Neil Jordan: Interviews

Introduction

ix Introduction With each successive outing, Neil Jordan—without doubt the most interesting filmmaker to emerge thus far from Ireland—astonishes the viewer with the eclectic, catholic range of his interests. From Angel (1982) to The Borgias (2011), Jordan’s peregrinations through genre often expand or efface the boundaries between categories. Jordan is deeply idiosyncratic, always experimenting with form, unapologetically changing styles from film to film. He is a master at creating moods and situations that can be sensed, but that are too complex to be grasped immediately. Jordan is a filmmaker who loves both the image, and the use of language that expresses and transforms meaning. He has no trepidations about making bold, outré gestures in his work. Jordan is one of the most poetic, intelligent , and gifted of contemporary filmmakers. As much as Jordan experiments with form and generic convention, his work tends to circulate around repeated themes. Among them are a fascination with storytelling, and how the stories are enacted through various modes of performance; the quest for identity and wholeness; meditations on innocence; permutations of the family unit; violence and its attendant psychic and physical damage; impossible love and erotic tension; the dark and irrational aspects of the human soul; and characters who are, in some way, haunted by loss. His films continually embrace the most profound question one can ask: What does it mean to be human? A prominent attribute of Jordan’s work is his approach to character. He does not have a strong investment in probing his characters’ psychology in the traditional sense; he is most interested in their immediate feelings , moments of revelation, and sensations so beloved by the Romantics . One knows very little about Jordan’s characters, their backstories are minimal, at best; we enter their lives in medias res. And yet, one cannot call these films apsychological (in the way one might consider the work of Antonioni), because there is access to the emotional sensibilities of the characters. Characters have definition and amplitude; feelings are x introduction experienced and enacted; emotional journeys occur that result in major alterations of a character’s life. Jordan’s main concern is something I would call “sensual meaning,” something that is provisional and fleeting , and made up of the melding of image, sound, performance, narrative , and dialogue. One intuits not only from character traits, but from sensory materials. ItisimpossibletoconsiderJordan’sworkwithoutcontextualizinghim as a filmmaker who came into adulthood just as the troubles resurfaced in Ireland in the late 1960s. The interviews beginning with Angel (1982) (both by Mario Falsetto and Michael Open) are a way of comprehending the violence and sectarian hostilities of The Troubles.1 The director utilizes the political turmoil to interrogate the journey of a lone individual who gradually loses his connection not only with the external world, but with his identity. He becomes a self-appointed executioner, who avenges the death of a girl he barely knew. The central question is: What happens to a human being once he becomes enmeshed in violence? The interviews also focus our attention on Jordan as a first-time director , as he learns the process of filmmaking, as well as the attendant contretemps that accompany this newfound responsibility. Jordan’s move from literature to film also elicited disapproval and disappointment for his (temporary) abandonment of the grand Irish literary tradition. Angel marks Jordan’s initial partnership with Stephen Rea, who would become a fixture in the director’s films. Jordan manifests a strong personal vision in his freshman film, and also his great indebtedness to European Art Cinema, particularly of the French New Wave, New German Cinema, and Italian films. There is a good deal of experimentation with off-screen sound, color, and genre. The manipulation of genre is something Jordan will deploy throughout his career, most often finessing several genres simultaneously. Unlike the sacred and national origins treated in myth and legend, another form of storytelling—fairy tales—are a narrative form that engages with personal and social origins, providing a rich body of cultural imagery and history for a filmmaker concerned with the negotiation of identity. Moreover, the instability of fairy tales, historically contingent, forever reworked by the new teller, allows for the kind of creative maneuvers that subtend the director’s interrogation of the power of narrative and myth. Rather than following the paths of archetypal and structural absolutes or overlaying moral and social codes in his use of fairy tales, Jordan builds upon the disruptive elements of this durable narrative form...