Genre & Irish Film Conference 2005 :: Articles

The Irish-American as the Return of the Repressed in Ireland’s Films of National Identity: Sheridan’s The Field as a Transnational Text
by Tom Hemmeter, Arcadia University

  • The popular myths of Irish identity, fueled by the island’s tragic colonial and postcolonial history of British oppression, imagine a pure Celtic race of people, informed by rural values, whose revival would form the basis of a new nation. Embedded in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literary texts (e.g., early Yeats poetry and the drama of Lady Gregory), this romantic perspective found fertile ground among Irish immigrants to the United States.
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Bloody Sunday
by Renée Penney

  • The construction of cinematic Ireland has been influenced by numerous historical schisms, perhaps most notably the dominant ideology of cultural nationalism in Ireland, combined with the ‘cinematic occupation’ of Ireland by Britain and the United States. An indigenous film community emerged in Ireland in the 1970s intent on re-coding the landscape by overriding the derogatory stereotypes of the pastoral and the atavistic. This move towards ‘authentic representation’ spans across social, cinematic and critical spheres and can be associated with the drive towards a collective working through of Irish conflict.
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Genre & Irish Film Conference 2005 :: Reviews

Overview of the Conference
by Renée Penney

  • On the first day of the conference, scholar Martin McLoone made two comments that for me set the tone for the dialogue that followed over the next two days. In a discussion around identity and representation, McLoone suggested that the Irish were no longer “victims acted upon”, but “participants acting” in the re/construction of their own identity. The second comment related to consideration of the idea of genre itself, McLoone taking the position that genre was a Hollywood concept and that it’s contemporary application was somewhat dubious. What became apparent in many presentations and discussions was the contentious nature of the re/construction of Irish identity itself. For some participants, like McLoone, there was an overriding desire to maintain Irish historical specificity as a primary identification strategy. For others, a forward thinking agenda did not necessarily carry a direct historical signification of the past. Therefore, notions of identity and genre were inextricably linked.
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On ‘Genre’ And Semantic Quibbling: Or, There’s No Pleasing A Genre Critic
by Christine Evans

  • In my own paper for the Genre and Irish Cinema conference, I made the conscious and ultimately rather problematic decision to avoid using the term ‘genre’ at any cost. While writing, I encountered a difficult impasse: ‘apocalypse films’ are not a genre-proper, especially considering the mutability of ‘apocalypse’ from event to term, and from adjective to noun and back again. I imagined being interrogated about my decision to fallaciously ‘create’ a genre (at worst), or to assume the existence or pertinence of a genre where none existed (at best); somewhat terrified, I opted to employ a strategy which was later critiqued as “avoidant and apologist” but which I nonetheless don’t regret.
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