The International Cast of Irish Cinema: The Case of Michael Collins

The cinema of Ireland has always been international; it has always depended on international (now multinational) capital. To a large extent, the financing of cinema has been in the hands of foreign money, and its subject matter has been appropriated by other countries, in particular, the United States and Great Britain. Dominated directly and indirectly by a world power—Great Britain—Ireland has been doubly colonized, economically and culturally. Until recent decades, the North has been identified with industry, while the South, the Republic of Ireland, has been, for the most part, identified with agriculture, thus reinforcing the long-standing division between the two regions in relation to religion, traditions, and nationalism. In addition, the internal life of the Republic of Ireland has been determined primarily by the powerful intervention of the Roman Catholic Church in the areas of civil and political life, and by long-standing conflicts with Great Britain over boundaries and national identity.

Since the 1950s, the Republic of Ireland has been confronted with the imperative to move into modernity, and changes are now taking place with a vengeance in all aspects of the nation’s economic, social, and cultural life. Terry Byrne writes, “Ireland may be said to be an emergent nation; after centuries of domination by its neighbor, it fought its way to independence only to plunge into self-imposed isolation for the next forty years. Thus it is that, in the last decade of the century, the country is experiencing a late reemergence into world consciousness.”¹

This “reemergence” is tied to intensified industrialization, urbanization, and Europeanization. American and multinational capital have altered the physical and social landscape of the Republic of Ireland, and the older generation, the church, technology, and traditional familial structures have confronted modernity, though not without some trepidation. Ireland now meets Britain and the North not as a country cousin but as a charter member of the European Union, along with Germany, and has become a potential player, for better or worse, on the world stage. Moreover, the movement toward cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic can be traced to European economic and cultural objectives: namely, the “down-playing of nationalism and the nation as exclusive, essentialist, immutable forms.”² The current rethinking of Irish culture and politics challenges Irish institutions on both sides of the border. It involves “an interrogation of Irish history and tradition,” including long-standing myths of ruralism, independent nationhood, ethnicity, political violence, and religion, with its designs on education, forms of cultural expression, and conceptions of gender and sexuality.³

One gauge of these political and cultural transformations is the cinema. Until recently, cinematic portraits of Ireland have been governed by a mythology in part abetted by indigenous ideologies in the interest of national identity, in larger part by a mythology sustained and perpetuated by a large immigrant population scattered worldwide. In this sense, though, there has always been an Irish cinema, even if it did not belong to the people of Ireland. In particular, Hollywood and British cinema exploited Irishness, offering a screen mythology of the fighting Irish, the bloodthirsty Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the garrulous, ineffectual, often alcoholic but charming Irishman. Many diasporic Irish have settled in the United States and Great Britain since the mid-nineteenth century, though the number has dwindled in the last decades of this century. The large presence of Irish people in these countries has not significantly altered “the fictions about Ireland being dished up in Los Angeles and elsewhere.”⁴

This essay focuses on a recent film, Michael Collins (1996), for the light it sheds both on Ireland’s relation to internationalism and on the history and contemporary status of nationalist struggles. The film provides an account of a willfully suppressed event in Irish history, namely Ireland’s civil war.⁵ This account, as presented in the film, is not neutral but provocative. Michael Collins draws on the...