Irish Film 3483
Tuesday and Thursday 2025
Course title: IRSH/ENGL 3483 Irish Film Course description: In this course students will study native Irish culture and the culture of the Diaspora through the medium of film. We will study the impact of foreign and domestic cinema on the political, cultural and intellectual life of the Irish both at home and abroad.
Instructor Information
Name: Dr. Stewart Donovan
Email: sdonovan@stu.ca
Office location: 307 Edmund Casey Hall
Office hours: M/W 1:00-2:00
Phone: 452-0426
Recommended Texts: The New Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson; Fame in the Twentieth Century, Clive James.http://www.clivejames.com/books/fame/intro "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
In the Wake of Dark Passage: an essay on the Famine Irish of New Brunswick
Under English Eyes. A Review of Heathcliff and the Great Hunger by Terry Eagleton.
Michael Collins : A review essay of Neil Jordan's film and memoir.
Course Requirements: one essay 10%; a journal 40%; Final Exam: in-class essay 40%, class mark 10%. Your first paper is due on October 15.
Journal
A more informal style of writing, your journal should record notes from class, conversations with fellow students, family, friends et. al. about Ireland— its cinema and its cultural impact. The journal/notebook should also highlight research you have been doing: reading and viewing you will have done in the library or on the net. This is the independent learning section of the course. There is a large section of Irish and Irish themed cinema and movies in our library and students are expected to become familiar with some of them. The best source for Irish Film is on-line and most of the standard streamers cover Irish cinema and Irish themed cinema. Criterion is the gold standard but almost all the streaming Apps have some Irish themed works. You will be expected to write reviews and summaries of some of their themes, plots, performances and style and to make comparisons with other films you have seen. You should try to write/ compose at least two entries per week. The length of these entries depends on your writing skills, but try to avoid point form. Set a goal of one to two pages per week. Remember that the journal is also a writing and communicating exercise. Do not fear the blank page, as no one learns how to write well overnight. You must, however, try to critique the celebrity culture that has largely been the background of your movie-going experience. Try to step back from it and critique its negative qualities while appraising the merits of film and film culture in general. Many educators are concerned that the undergraduate essay will be (or as the New Yorker has argued already is) dead. We can combat the hostile take-over of AI by inserting our personal voice, but still maintaining academic rigor. The Journal, as opposed to the essay, allows for this kind of rear guard action where we insists on our own voice and our own story without surrendering to the intervention of Big Tech with its massive encyclopedia of facts often presented in a deliberately faux Mandarin style: Mandarin style” in prose—which typically means a very high-toned, formal, refined, somewhat elitist way of writing in English, reminiscent of accomplished 18th–19th century historians like Gibbon. It’s less about Mandarin Chinese and more about a certain polished “mandarin” (as in bureaucrat, cultured elite) voice. Here’s a classic example from Kenneth Clark: “It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last line of the last page…”— Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire(as quoted in Clark’s essay “Mandarin English,” cited as an exemplar of Mandarin prose style) That paragraph’s measured rhythm, London-square cadence, softly grand arches—that’s Mandarin English at its peak. Many critics see this style as beautiful but evasive, a gilded way to glide past awkward truths under the cover of eloquence. As Clark notes, even Gibbon sometimes “passes too easily over difficult ground”, smoothing over complexity with equalizing prose. In short: “Mandarin style” refers to a very formal, elevated English prose—rich with cadence, polished vocabulary, stately poise, and a kind of aristocratic restraint. It’s rare in casual conversation but often deliberately evoked when you want writing to feel majestic, timeless, or quietly authoritative.You have probably guessed correctly that this is AI —which it is. Proving that it can use many styles— as many infact as there are on the Web.
NOTE: The Journal is to be handed in on the exam day in December.
Exam
Your final exam will be an in-class essay without notes. You will be given 6 or more questions on the last day of classes from which you will choose and write two short essay questions.
