative by
extending the Section 35 tax incentive to individuals
willing to invest up to £25,000, transforming the
amount of cash available to the nascent industry. By
1996 such investments amounted to £40m and a sus-
tainable Irish film sector gained momentum as a slew
of young talent embarked upon often faltering but
hitherto unimaginable careers in film production.
A new phase of government intervention in Irish
film went all-but-unnoticed when Minister Josepha
Madigan recently announced that the Irish Film Board
(IFB) would be renamed Screen Ireland (or Fís Éireann,
meaning Ireland-vision). While this change seems
innocuous enough it might be suggested that it
represents a fundamental shif t in emphasis and even,
perhaps, the final credits on long-nurtured ambitions
to create a distinctively national contribution to what
is widely considered to be the art-form of the twenti-
eth century.
The re-branding was accompanied by a release stat-
ing that the new name recognises “the widening remit
of the agency and gives greater voice to Irish creative
storytelling on screen”. Reactions within the industry
have been mixed, if broadly supportive. Dubliner
Neasa Hardiman is symptomatic of shif ts in the indus-
try having made an international reputation as an
award-winning director of shows such as Happy Valley
and Jessica Jones. She hailed the name change as “a
welcome enlargement of remit given Irish TV’s mini-
mal engagement in screen drama and an
acknowledgement of current realities”. Oscar-nomi
-
nated director of
Room
and the forthcoming
The Little
Soldier
, Lenny Abrahamson, also picked up on the
importance of small-screen production: “I’m OK with
it in that I think it’s important that TV is supported.
RTÉ are not in a position to sustain the TV industry
here and Screen Ireland have a big role to play”.
Irish producers were also broadly welcoming with
Element Pictures boss Ed Guiney saying the change
“very much reflects the way the world is moving”.
Probing more deeply however, Cathal Gaffney, co-
founder of the hugely successful animation studio
Brown Bag Films, questioned in a Twitter post whether
the new name marked a genuine widening of remit
saying that “Changing the logo for the Film Board
without changing the 1980 Film Board Act is pure PR.
Content consumption has changed since 1980 and a
by Tony Tracy
Vogue, commercialism or realism?
The Irish Film Board rebrands as Screen Ireland
MEDIA
July-August 2018
4 9
more up-to-date mandate is what’s needed.
Same act has been interpreted to exclude and
marginalize animation”.
Other directors have been less enthusiastic
about the loss of film in the title. John Carney,
the award-winning writer/director of
Sing
Street
and
Once
, described the adoption of
the screen as “daf t”: “I think the whole caving
in to the laptop and phone screen as some
sort of
fait accompli
is tiresome and wrong-
headed. TV is a passing pleasure. Films do
really last a lifetime. Who wants to watch a
comedy at home on one’s own? Or a
musical!”.
Whether the change is understood as a
response to realities, a shift in state attitudes
to the meaning and value of cultural produc-
tion, or simply a re-branding exercise, it
nonetheless marks the end of the era of
efforts by many to establish and imagine a
distinctively Irish cinema, initiated by John
Huston in a government-backed committee he
chaired which produced in the Huston report
in 1968.
Michael D Higgins saw the re-establishment
of the IFB as an overdue gesture of political
independence, describing its re-establishment
as a choice between “whether we become a
consumer of images in a passive culture or
whether we will be allowed to be makers of
images in an active culture, in a democratic
society”. His decision to re-launch the IFB (fol-
lowing its disbandment after just six years by
Charlie Haughey in 1987) grew from persistent
lobbying by a group of politically-conscious
film makers such as Pat Comerford, Pat
Murphy, Bob Quinn and Lelia Doolin.
Many of these figures were central to the
1980s ‘first wave’ of Irish filmmaking whose
work wa s defined by an experimental approach
and a desire for self-representation to coun-
teract the cinematic stereotypes established
and perpetuated by British and American
cinema.
Surprisingly those filmmakers who had
countered the odds and inexperience and lob-
bied extensively for the re-establishment of
the Film Board featured far less prominently
in its new incarnation and the crucial US suc-
cesses of
My Left Foot
and
The Crying Game
established a template of ‘universal’ story tell-
ing which grafted local narratives onto
mainstream narrative styles and structures.
Nevertheless, despite many often underde-
veloped and frankly forgettable efforts during
its first decade, Irish cinema gradually grew
in confidence, reaching something a pinnacle
with the recent success of films such as
The
Guard
,
Room
,
The Lobster
and
Brooklyn
.
