Translating Ireland Back into Éire: Gael Linn and Film Making in Irish

TRANSLATING IRELAND BACK INTO ÉIRE: GAEL LINN AND FILM MAKING IN IRISH JERRY WHITE 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 Comhdháil Náisiúnta 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 Éireann (A View of Ireland, 195664 ) and on George Morrisson’s two films, Mise Éire (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 Irishspeaking 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 GAEL LINN AND FILM MAKING IN IRISH 106 1 I am indebted to Thomas Dillon Redshaw, who drew my attention to and sent me a copy of Films in Irish, and to Kevin Rockett who sent me a copy of Ár Scannáin Féin, a booklet so difficult to find that it can only be thought of as a ghost-book; even Proinsias Ó Conluain told me he did not have a copy. Go raibh míle maith agaibh. 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 ciné-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...