Documented Irish

Like the playwright J.M. Synge decades earlier, Flaherty had examined the raw details of life on the island and had produced an arresting work of art, leaving it to the viewer to decide if it’s truths were particular or universal.
The wily Irish president Eamon De Valera, always unconsciously on the lookout for an expedient national myth, seized upon Flaherty’s masterpiece with oft remarked upon enthusiasm. “Man of Aran,” he realized, populated the national stage with photogenic pre-modern Abbey Theatre archetypes, stoic men and women who suffered in silence, exactly the kind of constituents who were unlikely to vote him out of office. It’s hardly surprising that the film was so popular among the conservative establishment of the day, because they had willingly mistaken it lyricism for simplicity, and simplicity seemed to offer them fewer challenges.
How utterly things have changed. To produce a documentary in 2003 all a filmmaker requires now is a digital camera, a laptop and a subject. This is represents a radical departure from even the recent past. Throughout most of the 1980s, for example, there was no film industry in Ireland to speak of, nor much in the way of professional facilities. Few freelancers had access to the unwieldy video cameras of the day — the technology was costly and difficult to transport — and film crews were a budgeting essential that could completely sink a project.
Because of the prohibitive cost factor, then, ordinary communities in the north and the south found themselves disenfranchised, unable to record or present their own struggles. Often represented, they could never afford to represent themselves. During that remarkable period of mass unemployment and emigration in the south, and interminable warfare in the north, not one film was made that gave voice to that generation, not one challenge was articulated on screen. Thousands went gently into the night, unrecorded and ultimately unseen.
There was also an intractable cultural aspect to this prolonged silence: documentary filmmaking is certainly not for the self-effacing. In fact, the first thing a documentary filmmaker learns is how to be aggressively assertive about his or her own rights. So for the Irish — notably and paradoxically fearful of conflict — simply committing to a subject and treatment was often a departure in itself.
The recent explosion of Irish documentary filmmaking both here and in Ireland has much to do with those long decades of cultural silence. And the work now being produced is engaging with ever more divergent and challenging themes. Lyell Davies, an Irish documentary filmmaker who lives and works in Manhattan, is a representative example. A remarkably articulate and perceptive individual, his most recent film, “Who’s Not Irish?”, explores the enduring clash of conservative and liberal ideologies within the Irish and Irish-American communities living here. A heterosexual, Davies saw in the ongoing St. Patrick’s Day Parade controversy a unique political dimension — and a vivid cultural subtext — that provided him with rich and contrasting insights into how life is lived both here and in Ireland.
“I first got involved in documentary filmmaking as a tool for engaging social change,” Davies said last week. “For me it’s about creating discussion rather directing it.”
In addition to his own documentary film work, Davies is also a facilitator on a national media project that provides access to young people from underprivileged backgrounds, providing them with the means to direct and film their own stories. (Growing up in Dublin in the 1980s, he has firsthand experience of the lack of facilities, a situation that he is only too happy to redress for others).
“When I met someone from Ireland here, one of the first questions is always, ‘Where in Ireland are you from?’ and ‘When did you come here,’ ” Davies said. “I’m always looking for these linkages, which I don’t do with anybody else. There’s a very strong impulse, to discover a kind a unity, something that comes from a shared sense of nationhood. I also seek out linkages with other cultures — cultures with similar values, or a similar heritage”
Davies is also aware of the contrasts.
“The people who arrived here in the 1950s left a very different Ireland to the one I left in the 1980s,” he said. “Mine was the Ireland of The Boomtown Rats, punk rock and U2. We arrived with a different set of perspectives. For my generation of immigrants who arrived in the late 1980s, the Irish Lesbian and Gay struggle encapsulated the difference between those earlier immigrant experiences and us. It was a marker of the changes that happened in Irish society, a crucial distinction.”
D