Rejected Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship Proposal - Lancaster University, 2016

Post-Agreement Cinema: The Northern Ireland Conflict in Contemporary British and Irish Screen Cultures

Abstract

Film and television production in Northern Ireland has experienced significant shifts since the Peace Agreement was signed in 1998. During this time, major changes in views of the Northern Ireland conflict in other parts of the British Isles have emerged. This project will analyse the landscape of contemporary film and television across the UK and Ireland with a particular focus on inter-regional productions that engage with the conflict’s legacy. As well as major publications and a vlog, outputs will include curating an exhibition of visual art relevant to the project and a series of film screenings with talks.

Details of current and past research

My research interests lie in contemporary film and visual culture focusing on conflict and post-conflict themes. I am drawn to convergences between cinema and visual art, particularly involving documentary and archive-based work. This is shown in my article under review with Acta Universitatis Sapientiae: Film and Media Studies on the use of archival materials and disruptions of documentary realism in Duncan’s Campbell’s It For Others (winner of the 2014 Turner Prize). My chapter in the Peripheral Visions volume currently at press compares a video installation by Willie Doherty and a documentary by Patricio Guzmán that scrutinize the Irish and Chilean landscapes to confront silences surrounding the ‘disappeared’. The monograph developed from my PhD, Old Borders, New Technologies: Reframing Film and Visual Culture in Contemporary Northern Ireland, examines the ways that artists and filmmakers shed light on the anxieties still troubling society in Northern Ireland. Concerns linked to intensive surveillance are explored in my article published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. It analyses videos showing how psychological forms of colonization are achieved through para/military surveillance and media circulation. My interest in how surveillance affects the performative navigation of space is demonstrated in my chapter in the Cities of Memory collection, which is now at press. I have also contributed to early film scholarship with a historical project on Irish-themed silent era American newsreels. Using archives of early trade publications, I traced a history of American newsreel coverage of upheaval in pre-partition Ireland, published in a special issue of POST SCRIPT.

Detailed statement of proposed research

This study identifies a major change in views of the Northern Ireland conflict emerging in film production throughout the British Isles. These changes coincide with a time when funding bodies have experienced cuts and closures leading to fundamental shifts in the landscape of cultural production across the UK and Republic of Ireland. The British and Irish publics are also experiencing distrust in the media in the light of revelations of varying degrees of misconduct and withheld information since the 1960s. With the distance of time and as information emerges, many are questioning what really happened and what they were not told. Recent examples in film culture, such as ’71 (Demange, 2014) about a young soldier separated from his squad during a riot in Belfast, invite audiences to become aware of their lack of awareness. While the film perhaps allegorically comments on the colonial implications of Britain sending its youth to fight battles elsewhere, it importantly explores imaginings of what happened in the UK’s ‘place apart’ during the thirty years of political violence that became known in the media as the ‘Troubles’. This begs a relevant study of the role that cinema plays in shaping and documenting a changing national identity.

The proposed study intersects with and forges links between historiographies of indigenous regional and national cinemas across the UK and Ireland, in particular picking up where Martin McLoone and John Hill leave off their studies on Northern Ireland (c.2006/8) within their broader discourses on Irish and British cinema. Furthermore, films made since then, perhaps with Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) effecting a sea change, have more convincingly engaged with the problems associated with memory and state-organized forgetting, collective understandings of history, social justice and conflict transformation. While documenting this aspect of screen history as it transpires, the study will also pioneer a transregional approach to engaging with cultural production on these islands. It offers an alternative to nationalistic approaches to British and Irish cinema (in both of which Northern Ireland is often at least peripheral), and recognizes the complexities of regionality and the vibrant array of cultural identities unique to the location. While national and transnational approaches to the study of film are unquestionably important, transregional productions within and among nations have been significantly overlooked. The British/Irish context is an ideal testing ground on which to build such a framework.

