IRISH FILM, TELEVISION & THEATRE – 2024

Abstract

HOOPER: It doesn’t make much sense for a guy who hates the water to live on an island.

CHIEF BRODY: It’s only an island if you look at it from the water.

HOOPER: That makes a lot of sense.

This tangential drunken exchange between the shark-hunting protagonists in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) may inadvertently reveal something acute about the ambiguities of island identity. Ireland’s geography, society and ecosystem have been repeatedly – literally and metaphorically – created and recreated through a dynamic symbiosis of sea and land. Processes of deposition and reclamation, of mortality and nourishment, of inclusivity and exclusivity, of constitutional belonging and defining otherness, have all been bound in one way or another to the country’s maritime borders. Irish cultural experiences follow the same variable fluctuations, and from the earliest historical exhibitions of indigenous creativity, the sea has been a source of ubiquitous inspiration and fascination for artists. It appears throughout the romanticised landscapes of Jack B. Yeats and Paul Henry, it infuses and inspires the haunted ecologies of the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Paula Cunningham, and it performs a portentous narrative function in countless Irish ballads. Native literature has regularly narrated tales of death in or beside the water. We need only pause to consider John Millington Synge’s modernist play Riders to the Sea, John B. Keane’s The Field, and John Banville’s 2005 novel The Sea to get a sense of how that natural phenomenon has infiltrated our cultural heritage and memory. Some of Ireland’s most interesting films have framed the magnificence of the shore for concluding or climactic scenes: whether tragically, in Lamb (Colin Gregg, 1985), Adam & Paul (Lenny Abrahamson, 2004) and The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh 2022); affirmatively, in Maeve (John Davies and Pat Murphy, 1981), Into the West (Mike Newell, 1992) and Disco Pigs (Kirsten Sheridan, 2001); or more uncertainly, in The Secret of Roan Inish (John Sayles, 1994), The Van (Stephen Frears, 1996) and Nora (Pat Murphy, 2000).