Film and Television

The recent media flurry about the Beckett on Film project in the same week as the first public screening of Joseph Strick's 1967 adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses may have raised old fears about a strong literary heritage overshadowing Irish cinematic representation, except that today that's no longer an issue. If anything, the current exuberance in Irish writing is part of the web of cultural production that includes film-making, and frequently involves a crossover as writers such as Conor McPherson, Gerry Stembridge and Vinnie Murphy move easily between stage, performance and cinema. At the time of writing, two Irish films in particular are attracting audiences and critics alike - Murphy's road movie Accelerator and Gerry Stembridge's About Adam . Accelerator follows a race from Belfast to Dublin between six joyriding couples. There have been other Irish forays into the generic landscape of the road movie but Murphy's re-engineering of the genre offers a dashing and energetic spectacle of joyriding as personal style and exuberant action. In a genre bound up with images of landscape, Murphy's cameras track the urban spaces where Whacker and Co. hang out. The joyriders are not an undifferentiated gang of violent youths but are clearly delineated and individuated during the race/itinerary where they describe different dreams of escape. With nods to older films like Rebel without a Cause and Bonnie and Clyde , the film rattles along with an intoxicating buoyancy and avoids crumpling under any petty moral freight.

Stembridge's About Adam is a romantic comedy focusing on contemporary Dublin's young middle class. If Murphy's mainly night-time landscape involves the rural and the urban, About Adam is firmly situated in the Dublin of Temple Bar, in its cappuccino years. In high-energy colours, the story centres on the enigmatic Adam's seduction of three sisters (and almost their brother). As in Accelerator , the characters are sharply observed - neatly and wittily conveyed. In a deft narrative structure that offers incidents from different perspectives, the film's musical palette (Cole Porter, Gershwin among others) echoes Woody Allen's family dramas.

These two films show very different images of contemporary Irish life, but both exemplify localising a global genre in an Irish context - or 'glocalisation' as the marketeers would have it. While the romantic comedy genre is generally seen as a conservative one, it's part of the web of cinema experience - not simply as a single film but as a strand in the memory and history of cinema.

To put this in some kind of context: prior to the re-establishment of the Film Board in 1993, the paucity and sporadic funding for film production exerted impossible pressures on any Irish film that managed to be completed. High expectations collided with a desire that every film should engage comprehensively with Irish life. As Accelerator and About Adam show, these processes of glocalisation invite us to view Irish cinema in all its diversity. Sustained funding is central to this diversity, offering experimental possibilities as well as familiar generic product. What has yet to be resolved is the issue of distribution and exhibition so that Irish audiences can see the products of this funding wherever they live on the island...

Stephanie McBride