Re-Viva la Revolución! Part 3

Part 1

Part 2

Rewriting the Self

A contrast between Good Vibrations and No lies in the points of view from which they are told. From the outset it is clear that Good Vibrations is Terri Hooley’s story told in an oral storytelling fashion – spinning a yarn, as we say in Ulster. The film is a series of memories depicted through a fanzine cut-and-paste collage of archival materials (amongst which I include the original recordings of the bands’ songs as well as television footage and radio archives) and original footage filmed with anamorphic lenses. The slightly skewed and blurred appearance with a lean to the right visually emphasizes Terri’s narrow vision in more ways than one; as well as missing his left eye, he fails to see how his actions affect those around him. Although No closely follows René, this fictionalization is neither biographical nor autobiographical as the character individualizes the larger team behind the more extensive No campaign. In a way, though, it could be argued that that is precisely how the idealized version of Hooley also functions – an individual eclipsing a community. No takes on a more objective style with interesting tensions between the often long focal lengths used that indicate that the camera is often at a distance while tightly framing the characters. The effect of the long-distance zoom close-ups sustains a ‘talking heads’ televisual aesthetic befitting the U-matic camera and 4x3 aspect ratio as well as exuding a feeling of covert watching. Regardless of these different approaches, both films express narrowed and skewed vision and work at a level of entertainment with a critical sting in the tail, should the more active viewer choose to identify it.

Accompanied by serene birdsong, Good Vibrations begins with a bird’s eye view close-up of a record player upon which a 7-inch single of Hank Williams’s ‘I Saw the Light’ is placed and the stylus positioned for play. The song begins as source music while the frame cuts to a series of softly focused canted slow-motion Steadicam shots revealing a young boy (Cathal Maguire) in period 1950s shorts and sweater ‘flying’ contentedly with arms outstretched amongst the rose bushes in full bloom in the garden of his parents’ home; this is an action later repeated by the adult Hooley when the screen shares his drug-induced hallucination during a trip to London. The childhood scene is further periodized with soft focus and brownish hues. The analogue motifs extend into the initial company credits revealing the transregional funding for the film – presented by BBC Films and made with support from the Irish Film Board, Northern Ireland Screen, and the European Regional Development Fund – in that they flicker in time with the crackling, spinning record, calling to mind the flicker of celluloid passing through a projector.¹ In bright sunlight, the boy lies contentedly on a patchwork quilt beside the record player and a photo of Williams as animated musical symbols float up from the player and out of the right-hand side of the frame. There is a brief cut to a heavenly Williams stand-in (Peter Kelly) miming the song directly to camera against a backdrop of light clouds in a blue sky. This is the boy’s subjective imagining, and a motif which recurs. The song’s religious epiphany signifies the boy’s devoted worship of music alongside his peaceful sensibility, as well as rounding out the film’s autobiographical tone. The track is also an example of the film’s ironic humour; very soon the boy will be half in darkness and will – literally and figuratively – at once succeed and fail to ‘see the light’ in his future life decisions.

Channelling the real Hooley’s knack for storytelling, the adult Terri’s voiceover is woven through the sequence: ‘Once upon a time in the city of Belfast there lived a boy named Terry, with a y. And everything in Terry’s garden was rosy. Well, nearly everything.’ The idyllic scene is disrupted with a cut to a tomato striking the window near his father’s ‘Vote Hooley’ election poster. The startled youngster meets cries of ‘Fenian lovers!’ and ‘Go back to England, commie bastards!’ from the boys attacking him from over the hedge in ‘Cowboys and Indians’ outfits with: ‘My dad’s not a communist, he’s a socialist!’ A boy takes aim with the bow and arrow, and releases. The red war paint on his cheeks, his pale skin, and the blue of his eyes in sharp focus along with the bluish hues in the frame’s blurry negative spaces are additional markers of his coded loyalist identity.² A whip-pan represents the arrow’s swift flight towards the boy’s face, indicating how he ‘became Terri with an i/eye’, the dialogue off the mark with the distinctly morbid Northern Irish humour. The film’s title suddenly appears against a shattered glass/lens motif and red closed-eye vision vaguely reminiscent of Stan Brakhage’s early hypnogogic trance films. The film further affirms its subjective alignment with Hooley as his mother Mavis’s (Ruth McCabe) muffled voice asks the blurry doctor shining light into the camera lens if their son has been blinded, and is informed in the mix of sounds and vision-testing motifs that ‘he’s going to see things a bit differently’. This different way of seeing has already been conveyed in cinematographer Ivan McCullough’s use of Hawk Scope long-range anamorphic lenses with a shallow focus and depth of field associated with a character concentrating solely on his own interests and unable to see the reality blurred in his narrowed peripheral vision.

