Abstract
O’Brien and Canning examine how Irish film production illustrates the complexities and paradoxes around producing meaning-making cultural products within a national setting, while operating simultaneously within a globalised industry. They situate the emergence of the twenty-first-century Irish film industry against the competing dynamics of free-market funding and implied ‘cultural value’ frameworks, and demonstrate how the dialectical relationship between them produces Irish film which speaks both nationally and transnationally. This ‘internationalised’ Irish film includes the work of Irish-born (Lenny Abrahamson) and diasporic Irish (John Michael McDonagh) filmmakers. The authors take Brooklyn (John Crowley 2015) as the central case study and frame it as an example of glocalisation (Robertson, The Journal of International Communication 18:191–208, 2012), interrogating America as well as Ireland.
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Notes
- 1.
The full title is the 1968 Report of the Film Industry Committee in Ireland, 1968, and it was commissioned by the then minister for industry and commerce.
- 2.
The explicit use of the term ‘tax expenditure’ as preferred by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) instead of the more usual ‘tax relief’ or ‘tax incentive’ is a conscious decision to reflect the true nature of such subsidies, as expenditures on the public purse (OECD (2010), Tax Expenditures in OECD Countries, OECD Publishing, Paris).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
See Chap. 17 for a more detailed discussion of the film.
- 6.
The Great Famine (An Gorta Mór) 1845–1849 followed the failure of the Irish potato crop—the main affordable food supply of the population—due to infection by potato blight. More than one million of the population of eight million died of starvation, and two million more were forced to emigrate. Other food supplies were unaffected, but were exported to Britain; the British government’s response to the disaster was slow, and was condemned worldwide.
- 7.
Statistics from US Census Bureau 2013 American Community Survey. An additional 3 million people additionally identified as ‘Scotch-Irish’ and whose heritage is that of Scottish/Ulster Protestantism. See https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk.
- 8.
Following controversial 2014 comments on the quality of Irish film, McDonagh noted, “I didn’t want [Calvary] to be perceived as a small, parochial, ‘Irish’ film. This intention on my part has been wilfully misrepresented by a small section of the Dublin media with an axe to grind. What has been most dispiriting to me, however, is the low-level bigotry that has reared its head in the fallout from the interview. I am an Irish citizen, a child of Irish parents, nearly all my friends and work associates are Irish, and yet because I was born in London I supposedly have no right to comment on Irish film” Flynn and Tracey (2015).
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O’Brien, M., Canning, L. (2020). Brooklyn and the Other Side of the Ocean: The International and Transnational in Irish Cinema. In: Lewis, I., Canning, L. (eds) European Cinema in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_13
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