Rethinking Occupied Ireland: Gender and Incarceration in Contemporary Irish Film

1 Into the Quagmire

32 1 Into the Quagmire Feminism, Nationalism, Partition I N P I C T U R I N G D E R R Y (Dave Fox, 1985), members of a photography collective recall that when they showed their work at an arts college in England, audience members complained that the photographs were too “heavy.” While one of the photographers explains that the collective deliberately avoided politically weighty material, the film cuts to a series of the exhibited images—a woman standing on a hillside, a woman kneeling before an altar, a street scene of people going about their everyday tasks. All relatively mundane, these black-and-white photographs would be simple slices of life were they taken in London or Dublin, but when looking at images shot in Derry—a city whose very name is disputed— the audience perceives a political and emotional weight that oppresses and alienates them from the subject matter. The reception of these photographs in 1980s England reveals the way that meaning emerges through the circulation of images in a given field: decades of media coverage of the “troubles” have primed the English audience to see heaviness where the Derry collective sees everyday life. Through surveillance, incidents of state and anti-state violence, and the accumulation of photojournalistic images of warfare, representations of space in Northern Ireland have become charged with a sense of menace . One result of the weight of that history has been a tendency in film and media to imagine political engagement as a burdensome trait of an essential Irish nature rather than as something that emerged in relation to a particular set of historical and political circumstances. Thus, for some of the audience members, the key to “lightening” the Derry collective’s Into the Quagmire ◎ 33 photographs was to leave Irish people out of the image entirely. As one photographer explains: So they asked us why didn’t we take photographs of scenery. . . . It was me that said, “Well, if we took photographs of scenery—if we go out and take a photograph of trees and bushes and a lovely green field, well, we don’t know what’s behind the trees and bushes.” And little did I know that two years later my husband was to be shot dead by the British Army and the RUC—and they lay in wait for him . . . behind bushes and trees, and he was shot in a really scenic setting, by the Waterside. . . . So that’s what scenery means to us; you don’t know who’s behind a bush or a tree. (Picturing Derry 1985) For the arts-college audience, the countryside is the antidote to the oppressiveness of Northern urban life, but for the Derry photographer such binary oppositions ring false. A scenic setting seemingly empty of people offers no refuge from the politics of occupation. In fact, it only facilitates the violent actions of state security forces. The imminent threat that the landscape conceals—in this case government assassins, but in other instances, paramilitary—is captured in Willie Doherty’s work, which represents pervasive, invisible surveillance through alluring photographs of river embankments, hills, bushes, bridges, and streets that throb with a disconcerting silence as we realize every space is eerily devoid of people. But even when traces of human activity are present , they are hardly reassuring. In such photos, something has happened or is about to happen, and since the event itself always eludes the photographer and the viewer, we wonder what else is just beyond our grasp. The sense of recent or impending violence that saturates Doherty’s landscapes is heightened by the stunning visual style of the photographs, especially in his later cibachrome prints. Vivid, glossy, and soaked with color, works like “Border Incident” and “Border Road (Diptych)” juxtapose the wild beauty of the Irish landscape with the charred remains of cars or the cement barricades installed by security forces to block traffic from crossing unapproved roads at the border. In The Outskirts (fig. 2), deep-green shrubs backlit by a sumptuous, purple sunset compete for our attention with screeching tire tracks on a 34 ◎ Rethinking Occupied Ireland road in the foreground. Severed from a historical or political sense of place, the photo might encourage us to focus on the picturesque landscape and muse over the juxtaposition of natural scenery with the industrial traces of modern life. But in the context of Derry’s border roads, where a...