The transregional scope of the study will naturally progress from my previous research that identifies approaches to moving image production that collapse the boundaries between different modes of media. I developed this method to ‘reframe’ perceptions of film production in Northern Ireland, which in industrial terms has historically provided a service industry while indigenous filmmaking struggles to move beyond the confines of promoting tourism, goods and government propaganda. Given the lack of an indigenous film industry, and the many commercial films produced elsewhere about the Northern Ireland conflict and the immediate millennial/post-1998 Agreement climate, studies of cinema and Northern Ireland such as Hill’s, McLoone’s, and Brian McIlroy’s inevitably feature British and Irish productions in the main. Rather than regurgitate or simply continue their valuable historical accounts, my PhD study (2011) on film and visual culture in Northern Ireland since the early 1990s responded to McLoone’s observation in Irish Film (2000) that many films concerning Northern Ireland failed to be socially or politically relevant; my solution was to expand the boundaries of the search. At a time of increasing convergences between media, sites of exhibition, and screening apparatus, I combined theories of film and new media to ask again, what is cinema? My study extended ‘the cinematic’ to include video installation, live mixed media performance and experimental forms of nonfiction alongside more traditional forms of documentary and fictional feature films. This interdisciplinary framework allowed me to examine how socially engaged artists and filmmakers confront specific problems still troubling society in Northern Ireland, specifically imprisonment, surveillance, traumatic recall and media mythmaking. This method reflected the uneasy collapses beginning to occur between social, cultural and political divisions in the region.

Since the completion of my PhD and subsequent book project (2014), new approaches to engaging with Northern Ireland and its conflicted past-present have emerged in independent British, Irish and Northern Irish moving image production. For example, rather than attempting to depict the conflict from the inside, British films such as Hunger, Shadow Dancer (Marsh, 2012) and ’71 demonstrate an increasing awareness of the implications of colonialism in their scrutiny of Britain’s roles in how the conflict was managed. They also probe the extent to which the conflict became a media-managed construct, indicating that a decade after the Agreement, critical creative practitioners in Britain are now revealing what had been easily hidden from view by state news broadcasting. This shows that there is at least a desire to redress the elliptical perceptions of this history, and why this study is timely and relevant. 

Additionally, Hunger, Shadow Dancer and ’71 are transregional productions that embody the between-ness of national identity, shared histories and the interrelationships across regional, national and natural frontiers in this island cluster. Particularly at a time of austerity (mirroring earlier periods of austerity and high unemployment while under Conservative governments in the 1970s and 1980s) the regional screen organizations and arts funding bodies such as Northern Ireland Screen, Film4, the Irish Film Board and the British Film Institute seem to increasingly engage in collaborative efforts to facilitate the production and distribution of new work. This has seen great challenges since the UK Film Council was dissolved in 2011 and significant cuts have been made to arts councils in the years since. Analysing this to establish the project’s broader contexts will not only contribute to pertinent discussions in the field, but could contribute to the distinctiveness of Film at Lancaster at a time when domestic students are expressing strong interest in practice-based careers. Developing a final year specialist module on contemporary British and Irish cinema would greatly enhance the project, and would aim to speak to many students’ needs in career development. The interdisciplinary nature of it would also cater for students undertaking combined honours degree pathways with LICA.  

The research across the UK and Republic of Ireland will be conducted in three main strands:

1. Analysis of the corpus of media texts and the circumstances of their productions;

2. An inter-regional/national study of the extent to which audiences are impacted by the films;

3. Archival research of media documents to examine perceptions of the conflict as it ensued.

The data collected from the live audience responses (using ‘vox pop’ recordings of initial responses and online surveys for those willing to be contacted later by email) will be compared with any data found in the archival research and used to enhance understandings of the significance of the films in local, regional and national contexts. A larger aim of the project is to evaluate cinema’s potential for impactful social change in areas undergoing conflict transformation. With this objective, the project intersects with international studies with similar imperatives, such as the major ‘Screening Violence’ project currently in development at Newcastle University, which is international in scope and built on a growing team of UK-based scholars. The Post-Agreement Cinema study will however remain distinctive due to the complexities of its unique geo-political context.

