Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

The indigenous film industry in Ireland tentatively
emerged in the 1970s, but it was not consolidated until
two decades later, when government funding arrangements
were implemented to support production on a
long-term basis. Irish filmmakers produce up to ten
feature films per year, as well as dozens of shorts. In this
regard, Irish filmmaking resembles that of most other
medium- and small-scale European industries in which
production is the result of a complex structure of national
and transnational (especially wider European) funding
initiatives. Like so many other European industries, state
support for film production in Ireland is designed to
promote an indigenous film industry and to develop a
more pluralist film culture in a country in which cinema
screens are dominated overwhelmingly by Hollywood
films.
The fact that filmmaking in Ireland is a fairly recent
phenomenon should not, however, disguise the fact that
Ireland and the Irish have maintained a major presence in
American and British cinema since its inception. This
presence has been manifested in terms of personnel (especially
actors and directors), but most specifically in terms
of theme, setting, and plot. The relatively high profile of
Irish themes and stereotypes in American and British
cinema has ensured that the representation of Ireland
and the Irish has been a major concern for film studies
in Ireland. Two traditions in particular have been identified.
On one hand, Ireland has tended to be represented
in romantic rural terms with great emphasis placed on its
beautiful landscapes and seascapes. This has been the
most enduring cinematic tradition and one that has
recurred with remarkable consistency over time. John
Ford’s 1952 romantic comedy The Quiet Man is the
IRELAND
screen’s most famous and most enduring example of this
tendency. The romanticization of Ireland and the Irish
landscape is ingrained in the cinematic cultures of both
Britain and America and frequently emerges in both
nations’ film industries, for example, in the British production
Waking Ned Devine (1999) or the American The
Match Maker (1997). Even Robert Flaherty’s historically
important documentary Man of Aran (1934), received
initially as a realist documentary on the hardships of Irish
rural life, later appeared to viewers as overly heroic and
romanticized.
Ireland’s long and fractious political relationship to
Britain has provided the other recurring cinematic view
of Ireland—a land of urban violence and sectarian
hatreds where a proclivity to violence seems to form part
of the Irish character and to have locked the Irish into an
endless and meaningless cycle of murder and revenge.
Ford again provided one of the early and most enduring
examples of this tendency in his expressionist view of a
strife-torn Dublin in The Informer (1935). The most
celebrated British version of this stricken Ireland is
Carol Reed’s equally expressionistic Belfast in Odd Man
Out (1947). In the 1970s and 1980s, when political
violence in Northern Ireland escalated, this image
appeared with more regularity, sometimes merely as a
plot device in otherwise conventional thrillers, such as
Patriot Games (Phillip Noyce, 1992) or The Devil’s Own
(Alan J. Pakula, 1997).
That indigenous filmmaking developed slowly
meant that these two dominant traditions went largely
unchallenged in cinematic terms and therefore tended to
circulate as markers of a general Irish identity. However,
in the twenty-first century these traditional and recurring
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