The burden of history: rethinking post-conflict Irish essay films: Peter Lennon’s <i>Rocky Road to Dublin</i> (1968) and Mark Cousins’ <i>I Am Belfast: A City Symphony</i> (2015)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarly attention within the field of documentary cinema in the last twenty years or so has developed a new branch of studies often focused on what is termed the essay film. This mode of expression commonly associated with post-war filmmakers such as Alain Resnais and Chris Marker frequently seeks an appropriate mode of address to come to terms with a traumatic past. This essay endeavours to bring some of the insights of critics on the essay film, such as Nora Alter, Timothy Corrigan, Philip Lopate, and Laura Rascaroli to an Irish context. In particular, the essay films by Peter Lennon and Mark Cousins are discussed as best seen and understood within this new context. It is argued that these films seek to unburden the suffocating effects of Irish history and serve as a kind of medication for past and ongoing injuries. An effort is also made to build an admittedly imperfect genealogy of the Irish essay film by reaching back to the 1940s and referring briefly to the work of Liam O’Laoghaire and subsequently George Morrison in the early 1960s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".