Attendance
Attendance is mandatory. Students who miss more than three classes without an excuse from the Registrar will be awarded a Golden F by the academy.
Texts and Films
There will be a series of class email handouts. Students should also consult professor Donovan’s web page for the course. Note: some films may be subject to change.
Course Requirements: Topics for your essay include: "Breaking the Hollywood Yoke"; “The films of Jim Sheridan: from My Left Foot to The Boxer;” "Neil Jordan as Auteur”;” “The Troubles ”. “Irish identity and Irish modernism: seeking subjects in the post-national state.” “Beyond Ethnicity, Beyond Empire: Ireland, America, Europe and the Global South.” Students may also choose four or more feature films made in Ireland post 1982 and discuss their treatment of Irish subjects. Your paper is due October 15th.
Recommended Reading: Tom Hayden, Irish on the Inside "A pugnacious autobiographical treatise, in which former California state senator Hayden reclaims his Irish identity. Hayden's family emigrated to the US during the years of the Famine and quickly assumed the assimilationist role, both out of a desire to survive (the "wild Irish" were perhaps as despised as Natives and African-Americans, though they had an ace up their sleeve: the right to vote) and out of the shame that accompanied the Great Hunger and the subsequent flight into amnesia. Here, Hayden tells his story of regaining his Irishness, and why In the Irish soul he finds appealing elements: rebelliousness, moral idealism, communal ethics, mysticism, all still in circulation despite the best efforts of the church and an occupation state. He finds in the language and music a cultural diversity akin to biodiversity, not only an intrinsic value but a strengthening and protective character for society writ large, for it is at once very much itself and inclusive. Equally attractive are historical ties of the Irish to radical movements and their experience with servitude: As both victims and victimizers—Hayden draws upon the treatment of African-Americans by the American Irish during the latter half of the 19th century—he also considers the Irish experience invaluable in examining how racial attitudes are formed, and how it can be subverted to form links with the nonwhite world through a common history of colonialism, starvation, poverty, and threats of genocide. The heart here, though, is in Hayden's time spent in Ireland, particularly Northern Ireland, and his efforts to understand—more so, to live—the unfolding of Irish history as it is played out along political, economic, and human fronts. An electric piece of emotional archaeology and a welcoming back of an ethnic spirit—nonconformist, open, ancient—that anyone could be proud to claim. "Kirkus Review.
The auteur historian and activist, Mike Davis, like Tom Hayden, a radical Californian, was also deeply influenced by his Irish American background and time he spent, again like Hayden, in the North of Ireland during "The Troubles" and his studies in Glasgow.
Overture to cultural stereotypes: from Stage Irish to the Myth of the West. Gangs of New York. Overture to Ethnicity: diaspora, nation, identity, race and settler colonies in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. Intro to film as cultural studies, art, narrative, history and politics.
Interviews with cast and director. Clips from Gangs of New York.
a) deconstructing Hollywood Irish or, life among among the white folk, from LA to London. Recommended reading and viewing: How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev. YouTube lecture by Noel Ignatiev: from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called 'path breaking,' 'seminal,' 'essential,' a 'must read.' How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Mass. Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country - a land of opportunity - they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person's skin. Noel Ignatiev's 1995 book - the first published work of one of America's leading historians - tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White, Routledge, 1995. See also Chris Hedges on the old South.
b) Acceptable to Empire: Washington, London and Rome. Michael Collins; Peter Mullan/Stephen Frears
Race, violence, religion and the image of the Irish: Scarface. Paul Muni as Tony Carmonte. Angels With Dirty Faces; Hell's Kitchen colourized; Cagney and O'Brien Bogart in Dark Victory, Irish Bogart; St. Dominic, the mortgage, and the myth of Irish emotionalism: The Bells of St. Mary's and Going My Way religion (Barry Fitzgerald and Maureen O' Hara as the tourist 's/stage-celluloid Irish). Ginger Rodgers as Bowery Cinderella, Kitty Folyle (1940); The Fighting Sullivans (1944) as tragic elegy and war-time propaganda (inspiration for Saving Private Ryan). Race, violence, religion and the image of the Irish.