At its most basic, the name change recog-
nises film is an anachronistic term and despite
the insistence of Christopher Nolan and a few
other ‘remainers’, digital sensors and postpro-
duction software have largely replaced
light-sensitive plastic running through cam-
eras at 24 frames per second.
Additionally, the advent of the ‘networked
screen’ has radically changed the character
and location of the audience. Shifting their
business model from mail-order DVD to global
online ser vice, Netflix and those who have fol-
lowed co-opted and then pushed much f ur ther
the business model of cable channels such as
HBO (producer of
Six Feet Under
,
The Sopra-
nos
and
The Wire
) to enlist huge numbers of
subscribers through the production of high-
quality small-screen drama. Today, Netflix
boasts 125 million subscribers, a production
budget of more than $8 billion and commis-
sions 700 original series.
These changes have had a transformative
impact on national cinemas as audiences
stream whatever and wherever they wish, with
an almost limitless level of choice. Surpris-
ingly, while this may be expected to be
especially problematic and potentially cata-
clysmic for a tiny and fragile industry as
Ireland’s, the opposite has occurred.
In recent years the Irish production sector
has blossomed both as a result of massive
inward production of big-budget TV drama
(beginning with
The Tudors
2004-2008 and
including shows such as
The Vikings
,
Penny
Dreadful
and others) while at the same time
experienced a golden age of home-grown cre-
ativity in a diverse range of feature live action
and animation production.
A striking characteristic of the contempo-
rary Irish audiovisual sector has been the
emergence of strongly individual creative
voices who no longer obsesss about what an
Irish film should be or do and whose work is
all the better for it. Indeed a great many recent
Irish films –
Frank
,
Room
,
Mammal
,
The Lob-
ster
–have even eschewed Irish settings and
stories. So outward-directed has the focus of
the industry become that a majority of Irish
films now premiere outside of Ireland at elite
festivals of ‘independent’ cinema such as
Toronto, SXSW or Sundance and secure inter-
national distribution deals before local ones.
Alongside an emerging and overlapping
gaming industry and the exponential rise in
content production for social-media platforms,
the decision to replace ‘film’ with ‘screen’
therefore seems both timely and an
acknowledgment of production/consumption
practices.
But one might also detect broader ideologi-
cal motives at play in an Ireland that has
significantly upped the ante in both branding/
monetising culture and attracting tech and
knowledge economy jobs since the 2008 eco-
nomic crash.
One producer suggested that the name-
change signalled a not-so-subtle subtle drift
away from the artistic, cultural and political
values upon which the IFB was re-established
in 1993 towards the creation of an agency
geared to increasing incoming film and T V pro-
ductions such as
Game of Thrones
(just
finishing) and
The Vikings
(entering its sixth,
and rumoured final season). Supporting this
view is the fact that production space in Ire-
land has multiplied in recent years with the
building of Ashford Studios in Wicklow (soon
to be further expanded at a cost of 190m); the
opening of Troy studios in Limerick and
another massive complex planned for the
south Dublin coast (backed, naturally, by
Bono).
Certainly, the new Screen Ireland uninspir-
ing logo offers a revealing and perhaps
troubling shift in brand identity: several geo-
metric shapes (presumably screens of various
dimensions) arranged on a purple background.
Its overall effect is generic and corporate with
no recognisbaly Irish element while its tagline
– ‘Talent, Creativity, Enterprise’ – takes up
New Labour’s creative industries discourse.
At its most literal, the tagline locates crea-
tivity in the individual, disavowing wider
contexts of state and society. But as John
Carney suggests, the foregrounding of screen
also elides the specific virtues and values of
cinema as art form and social experience.
The most memorable and enduring Irish
films of the now superseded Irish Film Board
–
Nora
,
The Butcher Boy
,
Song for a Raggy
Boy
,
Adam and Paul
,
Once
,
Garage
,
Michael
Inside
,
Song of Granite
among many others –
grew from powerful evocations of Irish
character, place and history and addressed
indigenous, as well as international audi-
ences, on a range of local themes.
Such films were made to be consumed at
the cinema and articulate in a communal set-
ting local perspectives on a particualr culture.
Does the foregrounding of ‘screen’ allow for a
richer and more inclusive variety of such sto-
ries? Or signal a shift away from a
state-subsidised commitment to self-represen-
tation in favour of job creation and
transnational output? Or can it be both?
Tony Tracy is Director of the Huston School of
Film & Digital Media, NUI Galway and co-
author (with Roddy Flynn) of the 'Historical
Dictionary of Irish Cinema', Rowman & Little-
field (2018).