Over the next minute the film performs two main functions: rather than ellipse more than twenty years, the film frantically fast-forwards through two decades of archival footage at a speed evoking the breakneck tempo of a punk track, while the sound design featuring David Holmes’s slow, sustained tones enveloping the slowing, fading ‘I Saw the Light’ marks the significance of Hooley’s hearing in tension with his ability to listen. It contrasts the intense pace of the historical images and provides an affective bridge between the region’s difficult past and the film’s contemporary audience, much of which in the specific time and place of its release consisted of a postmemory generation. In what is also a visual history of Ulster television, black and white images of pastoral life, religious practices, farming, markets and shipbuilding in the 1950s and 1960s move swiftly to mixed black and white and colour depictions of the civil rights marches in the late-1960s, the arrival of the British army, Bloody Sunday in 1971, blood-stained concrete, grieving relatives and escalating destruction and violence. The sequence ends on bomb blasts in Belfast city centre, the footage regaining standard speed and sound, when the frame jolts back leaving the archival footage reframed in the period television monitor while the sound attached to the image includes the tinny static of the domestic televisual image, contained and mediatized.³

It is now the late 1970s and the adult Terri positioned between his parents on a sofa and rubbing his glass eye comments on the onscreen violence (‘What a fuckin’ nightmare’) as his mother to his right berates his swearing (‘Mind you your language’) and his father, George (Karl Johnston), to his left laments the chaos being presented as revolutionary politics (‘And they call this a revolution’). Their brief half-exchange (each is really only talking to themselves as they stare straight ahead at the TV) characterizes Terri as someone for whom the conflict is unassimilable and can only be understood through levels of mediation (as discussed in more detail in the following section), Mavis as an upholder of morals who is intolerant of swearing but silent for peace, and George as a leftist no doubt knowledgeable about Marx and Trotsky who is sceptical about the political upheaval reported daily. The opening sequence as a whole establishes the narrative’s subjective alignment to Hooley while situating this singular version of the narrative in the larger communal narrative of the city and region throughout this time period. The family’s act of viewing the local conflict on the evening news conveys the feeling that it was both ‘here’ and ‘not here’ common in suburban areas that were relatively unaffected, including the more middle-class part of south Belfast where the Hooleys lived.⁴

          In addition to the re-mediatization of the archival material interacting with contemporary footage arranged by editors Nick Emerson (Good Vibrations) and Andrea Chignoli (No), the stories retold in the films first appeared in written and performed forms of creative memoir which underwent further media/tiza/tion as film adaptations. Antonio Skármeta’s unpublished 2008 play El Plebiscito formed the basis for Pedro Peirano’s Altazor-nominated screenplay for No, while Glenn Patterson and Colin Carberry’s BAFTA-nominated screenplay for Good Vibrations is heavily informed by Terri Hooley’s autobiography edited by Richard Sullivan, Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations (2010).

           In the author biographies in Hooleygan it is clear that Sullivan, a journalist, spent much of his adolescence in Hooley’s Good Vibrations record shop. Affectionate anecdotes told by local (and all male) music personalities, including Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol and David Holmes who scored the film, punctuate the largely chronological narrative. Combined, the individual accounts build a communal narrative of punk nostalgia while telling a ‘great man’ history that centralizes, and perhaps embellishes to a degree (more than he does himself), Hooley’s role in fostering live punk and alternative rock in Belfast and Northern Ireland since the late 1970s. The subjective Hooley-centric narrative upon which the film pivots (to a greater extent than the book) marginalizes the roles of the women in his life and in the punk community as bodies of little importance who happened to be there and who – particularly his partner Ruth (Jodie Whittaker) and their daughter – suffer for the fulfilment of his do-it-regardless determination to open the record shop and establish an independent record label to promote local bands.

