Irish Horror! The film The Hallow has all the classic elements of a horror flick.  The film directed by Corin Hardy brings Irish folklore creatures to life in order to terrorize a British couple that are trespassing in the woods.  Hardy’s talent for special effects is quite evident in this film by using lots of authentic Celtic mythology.  Not only does he introduce the audience to the creatures of Irish folklore but Hardy plays on the history between Ireland and Britain subtly in his story line, while blending mythology and science.  The story line revolves around a tree doctor and his wife and infant son, who come to live in the woods in Ireland in order evaluate the forest for development.  The locals are unreceptive to the couple and continually warn them about trespassing on the Hallow.  There is very little narrative but scenes are full of chemically mutating slime, zombie like creatures, darkness interrupted by flashes of light and isolation. 

The historical interpretation can be perceived, as the couple is British, they move into the ‘big’ house in the countryside while the local Irish wish them to leave.  This draws parallels to the Anglo-Irish landlords in the 17^th to the 20^th century and the colonization of Ireland by Britain. 

This film is very fast paced with very little dialogue transitioning from one scary scene to the next.  This film could be classified as Eco-Horror playing on the fears of the environment fighting back.

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Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU1StZXrExs

This film is based on a production by Edna Walsh, which was first performed at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork, Ireland.  The play is based on two teenagers who have grown up together since infancy, living next door to each other and speaking a private language that only they understand.  For example, they live in Cork City, which they refer to as Pork Sity and call each other by pet names, the male character is Pig and the female character is Runt.  Their attachment to each other has a twin like nature; they’re every day routine identical.  The film was directed by Kirsten Sheridan and released in 2001 with the same name.  The film portrays the two teenagers as social outcasts, both exhilarated by violence and bullying.  Flashbacks to their childhood provide some explanations of their family situations and the audience develops some sense of reasoning behind their rebellious behaviour.   After a series of violent acts, Runt is sent to an intervention centre to learn a trade with the understanding that she can be rehabilitated; while it was believed that Pig has no hope of being reformed.  It is at this point when Pig feels more than friendship for Runt, he wants to move past their childhood infatuation and develop at man/woman relationship. Damien (Pig) is mentally and physically lost without Sinead (Runt) and sets out to find her in order to celebrate her birthday.  The celebration turns to jealousy, violence and murder.  Ric Knowles stated in his article on “Extract on Disco Pigs,” that Disco Pigs (the play) performed in Toronto received some ungenerous criticism, it was thought that the characters did not generate any valid sympathy and were rebellious pain in the butt teenagers.  I also had the same sentiment, wondering where the adults and authorities were to enforce discipline or responsibility in their lives.  I realized as Knowles points out, that this film needs to be viewed in the setting in which it was originally intended for, Fringe theatre, where plays are often performed late at night and in the environment of it’s characters.   The movie does an excellent job in isolating the main characters, which causes the audience to be either sympathetic or insensitive.  

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Knowle, Ric.  “Extract on Disco Pigs.”  Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.  P 195-200.

Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H98Njk29bU

This ‘coming-of-age’ film tells the story of a 14-year-old girl, Maeve Brennan and her journey through adolescences from her first bra to her first heartbreak.  Written and directed by Marian Quinn and shot in Dublin, this film has all the realities that most 14-year-old girls deal with in 1979.  Maeve and her three best friends are experiencing the ‘in-between’ stage of no longer being a child and yet, not quite a woman.  These four friends are totally inseparable, facing the world together as young women, yet Quinn gives each of the girls their own unique personalities with each facing their own set of family problems.  The film opens up with Maeve trying out her fist bra, which her friends express their approval.   The one exception is that this transformation into womanhood is not shared by her feminist friend Claire, who refuses to wear a bra.   Regardless, her friends inform Maeve that this new bra is her gateway into maturity and her entrance in to the world of dating. 

The Coming-of-age genre has its origins in the German Bildungsroman, a literary category that chronicles a young man’s development into maturity.  The main character of a Bildungsroman searches for answers and hopes to gain knowledge and wisdom, but this knowledge comes with conflict and disappointment.   Although the Bildungsroman was based on a male perspective, Quinn’s female version of Bildungsroman leads us into the lives of four coming-of-age friends and their journey for enlightenment.   Maeve goes through a personal transformation when she starts dating an older boy and ends up alienating her friends to spend time with him.  After her first kiss and first slow dance, he dumps Maeve when he is attracted to an older girl.   In a Bildungsroman, the objective at the end is maturity, in which the main character accepts their mistakes and moves on.  Maeve realizes that she let her friends down and that having a boyfriend was not the most important issue in her life.  In the end, Maeve is a little bit more mature and wiser. She reunites with her friends and Claire finally gets herself a bra.

