Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Jaye Davidson and Stephen Rea in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992). EVERETT COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY
PERMISSION.
cinema with suspicion and distaste, it subjected it to the
most rigid censorship in Europe until the more liberal
1970s. There also existed a cultural bias against the
cinema, which is hardly surprising in a country that
celebrates a strong literary and theatrical tradition.
During the early period of Irish independence—
from the 1920s to the 1970s—most of the cinematic
representations of the country came from the outside.
Although some attempts had been made in this period to
attract both political and economic interest in filmmaking.
The most notable of these were the semi-amateur
production The Dawn (Thomas Cooper, 1938) and
Guests of the Nation (Denis Johnston), based on Frank
O’Connor’s short story of the same title. Both the story
and film later inspired Neil Jordan’s (b. 1950) highly
influential The Crying Game (1992). In Northern Ireland
in the 1930s actor Richard Hayward attempted to start
the film production industry, but there was little economic
or political interest, and after a number of smallscale
comedies (The Luck of the Irish [1936] and The
Early Bird [1936], indigenous feature filmmaking in
Ireland ceased to exist for the next four decades.
Ireland
During these years, Ireland continued to attract both
Hollywood and British productions, and the Irish government
established a studio at Bray in County Wicklow
to facilitate such inward investment and to encourage
further location shooting. The presence of such ‘‘outsider’’
productions inevitably gave rise to aspirations
within Ireland itself for a more indigenous form of
filmmaking. In the 1960s and 1970s, an increasingly
vocal lobby emerged. It was supported in large measure
by two influential directors who remained in Ireland after
shooting some of their films there: John Huston, an
American, and John Boorman, an Englishman. The
Irish government finally began to provide very modest
state funding for filmmaking in the 1970s and early
1980s. It is hardly surprising that the generation of
Irish filmmakers that emerged would respond to both
the dominance of cinematic stereotypes from abroad as
well as the legacies of the nationalist traditions internally.
In other words, the films they produced constituted a
radical reassessment of Irish identity. This first wave of
indigenous filmmakers included a group of Dublin-born
directors—Robert Quinn (b. 1942), Joe Comerford
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