C106 article
Excluded by the Nature of Things?
Irish Cinema and Artist's Film
Artists'
film in Ireland: Maeve Connolly looks at the policies
and some of the products.
Introduction
At
the close of my report on 30 Years On: The Arts Council
and the Filmmaker, in CIRCA 104,
I suggested that retrospective seasons and festivals
offer a useful perspective from which to assess developments
in Irish film policy and practice. Through reference to
another recent festival event, Bord Scannán na hÉireann's
New Irish Cinema, 1993-2003, I also highlighted a
number of parallels and oppositions between the
policies of the Arts Council and the Film Board. I now
want to further explore further the relationship
between Irish cinema and artist's film and video, focusing
on policy and on some broader issues of exhibition and
reception.
Developed
through collaboration between the Arts Council and the
Irish Film Institute, the 30 Years On event included
a screening programme, a public forum and a published
directory of Arts Council-funded works. Yet as I noted
in my report, the project was marked by certain emphases,
and exclusions. Most notably, the programme excluded site-specific
work, and the directory was limited to projects funded
through dedicated film and video schemes. This relatively
narrow emphasis runs counter to the actual policy of the
Council, which has developed new funding schemes to engage
with a broader range of artist's practices in film and
video.
|
|
|
Vivienne
Dick: Excluded by the nature of things, 2002,
film still; courtesy the author
|
In recent
years the dedicated Film and Video Award has been replaced
by the multidisciplinary 'Projects' scheme. While this
policy may facilitate a greater diversity of practices,
the Arts Council award has perhaps become less important
as a means of profiling or promoting artist's film.
This policy is apparently under review but, in the meantime,
the Film Board seems to have staked a claim on an area
traditionally associated with artist's film and video
practice. In 2002 the Board announced two new schemes
for film production, one of which provides 100% funding
(between 25,000 and 100,000 Euro) for digital 'Micro-budget'
projects, "of a more experimental nature."
Despite its
newfound commitment to 'experimental' work, the Board
does not have a strong record as a promoter of Irish artist's
film. This is not to suggest that it has failed to fund
this type of practice. A recent Film Board publication,
entitled Ten Years After: The Irish Film Board, 1993-2003,
written by Kevin Rockett and published to coincide with
the New Irish Cinema event, lists a number of artist's
projects under the heading 'Other Short Films'.
These include Clare Langan's film series Floodlight,
Too Dark for Light and Glass Hour, (2000-2002),
Burn (Paddy Jolley and Reynold Reynolds, 2002),
C Oblique O (Blue Funk, 1999) and Excluded by
the Nature of Things (Vivienne Dick, 2002). None of
these were featured in the New Irish Cinema programme,
however, although several were screened at 30
Years On.
Undoubtedly, the Board needed to focus attention on its
achievements in feature film drama because of ongoing
uncertainty around state subvention for the Irish film
industry. But
this exclusive emphasis also serves to marginalize Irish
artist's film.
|
|
|
Pat
Murphy: Maeve, film still; courtesy Irish
Film Institute
|
Exhibiting
Artist's Film: International Perspectives
Exhibitions
of artist's film, in festivals or in the gallery, inevitably
contribute to the construction of official narratives
of art or film history, particularly when institutional
authorities support curatorial selection.
But the absence of a structuring narrative may also
prove problematic. Within the British context, Michael
O'Pray has criticised the "structuralist-formalist" hegemony
that was established in canonical exhibition projects
of the 1970s. But he also links the collapse of avant-garde
film distribution in the late 1980s with a "crisis of
categorisation."
Recent years have witnessed a collapse of British distribution
structures, most notably in the case of Cinenova (formed
in 1991 through a merger of feminist distribution organisations)
and Lux (an amalgamation of the London Film-maker's Co-op
(LFMC) and London Electronic Arts).
But Lux has reinvented itself through projects such as
Shoot, Shoot, Shoot, a touring retrospective of
LFMC work from the 60s and 70s, which opened at Tate Modern
in 2001.
Shoot,
Shoot, Shoot provided the focus for a recent study
of British avant-garde film distribution and curatorship,
led by Julia Knight.