I would recommend this film to my female friends; I am not so sure a male audience would enjoy it quite so much. At times it is a bit hard to understand the words due to the Irish accents.

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Source:  McWilliams, Ellen.  "The Coming of Age of the Female Bildungsroman."  Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman.  Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 1-12.

Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dysIJlVXE0g

 In the 1990s B. Ruby Rich describes that Queer cinema appeals to the norm and that it’s completely marketable.  Transgender persons feel that Queer cinema provides a voice for them and that film provides the perfect medium which gives them exposure.  Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game is one such film.   Jordan, an Irish born producer and writer is known for his historical drama Michael Collins (1996) and the drama Mona Lisa (1986).  The Crying Game is about an IRA member Fergus, who falls in love with the girlfriend (Dil) of a British soldier he kidnapped and murdered in Ireland.  While guarding the prisoner, Jody (the British soldier) and Fergus forms an unlikely friendship and promises to look up Jody’s girlfriend if Jody is killed.  Jody ends up dying and Fergus escapes a British military raid and flees to London.  Suffering from guilt at the death of Jody, Fergus tracks Dil and ends up falling in love with her. 

**Spoiler alert!  Dil invites Fergus up to her flat and they are about to make love when Dil reveals she is transgender. The scene is heart wrenching and while Fergus vomits in disgust, Dil is devastated by his revulsion. Meanwhile the IRA tracks Fergus down and requests him to fulfill a mission, to assassinate a London Judge and if he doesn’t comply then his girlfriend Dil will be killed.  Fergus still has feelings for Dil and he tries to protect her from the IRA. 

This film helps us rethink gender identities and places into context female sexuality and whether trans genders try to deceive or pass as women.  This is a complex film on so many levels and full of multiple deceptions.  Dil, the transgender female does not hide the fact that she is transgender; she lives her life as a female without explanation.   It was Fergus who walked into her world and naively expected her to be what he believed to be a ‘natural’ woman and seduces her.   Before Dil’s reveal, the audience was under the assumption that Dil was a female by stereotypically identifying her as female by her appearance and mannerisms.   Contrariwise the ‘natural’ woman in the movie, Jude, an IRA member uses her sexuality to deceive and capture the British soldier.   Fergus himself deceives Dil, he gives her a false name and lies to her about knowing Jody.

Julia Serano, a transgender person feels that people classify gender base on visual cues and a ton of assumption.  This is evident    in The Crying Game. 

I would classify this movie as an action thriller and I would highly recommend it. I would also recommend the source reading by Julia Serrano, it is very enlightening.

Great soundtrack.

Sources:

Class notes, Dr. Emer O’Toole’s slides.

Serrano, Julia.  “Skirt Chaser: Why the Media Represents the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels.” Whipping Girl. NY: Seal Press, 2007. P 33-52.

Trailer:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vs_4-QQACo

Hunger is set in the infamous H-block of the Maze prison in Belfast 1981.  IRA men incarcerated there were no longer considered political prisoners.  According to then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, there was no such thing as political violence , it was criminal violence and therefore there was no status as a political prisoner, they were considered criminal prisoners. Upon withdrawal of the Special Category Status, the prisoners refused to wear the prison uniforms, striped naked of their clothing they wore the blankets off their bunks.  Being dressed in the uniform was the rule for using the bathrooms and because of the refusal to wear the prison garb; they resorted to smearing the walls with faeces and urinating under the door into the corridor.  This became known as the ‘dirty protest.’   When the British government refused to enter into negotiations to end the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland and the status of being a political prisoner was denied, ten inmates voluntarily decided to go on a hunger strike and starve themselves to death.  Steve McQueen’s film Hunger focuses on Bobby Sands who led the hunger strike of 1981.  In the film McQueen shows the brutality and violence within the Maze, from the degrading cavity searches to the violent washings. 

The story is told with very little dialogue, McQueen let the camera tells most of the story. Donal Foreman explains that the best scripts don’t make the best films, what makes a film great can’t be reduced to words on a page.  Seán Crossan agrees that the cinematography in Hunger allows the audience to engage in the moment with out the need for dialogue. 

The most striking scene in the film is a conversation between Sands and a Catholic priest.  Although I found this scene a little over rehearsed, it explained what has happened in the film and what is going to happen and why.  The two discuss Bobby’s decision to go on a hunger strike.  The priest feels that the British government won’t give a danm about prisoners starving themselves to death and that he should think of his family and the other prisoners who have signed on to starve. Sands feel he needs to control the situation, to fight for his sense of identity.

