Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism

GENRE AND CINEMA: IRELAND AND TRANSNATIONALISM Edited by Brian Mcllroy New York: Routledge, 2007, 284 pp. Reviewed by Heather Macdougall Irish cinema as subject of study was virtually ignored until the late eighties, but it seems that researchers are now making up for lost time. There is no longer any shortage of authoritative volumes on the role of nation and history in Irish narrative film. In welcome addition to this canon, new collection of essays brings more nuanced approach to the study of Irish cinema, edited by familiar voice in Irish film scholarship. Brian Mcllroy's and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism is part of larger research project on Irish genre films, and most of its essays come from an international conference on Genre and Irish held at the University of British Columbia in 2005. Mcllroy has also established complementary website, www.irishfilmgenres.com, which includes further scholarly articles, reviews, and useful database of Irish films that is searchable by genre. McIlroy states that the research project was prompted by the fact that previous work on Irish cinema has generally privileged a small group of serious dramas that directly relate to historical and political crisis such as the troubles in Northern Ireland (on which Mcllroy himself has written extensively), the gypsy travelling community, the rural west, and so on. He offers in the book an opportunity to examine films not normally included in what is quickly becoming the established canon of Irish cinema. He also sees the book as chance to go beyond the approaches already taken by other scholars, such as historical and national representation, censorship and the state, literary adaptation, and auteur theory. Despite this admirable objective, and Cinema can't help but cover some ground that has been amply covered elsewhere. It includes, for instance, an entire section on the works of Neil Jordan, possibly the mostresearched Irish auteur and one whose work has also been frequently analyzed in generic terms. Nevertheless, the book as whole does offer different focus than most works on Irish film, while also presenting some interesting analyses of films that are normally overlooked, such as short films, Irish-language films, and independent or lower-budget films that have not previously received much academic attention. Among these are some rare but valuable gems which will be of particular interest to readers outside of Ireland, where these films have had little or no distribution and are therefore virtually unknown. This volume contains new work from well-established scholars of Irish film: Ruth Barton and Martin McLoone, for example, as well as Mcllroy himself. It also contains essays from emerging film scholars, including number of current graduate students, as well as contributors working in complementary fields such as cultural studies, literature, gender studies, theatre, and women's studies. While depth of familiarity with the subject matter is occasionally compromised in essays where contributors are working outside their principal discipline, the diversity of backgrounds also provides broader range of contextual interpretations than is normally found in books on Irish film. In fact, many of the most interesting points come from contributors who are new to the study of Irish cinema. Theatre scholar Joan FitzPatrick Dean, for example, goes long way in explaining why the critically acclaimed and immensely popular plays of Brian Friel have turned into disastrous flops as film adaptations. The first two sections of the collection are devoted to the relationship between Irish cinema and film genres, with the first focusing on genre theory and the second on Hollywood's influence. In both sections, the writers are careful to point out the difficulty in blending global genres with local content in an effort to satisfy both the small domestic market and the lucrative international one. …

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