This ongoing research project focuses on two different
approaches to distribution; the 'traditional' model involves
the maintenance of a library and catalogue and has its
roots in the Co-operative system. The newer model, exemplified
by agencies such as the British Film and Video Umbrella,
prioritises the selection, packaging and touring of film
programmes over the establishment of a library. This overtly
curatorial approach runs counter to the Co-op principle,
which is inclusive and non-selective. Shoot, Shoot,
Shoot represented a commercially and critically successful
fusion of the traditional and curatorial modes, as it
managed to attract diverse audiences for artist's film
and video and Knight's research suggests that,
in the future, traditional distributors may come under
increased pressure to provide "value for money" through
this type of curated programme.
|
|
|
Pat
Murphy: Maeve, film still; courtesy Irish
Film Institute
|
Irish Artist's
Film in the '70s and '80s
2003 was
marked by another major exhibition of British artist's
film: A Century of British Artist's Film and Video,
at Tate Britain. This project, curated by David Curtis
of the British Artist's Film and Video Study Centre, provides
a thematic survey of British practice. It encompasses
artists such as Tacita Dean and Jaki Irvine, usually associated
with gallery exhibition, early work by 'art cinema' practitioners
such as Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway and activist
projects such as Handsworth Songs (Black Audio
Film Collective, 1986).
There have been few comparable attempts, in publishing
or in exhibition, to explore the links between cinema,
artist's film and video and activism within the Irish
context. The 30 Years On Project did suggest a
starting point for this type of analysis but, when considered
in conjunction with the New Irish Cinema event,
it actually reinforces a sense of 'separate spheres' for
Irish art and film. The Film Board's Public Forum actually
opened with an historical overview outlining the pivotal
role of the Arts Council during the 1970s but there was
little evidence of any ongoing dialogue between the two
organisations in terms of policy.
The existence
of these relatively separate spheres is all the more striking,
given the earlier convergence between Irish art and film.
Many of the leading contributors to Irish film culture
in the 1970s and 80s, including Joe Comerford (a panellist
on the 30 Years On Forum), Pat Murphy and Thaddeus
O'Sullivan (both contributors to the Film Board event),
were actually art school-trained. Joe Comerford developed
his film practice while studying Fine Art at the National
College of Art in the late 1960s. During a series of student
occupations he helped to organise screenings of avant-garde
films by Richter and Man Ray and this experience informed
early works such as Emtigon (1972). Subsequent
works such as Down The Corner (1978) and Traveller
(1981) are informed by a more collaborative, community-based
approach and both were co-funded by the Production Board
of the British Film Institute. These explorations of social
and cultural identity were followed by Waterbag
(1984), a visually complex representation of abortion
and sexual repression, and two further features: Reefer
and the Model (1988) and High Boot Benny (1993).
|
|
|
Vivienne
Dick: Excluded by the nature of things, 2002,
film still; courtesy the author
|
Thaddeus O'Sullivan
and Pat Murphy also studied film at art school, primarily
at the Royal College of Art (RCA). O'Sullivan's A Pint
of Plain (1975) and On A Paving Stone Mounted
(1978) are set amongst London's Irish community. Both
films are characterised by a fragmentary, episodic structure
and were developed through improvisation. The latter film
was funded and distributed by the Production Board of
the BFI, and continues to generate critical interest for
its exploration of visuality and memory.
In later films, however, such as The Woman Who Married
Clark Gable (1985), O'Sullivan began to rely on scripting,
and to work closely with writers. He also worked as a
cinematographer on a number of critically significant
projects such as Pat Murphy's Anne Devlin (1984),
Cathal Black's Our Boys (1980) and Pigs (1984),
Joe Comerford's Traveller (1982) and Waterbag
(1984), The Return (Phil Mulloy, 1986) and Rocinante
(Cinema Action, 1986). In 1990, he directed the acclaimed
film adaptation of Sam Hanna Bell's novel December
Bride (1990) and he has recently returned to female-centred
period drama with The Heart of Me (2003).
In some respects,
Pat Murphy has followed a similar path to O'Sullivan.
She developed the script for her film, Maeve (co-directed
with John Davies, 1981) while studying film at the RCA,
and again this project was funded by the Production Board
of the BFI. Murphy also spent time in New York, on the
Whitney Independent Study Program, where she collaborated
with feminist filmmakers such as Lizzie Borden and began
to work closely with actors. With Maeve, and Anne
Devlin (1984), Murphy established herself as a prominent
feminist filmmaker but continued to produce critical work
within other contexts. She directed high-profile street
theatre events in support of the Guildford Four and the
Birmingham Six in 1989 and 1990 and subsequently developed
film programmes at IMMA and the Irish Film Institute.