McQueen avoids the martyrdom of Bobby Sands in this film and reflects on the vulnerability of the human body but the strength of the human spirit.

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Sources:

Crossan, Seán. ‘Review of Hunger.’  Estudios Irlandeses 4. 2009. P 160-162.

Foreman, Donal. What’s Missing from Irish Cinema.  http://www.donalforeman.com/writing/hunger.html.  Accessed on march 18, 2017.

Trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw7WJLZmVF4

The saying goes that, “Behind every successful man there is a woman” but history is often about men and women are often all but written out of historical narratives.  Pat Murphy tries to change this by making films that bring important historical women to the forefront.  Murphy tries to give a reliable account of these women when there is essentially nothing written about them.  Using Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora Barnacle, Murphy brings ‘herstory’ to the screen and presents the life of Nora, James Joyce’s wife who was a key figure in a lot of his work.  Like most wives of famous men, Nora was sufficiently covered in the biographies of her husband.   Nora deals with a strong willed young woman, which allows Murphy, as a female director to bring a distinctively resilient female voice to Nora Barnacle.   Hélène Cixous, a French feminist feels that there is a need for a new feminine way of writing and that women must write about women,  for too long writing has essentially been fashioned by men for men.   Cixous’s call to arms in her concept of the Ecriture Feminine is seen in Murphy’s film Nora where the story of Nora Barnacle is written and directed from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the role of the female character.

Nora Barnacle claims her own identity in this film, and it’s made clear that she was Joyce’s inspiration, although she rarely read anything he wrote.

The story begins with their meeting in Dublin in 1904, where she is a chambermaid and has recently left home in Galway..   He convinces her to go away with him to Trieste to live outside of matrimony, a taboo for an Irish Catholic girl.  The film takes the audience through her life with Joyce in Trieste, as she puts up with his drinking and jealousy.   I recommend this movie, even if you are not familiar with James Joyce and Nora Barnacle. 

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Sources:

Cixous, Hélène.  “The Laugh of the Medusa.”  Signs.  1.4. 1976. P 875-893.

Trailer:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT367gsMEvo

There was a war going on in Ireland in 1920, the war for an independent Irish Free State.  The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was committed through armed force to obtain complete independence from Britain.  The IRB planned the Easter Rising of 1916, which led to the founding of the first Dáil Éireann, an Irish parliament in 1919.  The Dáil was outlawed by Britain and the republic went underground and established the Irish Republican Army.  The IRA (no association with the Northern IRA during the ‘troubles’) used the social revolutionary tactics of guerilla warfare by using local flying columns to ambush and attack British military units.    The Wind that Shakes the Barley is set during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and into the first part of the Irish Civil War (1922-1923).  Director Ken Loach’s historical drama tells the fictional story of two brothers, Teddy and Damien O’Donovan who join the IRA to fight for Irelands’ independence.  The opening scenes set the tone of the movie and reveal the plight of Irish oppression by British military forces, as Damien witnesses the fatal beating of a young boy by the Black and Tans, for refusing to give his name in English.  Donal Ó Drisceoil suggests in his paper that the refusal to give his name in English and using the Irish language symbolically shows his distinctiveness as an Irishman.  The film deals with the violence from both sides, from the perspective of the IRA and their justification of internal executions to the shootings of British soldiers, and the British soldier’s perspective that they were performing their duty as soldiers.  As brutal as the Black and Tans were known to be in history, there was an interesting statement in the film by a British officer who admits that most of the men, who were demobilized soldiers from the First War, were ‘broken’ and undoubtedly suffering from shell shock (now known as PTSD). 

Ken Loach does a superb job in humanizing history and putting a face to the people that were involved in this historical period.   By using the two characters of Teddy and Damien, he allows the audience to relate to them, which permits the viewer to be pulled into that violent period of Irish history, enabling them to feel and live the experience.  Most historical films start with the beginning of a historical period and follow it to the end.  In The Wind that Shakes the Barley, we enter the story in the middle of the War of Independence and then to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which divides the two brothers, each supporting the opposite side in the Civil War.  As the film ends the Civil War is just under way, but the story of the O’Donovan brothers comes to an end. 

I strongly suggest this movie for anyone interested in history and military conflicts.

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Sources:

Ó Drisceoil, Donal.  Framing the Irish Revolution:  Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley.  Radical History Review. 104. 2009. P 5-15.

Great song by The Irish Descendants from Newfoundland : "Come Out Ye' Black and Tans"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCnGD6xv5ik