Ireland in Focus: Film, Photography, and Popular Culture

Foreword

ix Foreword Colin Gr aham In his book At the Edge of the World, a collection of photographs and impressions of the “marginal” places he has visited over the years, Jean Mohr reminisces about a 1965 trip to the Aran Islands, and specifically to Inisheer. For Mohr, Aran is primarily the place of Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, “for a long time one of the most treasured features of film-club programmes.” Flaherty’s staged realism is clearly important to Mohr’s particular aesthetic, which, like Flaherty’s, is an intensely committed descendant of an anthropologically unflinching gaze. In true photo-journalistic fashion, Mohr recalls Inisheer by reverting to his own journal, and its recording of a journey around Aran by horse and cart: Nothing spectacular meets the eye: walls twice as high as those on the Irish coast, women turning away and hiding their faces at the sight of a camera, O’Flaherty’s [sic] house in the distance. My guide remarked: “Flaherty didn’t really come from Ireland you know. He adopted the name so that he could get on with his work in peace.” (Mohr 1999, 75–76) At stake here is the gap opened up by the inevitable inauthenticity of an image of any kind, and here specifically by that awkward form of knowledge which is made by the apparatus of photography. The camera as a device offers us seemingly precise metaphors, and tempts us with their critical and cultural valencies; focus, framing, aperture, scene, foreground—all terms that seem to offer the viewer some kind of purchase, even “perspective,” on the cultural scene or historical moment they “capture.” But the reassurance of x   |   Foreword these metaphoric parallelisms, and the very idea of the image as something that will preserve evidence, is always made strange through the mechanics of an eye behind glass, recording the real with a distanced, edited mimeticism . Flaherty getting on with his work in peace is only possible because of a comic anonymity Mohr can wryly aspire to himself. Sometimes mistaken for a desire for impersonality, the distance between the creative lens, or the artist’s eye, and its object is more than a cultural distance, and is not even a metaphor for it. That distance will always reminds us, secondhand, of our difference from what’s in the image, and even the thrill of local recognition is heightened by the peculiarity of the photograph, and of the lens’s work, or of the painter’s brushstroke. Mohr’s trip to Ireland, recollected in tranquillity , is a record of nothingness, of faces turned away, and of a creative camera which faked its authenticity so well its slippery grasp on truth is inadvertently replicated in the slip on Flaherty’s name. Film, photography, painting, and their variations in the visual arts are still a curiously invisible presence in the way Ireland, its history, and its meanings are understood, despite the fact there was a relatively early twentieth -century Irish passion for cinema, an even earlier trend for documentary photography, and a constant intertwining of visual and verbal arts during the same period in the Literary Revival. The politics and aesthetics of these visual forms have their own semantics—film’s global language circulates in and out of cultural boundaries with an apparent freedom, yet as a commodity, film travels with and along the same lines as global capital. Early Irish films (for example, those made by the Film Company of Ireland) may owe part of their acting style and personnel to the Abbey stage, but they are nevertheless filmic narratives that make sense of cinema as a form in the same way as cinema did, at the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic. If a national cinema is an economic fantasy, then a national way of looking at cinema is merely a revealing intellectual aspiration. Painting, sculpture, and architecture, for all that they can provide moments of national pride, even national record, partake in a grammar of Western art before they become meaningful. When the photographic, cinematic, and visual arts are analyzed to understand a culture, then they will only ever see a culture estranged from itself. In critical and sometimes artistic pursuit of the tantalizingly nonlinguistic , talismanic image of pure knowledge, the inherently magical Foreword   |   xi qualities of the reproduced image heighten the promise of the mimetic to a form of hyperreality, and lead to a...