C91 Columns
FILM AND TELEVISION: Who made the World? Who built the Nation?
Cue ESB sponsor sequence. Roll image of woman watching large screen in virtual city. Run audio static--an audible soundbite... "some grew up with very little visual awareness..." Fade up sounds of church bells. Pan camera across model of barren landscape, a dolmen visible in flashes of lightning... Thus, the twin themes of tradition and modernity were established which underpin the opening episode of NationBuilding, RTÉ's recent series about 20th-century Irish architecture. The first of several intertitles, Ourselves Alone reinforces the strong historical dimension as the narrator alerts us; "We're back in 1922." This introductory episode addressed selected moments and monuments. Anecdotes about the diplomatic deliberations regarding the Scott shamrock pavilion at the 1939 World Fair pointed up De Valera's isolationist stance; keep the Irish building well away from the UK one. One key sequence focused on the ESB's hydro-station building project at Ardnacrusha. Central to this labour-intensive project was the internal migration of farmworkers from the West to work on this flagship modernist project. Here again, the tradition of the West as the authentic Ireland hovered.
The programme used and recycled plenty of good archival material but rarely bothered to caption or identify it, almost as though images of the past are sufficient in themselves--not requiring any anchorage. Plenty of graphics constantly tumbled across the screen, but this visual clutter was far less illuminating than any conventional captioning. A heavy case of CAD-mania and graphic fetishism! At one point, the narrator intones, "Once Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932, the State got involved in an ambitious building programme, exploiting the international style to give full expression to Éamonn De Valera's ideas." Yet the accompanying images lack any indication of where they are and if they are still standing--a reasonable question given the demolition jobs of the past 40 years.
The familiar aspects associated with de Valera's cultural vision for the new nation were closely bound up with economic isolationism. Yet as this programme implied, the fledgling state was not entirely isolationist, engaging with international architectural trends and examples. A section of the programme explored the impact of European modernist styles on the way in which the nation's buildings were imagined and built. Again, it wasn't always clear which buildings were the European examples and which were the national adaptations due to lack of caption. Some of the discussions began to explore how the state's architectural legacy is bound up with particular alliances between politics and economics, but never fully confronted them. (perhaps they will emerge later in the series). While a voice in the opening sequence laments a lack of "visual awareness," as history has shown it is not simply an issue of visual awareness but rather a question of how the visual and architectural legacy was shaped by the actions and alliances of those who had power to build, demolish and rezone the nation.
Stephanie McBride
Column reproduced from CIRCA 91, Spring 2000, p. 15