She has also produced video work for installation at the
Famine Museum at Strokestown House. Her most recent feature,
Nora (2000) clearly extends the exploration of
subjectivity instigated in her earlier work, particularly
through its representation of sexuality and memory.
|
|
|
Vivienne
Dick: Excluded by the nature of things, 2002,
film still; courtesy the author
|
It seems that
many of the most prominent of the art school-trained filmmakers
of the 1970s and 80s have gravitated towards feature production,
and particularly period drama. As such their work seems
to share few points of contact with Irish artist's film
and video, and particularly with gallery-based installation.
It is possible, however, to identify an intersection between
these parallel traditions in the work of Vivienne Dick.
Although she has received relatively little critical attention
within the context of Irish cinema studies, Vivienne Dick
has explored many of the same issues as Comerford, O'Sullivan
and Murphy, through Super8, 16mm film and video (for festivals,
film clubs and broadcast contexts) and more recently,
multi-screen gallery installation.
Vivienne
Dick: On the Margins of Irish Cinema
Born in Donegal,
Vivienne Dick moved to New York in 1975. There she became
active in No Wave film culture and produced a series of
Super8 works that include She Had Her Gun All Ready
(1978), Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979), Liberty's
Booty (1980) and Visibility Moderate: A Tourist
Film (1981). Instead of 'structuralism' or the 'poetic'
avant-garde of New American Cinema, No Wave filmmakers
were influenced by the New York Underground of the 1960s.
Together with contemporaries such as Beth and Scott B,
James Nares and Eric Mitchell, Dick celebrated the seedier
side of New York City life.
Many of Dick's
early films are melodramas staged around landmark New
York sites such as the Twin Towers, Coney Island and the
Statue of Liberty, featuring punk performers such as Lydia
Lunch and Pat Place. Her work is characterised by a retro
aesthetic, in terms of costuming, design and music, and
it articulates a fascination with all forms of Americana.
This quality led critics such as J. Hoberman to define
Dick as the "quintessential No Wave filmmaker."
But despite overtly American settings and themes, Dick's
work can actually be seen to explore many of the same
issues as her Irish contemporaries. Most notably, she
explores incest, abuse and familial violence in Beauty
Becomes the Beast, in parallel with Irish works such
as Our Boys (Cathal Black, 1981) and Traveller
(Comerford, 1981). Dick also began to represent Irish
experience directly, through images of Catholicism and
the Irish landscape in Liberty's Booty and Visibility
Moderate: A Tourist Film. The latter film, in particular,
features scenes of the Ring of Kerry that recall Hollywood
fantasy and O'Sullivan's On A Paving Stone Mounted.
|
|
|
Vivienne
Dick: Excluded by the nature of things, 2002,
film still; courtesy the author
|
Vivienne Dick
returned to Ireland in the early 1980s, in order to continue
her film practice. But, although she was actively involved
in the establishment of a film production course at Rathmines
College, Dublin, and in the Ha'penny Film Club, she was
unable to secure funding for her work. She points out
that, during this period, the newly established Irish
Film Board simply did not recognise Super8 as a medium
during this period.
She soon relocated to London, and became a member of the
London Film-Maker's Co-op. There she continued to explore
explicitly Irish themes, often with the support of British
funding agencies, most notably in Rothach (1985),
Trailer (1986) and Images/Ireland (1988).
Through her participation in a number of (gallery-based)
festivals and exhibitions of Irish cinema
she gradually acquired a profile as an Irish practitioner.
As I have
noted, Dick has recently moved into gallery installation.
Her three screen video work Excluded by the Nature
of Things, presented at the Limerick City Gallery
in 2002 and at the Galway Arts Centre in 2003, was funded
by Bord Scannán na hÉireann and by the Arts Council.
In terms of its imagery, Excluded seems to reference
an expanded history of film and art practices. It features
images of pilgrims on Croagh Patrick and at holy wells,
fragments of animation (like Joe Comerford's Traveller)
and fleeting close-ups of Sheela-Na-Gigs and pre-modern
sculpture.
Excluded
could be read as a feminist corrective to earlier projects
such as O'Sullivan's On a Paving Stone Mounted,
which deals explicitly with masculine experience. In particular,
Dick shifts attention away from vision and towards
other senses (smell, touch, hearing) through close-up
images of gorse, bracken and cattle, and sounds of driving
rain on the lens and the windowpanes. She also disrupts
the pictorial quality of the cinematography through animated
sequences and a series of rapid camera movements, suggesting
both motion and broadcast 'static'. The soundtrack is
presented on six speakers and suggests a complex layering
of predominantly natural sound. The only words spoken
throughout the piece are overheard snatches of conversation
at sites of pilgrimage.
|
|
|
Vivienne
Dick: Excluded by the nature of things, 2002,
film still; courtesy the author
|
Dick's feminist
critique also finds expression in the interplay between
the three screens at key moments. In addition to a Gothic
female presence, Excluded incorporates two contemporary
figures: a man and a woman. In the course of the narrative,
they appear on the left and right screens, each approaches
the camera and retreats, approaches again and then jumps
off to the side. The central screen remains empty throughout
and these gestures seem to articulate a desire for a space
between genders. This dimension of Dick's work
invites father analysis
but, for the purposes of this discussion, I want to consider
this 'third space' from a slightly different perspective.
