Bibliographic record
Abstract
Troubles Cinema: Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009) & Fifty Dead Men Walking (Kari Skogland, 2008) Two very different films appeared in 2009 to remind us that Troubles cinema has not gone away. Canadian Kari Skogland, who works mainly in television, directed one, Fifty Dead Men Walking. The other was Five Minutes of Heaven, directed by Downfall (2004) director, Oliver Hirschbiegel. Both share same producer, Eoin O'Callaghan, but little else. I mention Fifty Dead Men Walking more to dismiss it than to linger on it. An informer narrative, based on eponymous memoir by Martin McGartland, film is set in Belfast in 1980s. McGartland (Jim Sturgess) is an innocent charmer and lad-about-town who is hired by British Secret Service (headed by a lugubrious Ben Kingsley who works under code name Fergus) as an informer. Acting on what he believes to be proper principles, McGartland soon lands himself in deeper water than he could have anticipated and is eventually sold out to IRA by British. A last minute rescue sees him flee site of his torture and set up anew in Canada. The title refers to fifty men McGartland believes himself to have saved by informing, though in end it seems that he will never be able to save himself. Shot in fast-paced contemporary thriller style, film is marked by its determination to present Troubles in as entertaining a manner as possible. Only when drama slows towards end is viewer left in uncomfortable position of having to reflect on narrative construction or indeed to consider moral message, if there is one. In place of complexity come all thrills of McGartland's possible detection, their reality-effect guaranteed by knowledge that they are based on actual events. This in itself proved problematic for film's makers when McGartland threatened an injunction that would have prevented Fifty Dead Men Walking's gala screening from taking place at Toronto Film Festival of April 2009. His argument was that film did not represent his position accurately. In end, a confidential agreement was reached between producers and McGartland, and screening went ahead. Subsequently, a number of journalists reported that McGartland had contacted them following their reviews to correct inaccuracies. Skogland herself told Michael Dwyer in The Irish Times that: I liked universality of story because, whether it's happening in Ireland or Iraq or in an inner city, notion of someone choosing to go against their community and potentially giving up their life and their future, or facing torture as retribution, was a very compelling story. That's what hooked me; human drama behind it. Others, notably Ronan Bennett in The Guardian, argued for problematic nature of all informer narratives, particularly one that seeks to justify or glamourise informing (McGartland wrote to The Guardian correcting Bennett). Overall, Fifty Dead Men Walking is best defined as a project conceived with some naivety and almost complete indifference to historical accuracy, a criticism that will sound familiar to anyone who has studied Troubles cinema. A more considered piece, Five Minutes of Heaven is concerned with exploring issues surrounding reconciliation. The narrative focuses on two men, one, Alistair Little (Liam Neeson), a former Loyalist killer who has done time for murder of a Catholic, Jim Griffin (Gerard Jordan), an act witnessed by Jim's younger brother, Joe Griffin (James Nesbitt). In spirit of reconciliation, a television company that makes One on One (a programme about the man you could become in words of researcher), plans to bring two men face-to-face for first time since assassination. Little is now a peace worker; Griffin is an emotional wreck, revisited by flashbacks of murder and his mother's accusation that he could have prevented it. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".