          Hooley’s memories in Good Vibrations frequently disrupt the smooth play of the primary narrative in a way that mimics tangents in the flow of oral storytelling. Just as the shot sequencing in No often draws attention to the film as a construction, there are several instances when Hooley’s voiceover reflexively ‘pauses’ the film (which is the fictionalized Hooley’s account of the past, and to those who know Terri, it is one of any number of versions of real events). An instance of this occurs when Hooley visits The Pound bar for the first time and ‘discovers’ the bands Outcasts and RUDI. The scene serves to introduce the RUC (disbanded in 2001 and replaced with the Police Service of Northern Ireland) to younger and external audiences, and to indicate that the cross-community punks (and very implicitly, the queer community as a sub-group) faced confrontations and persecution from all sides. When Terri is standing at the bar, three officers enter the venue. A close-up of him noticing them (an exaggerated move with his working eye) freeze-frames and as his voiceover states, ‘Ah yes, the Royal Ulster Constabulary; the boys in bottle-green’, the film cuts to an archival sequence and light guitar strumming plays. Like the other archival sequences, the ordering of shots recalls the random ‘cut-and-paste’ feel of the punk fanzine,⁵ but is carefully constructed to give a sense of the RUC’s role and presence. In a mixture of colour and black and white with different degrees of grain, the moving image fragments include many shots of armed officers on patrol, on operations, standing guard around security alerts, engaging in violent clashes with marchers and protestors, and stopping cars at checkpoints. There are also shots of graffiti about the police, the messages usually comparing them to the SS, Adolf Hitler’s SchutzStaffel paramilitary organization. This is intercut with Hooley’s memories of his own run-ins with them featuring the same officer he confronts at the bar (Allan Gildea) threatening him with the shop’s closure at the mildest hint of finding drugs in it.

          As archival images of bombs exploding and officers assisting injured people play, Hooley says ‘of course, they had some serious shit to be dealing with on the streets of Belfast; you’d have thought their hands would have been full’. At this moment the images freeze and zoom in almost accusingly on a black and white shot of an officer turning suddenly and looking directly to camera with what appears to be a shocked expression. The film cuts back to the scene at the bar where the officer comments on a young woman’s pink hair (Claire Hannaway) and asks to see her identification. In an expression of his indignation at a force more concerned with misdemeanours than the intense daily violence, Hooley stands beside her and announces to the officer that he’d ‘like to report a civil war outside’. When told to step away, he tells the officer to take his time, that ‘the shootin’s, the bombin’s, the intimidation – they can all wait while you check her breath to see if she’s been drinkin’.’ Punk camaraderie is displayed when RUDI’s Ronnie Matthews (Killian Scott) interrupts the altercation by saying into the microphone ‘we hate the cops’ and the band starts playing and chanting ‘SS RUC, SS RUC’ joined by the crowd and Terri. The communal act of solidarity initiated by Terri forces the officers to leave and the gig continues. The band then proceeds to play their popular track ‘Big Time’, notably themed around class tensions, and Terri’s involvement in the movement is galvanized, as is the film’s conjunction of Hooley’s personal memory with the nostalgic communal memory of Belfast’s punk scene.

1 Good Vibrations was one of the last productions to be exhibited on 35mm film during its UK/Ireland general release in 2013 before digital cinema projection became the dominant standard. Thanks to Fiona Handyside for pointing this out. No was distributed globally on both 35mm film and d-cinema.

2 This incidental moment exemplifies the complexity of Ulster unionism/loyalism. Firstly, the Native American garb is highly ironic given loyalism’s links with the colonization of Ireland, and yet it captures the unionist/loyalist sense of defending territory against Irish nationalists/republicans (who would be the ones conflated with ideas of ‘savage natives’ in need of ‘civilizing’) and unwelcome imperialists (Hooley’s father was English, and the British army were initially deployed to Northern Ireland in 1969 under Operation Banner to protect Catholic/nationalist communities from rising loyalist paramilitarism; the archival montage following this scene even includes shots of women bringing tea to the soldiers protecting their neighbourhood). This exemplifies a fundamentalist loyalty to the United Kingdom that also desires regional sovereignty and social cleansing.

3 Given that George Hooley is an outspoken socialist, it could be a mistake to leave the archival footage in colour as the television is more likely to have been black and white and the colour screen indicates wealth. The large garden is also more of a poetic device, and both help to make a critical point about south Belfast as explained in the next note.

4 The tension around middle- and upper-class south Belfast being left unscathed while working class areas suffered the direct effects of the violence is raised when Terri and the band members are stopped at an army checkpoint while returning from gigs in the region’s north west and more rural areas. The soldier (Mark Asante) informs them that there is trouble in the west and north of Belfast (their direct routes), and some in the east. Terri asks about the south, and is told: ‘It should be ok… as long as you get going now’.

5 The film’s editor Nick Emerson described his technique as such during a post-screening Q&A at Belfast’s Queen’s Film Theatre, 9 April 2013.

 

Part 4

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