Cinema,
Gallery, Landscape: Continuities in Critical Practice
Multiple
screen installations, often diptychs, have become relatively
commonplace within the gallery since the mid 1990s. The
staging of an explicitly cinematic narrative across
several screens (in the work of Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas,
Shirin Neshat and, more recently, Willie Doherty) provides
a means of interrogating conventions of spectatorship
and reception that are particular to the gallery and the
cinema. By extending this fascination with the 'doubled
image' across a third screen, Excluded By the Nature
of Things articulates a critique of the shot/reverse
shot cinematic convention from an explicitly gendered
perspective. Dick's exploration of spatial dynamics is
inseparable from a critique of landscape, in terms
of its mediation through processes of representation.
As such, it recalls a critical tradition in Irish (and
international) film practice, which can be traced through
Third Cinema, postcolonial film practice and the political
current of the avant-garde.
A similar
engagement with issues of specificity in relation to landscape
and reception can be identified in recent Irish artist's
film and video. C Oblique O (1999), by the artist's
group Blue Funk, is a 16mm film that has been screened
with a cinema context. It employs various different modes
of address (including medical lectures and dramatised
references to science fiction and fantasy) to suggest
possible points of intersection between the body of the
nation and the subject of medical discourse. The 'national'
is figured through images of the hydroelectric turbines
at Ardnacrusha and of an ESB worker, whose body is used
to conduct electricity. The medicalised body is that of
Evelyn Byrne, a member of the group and a cystic fibrosis
sufferer who died before completion of the film. The soundtrack
provides the point at which these discourses (and bodies)
seem to converge, through recordings of the electrical
current and Byrne's critique of medical and psychiatric
practice.
|
|
|
Pat
Murphy: Anne Devlin, film still; courtesy
Irish Film Institute
|
Berlusconi's
Mousetrap (Eamonn Crudden, 2002) also invites analysis
for its more literal representation of the body politic.
This digital video diary documents the repression of anti-capitalist
protest at the Genoa G-8 summit. It also interrogates
the media's 'staging' of political protest as a form of
spectacle. A version of Berlusconi's Mousetrap
was presented in the Hugh Lane Gallery in 2002, accompanied
by archived anti-globalisation web resources. This mode
of presentation referenced the broader context for activist
media production and critique, the finished video is currently
distributed and promoted via the Indymedia website.
The 16mm
films of artist Gerard Byrne also evince a concern with
the representation of public space. In Why it's time
for Imperial Again (2001) Byrne employs a National
Geographic 'advertorial' for the 1981 Chrysler Imperial
as the script for an open air dialogue, which is restaged
several times across a post-industrial landscape complete
with rusted railway tracks and scrap yards. The two central
characters, 'Frank Sinatra' and 'Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca',
take up a series of mock-adversarial positions in order
to debate the merits of the Imperial car. Why it's
time... was shown at IMMA, as part of the NAME, and
it was screened on a monitor surrounded by framed photographs
of the National Geographic on library shelves. This mode
of exhibition highlighted the contrast between the film's
disused industrial locations and the museum interior,
calling attention to the displacement of manufacturing
by the information economy.
|
|
|
Vivienne
Dick: Excluded by the nature of things, 2002,
film still; courtesy the author
|
Despite their
evident differences, these works suggest an ongoing concern
with issues of site and specificity in Irish artist's
film. In some instances, the installation format also
provides a means of commenting upon traditions of representation
that are particular to cinema or to other contexts of
reception. Clearly, the critical perspectives articulated
in the Irish cinema of the 1970s and '80s and in recent
artist's film and video should inform developments in
Irish film policy, particularly in the area of 'experimental'
practice. But this would require a reconsideration of
the institutional frameworks that constitute Irish cinema
and art practice as separate spheres.
Maeve
Connolly is an artist and writer.; she lectures in
film and animation at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art,
Design and Technology.
