Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (review)

No one who has a serious interest in Irish electronic media should be without Lance Pettitt’s Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. In the relatively short space of just over three hundred pages, this book manages a clear and carefully researched synopsis of the history of film and broadcast in Ireland, a detailed account of the specific films and programs that defined Irish electronic media in the past century, and a useful commentary on the creative, cultural, and political forces with which individuals working in the film and broadcast industries had to content. There are other books, like James MacKillop’s Contemporary Irish Cinema, that offer more detailed assessments of individual films or broadcast programs, but none have the scholarly breadth or social relevance of Pettitt’s study. Indeed, this book stands as required reading for anyone interested in the cultural forces shaping twentieth-century Ireland. Although throughout the work Pettitt ranges freely and comfortably between media, he divides his study into two parts: “Cinema” and “Television.” The latter also gives a very good overview of Irish radio in both the North and the Republic. It progresses according to carefully detailed outlines—suggesting that its publishers hope that it will become a textbook for any number of Irish Studies courses—that give one a clear sense of each chapter’s aims without succumbing to a plodding or predictable style. Pettitt begins with a chapter on Irish history that would be extraneous to anyone familiar with the topic were it not for his exemplary treatment of the vexed issues of colonialism, nationalism, and postcolonialism (with and without the hyphen). While most studies invoking these terms move forward with superheated rhetoric toward foregone conclusions, Pettitt pays his readers the compliment of assuming that they have functioning brains, and so suppresses polemics in favor of exposition. The result is that readers come away with a far clearer and far more sophisticated sense of the terms than any number of studies by the holy trinity of Fanon, Said, and Bhabha could hope to produce. Pettitt also articulates the problems of defining a national cinema as cogently as one would expect to find anywhere. By the time that readers encounter his commentary on specific films, they already have both the lexicon and the background necessary to judge for themselves the merits of the works to which he refers. Though by no means encyclopedic, Screening Ireland does a fine job focusing attention on representative films from early silent works like Irish Destiny to the always problematic The Quiet Man. In assessing these efforts, Pettitt takes a realistic look at the difficulties confronted by independent Irish filmmakers Reviews: Léirmheasanna