Fortnight Publications Ltd.
Getting It All in the FrameAuthor(s): Mark RobinsonSource: Fortnight, No. 265 (Sep., 1988), p. 28Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25551680 .
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Maurice O'Donoghue (left) and Jimmy Brennan in Pigs
Getting it all in the frame THADDEUS O'Sullivan has been spending a
lot of time in Northern Ireland lately. He is to
direct the film adaptation of Sam Hanna Bell's
December Bride?the story of a woman who
keeps house for, and is loved by, two men and
the pressures she has to face in Ulster Protestant
rural society at the turn of the century. The project was mooted by Ulster Television
a couple of years ago but has been taken over by the Dublin-based independent Little Bird. Its
production of J G Farrell's Troubles was re
cently screened by both UVT and RTE. Thaddeus O'Sullivan is at the heart of new
Irish cinema, despite being based in London for
more than 20 years. He left Ireland in the mid
60s as a 17-year-old, he recalls, working at "this
and that" before studying film at the Royal
College of Art. This was in the days before
Channel Four, when an independent film-maker
was "a queer character outside the Pale". It is
different now, he adds. People have got "grown
up" jobs as directors and cinematographers. An RCA training tended to produce its own
perspectives. O'Sullivan shot his own films
because "that was the way you did it". The
theory was the "diary film", a tradition inherited
from American underground films of the 60s.
"Your camera was a notebook. What you looked
at, and the way you looked at it, were more
important than technical quality." Underground films were not expected to be commercial.
O'Sullivan made two films then which still
enjoy a circulation. A Pint of Plain (1975) and On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978) both deal with the Irish emigrant experience in London.
They were made "instinctively", he says. "I was
not comfortable with making films about the
new culture I was involved in, but felt I could
make films about what I had left behind."
They are not, however, easy exercises in
nostalgia. On a Paving Stone Mounted was at
least partly inspired by John Berger's A Sev
enth Man, a series of poetic essays on migrant workers in Europe. O'Sullivan recalls being struck by how the memories of home of Turkish
workers in Germany were burnished by exile.
Writing about On a Paving Stone Mounted, he
said: "The film is about memories, a patchwork of spare, reduced, cynical memories ... the
memories becoming fiction, and the fiction
becoming memory, the 'back home' in Ireland."
Back home film-makers like Bob Quinn, Joe
MARK ROBINSON talks to film-maker Thaddeus O'Sullivan about his work?and the film he
plans to shoot in Co Down
Comerford, Cathal Black and Pat Murphy were
also experimenting with form and subject matter
in an attempt to portray their own instinctive
view of contemporary Irish experience. Work
ing in London, O'Sullivan was separated from
the beginnings of this movement but, after a
spell in America, he worked as a cameraman on
many of the distinctive Irish films of the 80s. He shot Traveller and Waterbag for Comerford,
Our Boys and Pigs with Black and Murphy's Anne Devlin, and recently he has been filming a series of documentaries with Quinn.
"It may look like a kind of incestuous Irish
thing," he says, "but was really a meeting of
serious like minds." People making films knew
they were working outside the "straight" indus
try. They didn't like much of what that industry
produced, and wanted to make films about sub
jects it wouldn't touch. But there was no infra
structure: most of the technicians had grown up in television, and because they thought film had
to be a means of mass communication like TV
they found the new ideas "pretentious". So the
film-makers had to find other film-makers,
people who spoke the same language, to help. O'Sullivan respects the film-makers he has
worked with because, he says, "whether they have a good one or a bad one they have a belief
in cinema. Without this belief film-makers are
just factory workers." He believes there are
always two ways to make a film. It is possible
just to tell the story?as much television does?
or to tell the story in such a way as to create all
the space needed for the mise en scene to support it in a meaningful way. It is a question of "visual
literacy". Decor, costume, sound, lighting, camera movement are all "letters in an alphabet" which have to be juggled to bring their own
depths of meaning to the story. "In cinema there
is a way of getting everything in," he says. The job of a cinematographer is to interpret
what the director is trying to do, to arrange the
letters of the alphabet in the frame. As a camera
man the actors are for him part of that alphabet,
but as a director O' Sullivan says he is "obsessed
with performance". He thinks first about putting faces to the story; everything else makes up the
further layers of meaning. Although the director
is responsible for the finished film, O'Sullivan
belives good film-making is a collective effort.
"You have to give people room to do their jobs, to let them contribute," he says.
O'Sullivan returned to directing in 1985 with The Woman who Married Clark Gable, an
adaptation of a short story by Sean O Faolain, in
which he cast Bob Hoskins as an Englishman in
1930s Dublin whose resemblance to the great screen idol seems to offer to his wife (Brenda
Fricker) the promise of temporary escape from
an oppressive working-class family existence.
Like most of the films with which he has been associated, The Woman who Married Clark
Gable benefited from support from Bord Scan
nan na hEireann (the Irish Film Board). O'Sull
ivan is saddened and angered by its recent abo
lition. He feels that it involved "a ridiculously small amount of money" (around IR?500,000 a
year) and that arguments by Mr Haughey's
government that 80 per cent of films supported
by BSE failed to make a profit are short-sighted to say the least. Denmark, which he has recently visited, puts ?6 million a year into film produc tion?often up to four-fifths of a film's budget.
He believes that because so few Irish films
are produced they are subjected to an unfair
amount of attention: each is taken as a measure
of the state of the industry. And, after all, 90 per cent of Hollywood films are awful, or lose
money. He believes the Republic's government should realise that film is in a state of develop
ment and should support it, but he is not optimis tic: "It is hard to struggle against ignorance."
Despite the lack of support there is a good deal of activity and a fair amount of money
about, if mainly for television. O'Sullivan does
not feel threatened by the availability of TV money for films: "People interested in cinema
will make films. If they're not they can just make
television. But I've never yet met a film director
who, when it came to the crunch, worried about
framing a shot differently or using more close
ups. Television likes cinema. It knows the value
of it. It knows it has to break out of the parochi alism of the studio and deal with the bigger issues that come with cinematic sensitivity."
He is also impatient with arguments that set
individualistic independents against what are
perceived to be commercially orientated pro duction companies. For him the bottom line
must be "the development of Irish film culture".
People have "to want to make films"?films
which "open up another world, another way of
thinking". December Bride is backed by television
money, but is intended initially for cinema re
lease, so production values must be kept high. Sam Hanna Bell's novel is set around the shores
of Strangford Lough and O'Sullivan and other
key members of the production team have been
looking for authentic Co Down locations and a
suitable production base. Filming was tenta
tively scheduled to begin this month, but princi
pal photography has been put back to next April. The director is not unduly concerned: the back
ers appear very keen on the script and he is
confident that "the money will wait".
It could be a blessing in disguise. There will
be more time to recreate the landscape of nearly a century ago by planting long-forgotten crops like flax, while shooting some inserts through the winter will give the film the sense of chang
ing seasons so important to the original story. If
everything goes according to plan, the Decem
ber Bride should be well worth waiting for.
28 September Fortnight
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