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COPYRIGHT 2003 Irish American Cultural Institute
Without films in Irish all the work done for the language in the schools, on the radio and by voluntary organisations is doomed to ultimate failure no matter how effectively it is done.
Films in Irish, anonymous booklet published in 1950 by the Comhdhail Naisiunta na Gaeilge
The translator invades, extracts, and brings home.
George Steiner, After Babel
THE language revitalization organization Gael Linn is rightly famous for its embrace of "modern technology" in its work trying to revive Irish as Ireland's vernacular tongue. (1) While its traditional music label is perhaps the most widely known of these initiatives, equally important were its forays into film making. Here I offer a short examination of these forays, focusing on the newsreel series Amharc Eireann (A View of Ireland, 1956-64) and on George Morrisson's two films, Mise Eire (I Am Ireland, 1959) and Saoirse? (Freedom?, 1961). Two aspects of these films are particularly important; one is their Griersonian character--and I will explain John Grierson's ideas about cinema--and the other is their quality as translations, translations of a mostly English-speaking country into a series of Irish-speaking images. Gael Linn seemed to visualize film as something that was social and nation-building rather than commercial, an orientation that went against the otherwise capitalist-oriented development policies of the Lemass government. In this regard its film production strongly resembled those of the National Film Board of Canada and the film units of the United Kingdom's General Post Office and Empire Marketing Board, all of which were at some point run by Grierson. That Gael Linn sought to put this idea of film into action through the use of translation brings to light some interesting tensions in the role of translation in Ireland's ongoing process of cultural definition. A mixture of the progressive/social-democratic and the nostalgic/conservative are, we will see, problems that plague both the language revitalization movement and the Griersonian idea of cinema. Thus, these Gael Linn films, far from being merely a cine-historical curiosity, are in fact embodiments of deeply paradoxical moments in both film history and Irish history.
John Grierson (1898-1972) was an extremely influential figure in documentary cinema, though his legacy is a contradictory one. Born in Scotland, he first came to international prominence when he ran the film units of the Empire Marketing Board (1926-33; hereafter EMB) and the General Post Office (1933-38; hereafter GPO), both in the UK. This period is loosely known as the "British Documentary Movement," and Grierson oversaw the production of a number of films that stand as monuments of documentary, such as Drifters (EMB, John Grierson, 1929), Song of Ceylon (EMB, Basil Wright, 1933) and Night Mail (GPO, Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 1936). Grierson went to Canada in 1938, charged with surveying the country's film production; he subsequently became the first head of the National Film Board of Canada, whose original brief was primarily the production of wartime propaganda films. He also consulted on film commissions in New Zealand and Australia, and did film work for UNESCO from 1946 to 1948.
Overall Grierson's vision involved a socially oriented, non-commercial model for film, a model that was closely linked to strong government and national unity. He was influenced by Soviet cinema, whose important figures such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevlod Pudovkin saw film as a means to consolidate and unify the new, postrevolutionary state. Although many of the films made under his supervision (or by people influenced by his vision) were overly earnest or idealistic about working-class life, excessively dry, and vaguely patronizing in that educational-documentary sort of way, many Grierson-era films are also wonders of modernist aesthetics. Night Mail, for instance, features an editing style heavily influenced by Soviet film of the 1920s, a score by Benjamin Britten, and a W.H. Auden poem on the soundtrack (read by Auden himself).
The formal and ideological contradictions of Grierson's legacy have been the subject of a great deal of hand-wringing on the part of Canadian and British critics of the last two decades, and much of this sheds light on the situation of Irish film before the boom years of the late 1980s and 1990s. Although the later phases of Grierson's career were plagued by accusations of Communist sympathy, (2) he has been criticized as reactionary and crypto-fascist by Canadian scholars Joyce Nelson (1988) and Peter Morris (1986), both of whom discuss his admiration of Walter Lippman, as well as Grierson's desire to use film to manipulate mass opinion in order to "manufacture consent" in a way that anticipated contemporary methods of public relations. British scholar and film maker Brian Winston has also argued that Grierson's ideology, like that of his American colleague Robert Flaherty--director of Man of Aran (1934)--was paternalistic and rooted in Victorian ideas about art; Winston grumbles that "Grierson and his school could take government and industrial money for the making of liberal films selling the existing order and its capacity for gradual social amelioration" (1995:36). This recent work has sought to reject the idealism of Grierson the reformer or Grierson the social-democrat in favor of Grierson the corporate toady or Grierson the embodiment of the hyper-efficient, technocratic state apparatus.
In a way that Grierson would no doubt have approved, films in Ireland until the 1970s were, with the exception of work done at Wicklow's Ardmore Studios, (3) mostly produced by organizations with semi-pedagogical aspirations. Important examples of postwar Irish documentary include informational films produced by the departments of health or local government, and A Nation Once Again (1945), a film commemorating the centenary of Thomas Davis's birth, produced by Fianna Fail and seen by many as espousing a self-satisfied nationalism. Indeed, two years later Liam O'Leary, working for the opposition party Clann na Poblachta, produced Our Country (1947), which, although lacking specific mention of Fianna Fail, was seen as an attack on its legacy, documenting the tremendous poverty and deprivation that was prevalent in the last days of the Free State. All this Irish film-making activity was didactic and, in one way or another, nation-building.
Rather than working toward a vision of a commercial, narrative cinema, Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s was moving in a much more Griersonian direction. Indeed, part of the critique of Grierson's legacy, especially from Canadian critics like Nelson and Morris, is that he willfully held back feature film production in countries where he was influential not because he believed film had a higher...
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