In order to determine the impact on audiences of films such as Good Vibrations (Barros d’Sa & Leyburn, 2012), I Am Belfast (Cousins, 2015), and Bloody Sunday: A Derry Diary (Harkin, 2006) along with the examples already mentioned and many others, I will utilize the annual research allocation to fund a series of screenings throughout the first two years of the project. The aim is to secure venues and the appropriate rights to publicly screen the films studied in the project in different regions around the UK and Ireland. LICA is currently making stronger connections with the Dukes in Lancaster, and this project could contribute to forging a strong connection between the organizations if I was involved with events there. To maximize trips elsewhere, I propose two screenings per location with time for audience responses and data collection, and to conduct any archival research where available. One of the screened films might have a local or regional connection (this could be via a member of the creative team or a filming location), and the other would be more definable as a Northern Irish production. I intend to include a range of fiction, documentary and short films. I also aim to increase my industry connections and invite the filmmakers to participate in the events.

For the most part, I will propose screenings in areas where I can also access film archives and institutions, and try to gain exposure through inclusion in the educational programmes for various film festivals. For example, events in Dublin will allow time for research at the Irish Film Institute and RTÉ Libraries and Archives, while similar events in Lincoln would facilitate consultation with the Media Archive for Central England. As indicated in the annual research allowance budget below, events in the same region can be grouped and timed against relevant festivals and conferences. The archival research will provide data of localized media/mediated responses to the conflict throughout the years which wiil prove vital in understanding the degree to which perceptions of Northern Ireland and the conflict have shifted in Britain and Ireland, shifts which are indicated in recent moving image production.

In addition to regionality and transregional collaborations in industrial film and television production, identifying a post-Agreement cinema raises many issues. Firstly, the usefulness of construing the conflict’s official end (itself problematic and complex) as a watershed begs assessment, particularly in light of the argument that the ‘Troubles’ was a media-managed construct with real and serious consequences (Blair, 2014). Whereas my previous studies have concentrated on responses to this within Northern Ireland, the new project is concerned with how the conflict is engaged with in Britain and Ireland, with emphasis on remembering, forgetting and re-imagining events in attempting to understand them. The study also presents an opportunity to redress the continuing predominance of ‘male’ stories with women largely portrayed on the spectrum of victimhood (including in comedies like Good Vibrations). Questions can be raised around access for women filmmakers and why more films such as Maeve Murphy’s Silent Grace (2005) focusing on women’s other roles in the conflict struggle to attract funding and distribution.

Of further interest will be the wider effects of the conflict’s mediatization and the impact this had on what was and was not depicted in Britain and Ireland’s news coverage. This should connect with the lasting impact of successive governments’ attempts to control the conflict, especially Thatcher’s throughout the 1980s, and the disjunctions between social classes, counter cultures, territorial conflicts, and the implications of collusion amongst different organizations. It will be worth interrogating urban regeneration and how this affects our screen cultures, particularly when looking back to the past. For instance, the post-industrial/post-conflict regeneration of Belfast meant that realist historical films such as ’71 had to be filmed in British cities relatively unchanged since the 1970s. In looking to the present and future, with audience studies will arise the potential to explore the postmemory generation and ask whether or not a ‘psychic legacy’ of the conflict pervades younger audience members outside as well as inside Northern Ireland. Ultimately, the multi-media interdisciplinary approach to studying post-Agreement cinema in the UK and Ireland will be valuable in producing a more nuanced account of the cinema’s role in cultural representations of the Northern Ireland conflict.

 Relevant research in host department

Questions around concepts of national cinemas are prominent in Film at LICA. Bruce Bennett works on British cinema and has written about early depictions of post-conflict Northern Ireland in his research on Michael Winterbottom, while the notion of a ‘post-Troubles’ cinema shares some problems with an identified ‘post-racial’ or post-Civil Rights cinema in the USA as examined by Jonathan Munby. Some current PhD projects are focusing on British film; Matthew Smith’s on regionality in British cinema is particularly relevant. Additionally, Andrew Quick in LICA has published on NI artist Willie Doherty whose more recent work will feature in the study. 

Additional reasons for choosing host department and institution

My broader interests in areas where cinema and the visual arts converge chimes with the interdisciplinary ethos of LICA. My current post has allowed me to make research connections that will be of benefit to both my work and the department through my contributions. The project has the capacity to foster synergies between the subject areas of Film, Art and Theatre Studies (and possibly even urban design). An in-house study in tune with regional and national trends in film production as they unfold could be significant for student recruitment to Film Studies while further maximizing existing coverage of the field.

 

Office view, Lancaster University, September 2015

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