John Ford, John Wayne, the Sands of Iwo Jima Clip 2; The Searchers clip1 The Searchers and American racism; clip 2 the Captivity Myth; Walt Disney and the celluloid Irish: from The Quiet Man: Dragging her back. Spielberg's tributes to the John Ford: The Quiet Man in E.T. and David Lynch in the Fablemans. Darby O'Gill and the leprechauns and Sean Connery (with a footnote to Francis Ford Coppola and Finian's Rainbow).
Philomena with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan; The Lost Child of Philomena; Peter Mullen's The Magdalene Sisters Film ( Documentary: Sex in a Cold Climate) and Spotlight. Film clips 20 priests. Joni Mitchell in Japan with the Chieftains
Readings: James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries: And The Nation’s Architecture of Containment Indiana: university of Nortre Dame Press, 2007. P.155. Smith’s book is the most exhaustive study available thus far of the laundries and their impact on Irish society: “In late August 2003, almost one year after Mullan’s film premiered a the Venice Film Festival and within weeks of its release in the United States, The Irish Times revealed disturbing details of the exhumation, cremation, and reburial of 155 Irish women who had lived and died at the High Park Magdalen asylum operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Refuge in Dublin (Humphreys 2003). Buried between 1858 and 1984 and interred anonymously, these women were denied a proper burial and final resting place. The religious order sought and received the required state license to exhume the bodies in 1993. However, the license listed only 133 sets of remains. Death certificates, legally required, in Ireland, were missing in some fifty-eight cases (Raftery 2003). It was not until 2003, ten years later, that Irish society learned about the twenty-two bodies for which the nuns could not account. Although such irregularities should have led to an immediate police investigation, Ireland in the early 1990’s on the cusp of an economic and cultural transformation popularly termed the Celtic Tiger, had little interest in digging up old ghosts. Instead, the state provided the Sisters with a hastily reissued exhumation license, and all the bodies were cremated and reinterred anonymously at Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. Creamation, of course, destroys all trace of historical evidence, and thus no one will ever know with certainty who is buried at the Glasnevin plot (Raftery 2003). The history of the Ireland’s Magdalen asylumns is, then, incomplete and the still-emerging facts are even more disturbing than the fiction of Mullan’s film.” p. 137. See also Diarmaid Ferriter’s Occasions of Sin (2009). The critic and writer Patricia Craig has written that Occasions of Sin “shows the puritanical system evolving into a monolithic monstrosity.” See also Joni Mitchell’s song Magdalene Laundries. Her version recorded with The Cheiftans on the Tears of Stone (RCA, 1999) CD is the most poignant. Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland by Diarmaid Ferriter "Sex – my introduction to sex was in the back kitchen of Letterfrack, jammed up against a boiler, getting my leg burnt and getting raped by Brother Dax." Testimony such as this has racked Ireland since the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse published its report in May this year. The 2,600-page Ryan report exposed "endemic" physical and sexual abuse in church-run schools and orphanages in Ireland – 800 alleged abusers in more than 200 institutions during a period of 35 years. This grim litany reveals obvious failings in the Catholic church, the negligence of the state and an alarming capacity for collective bad faith, which no amount of public hand wringing now can mitigate or disguise. Diarmaid Ferriter's Occasions of Sin is thus an important and timely book: it is a richly textured history of modern Ireland's complicated attitude to sex." David Dwan
From the Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson on John Ford, John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara; Michael Rogin on John Wayne from The London Review of Books. Andrew O'Hagan on John Ford from the London Review of Books. Hollywood Censored, Gregory D. Black, Cambridge University Press, 1994. In response to a series of sex scandals that rocked the movie industry in the early 1920s, the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency implemented a code stipulating that movies stress proper behaviour, respect for government, and "Christian values." Based on an extensive survey of original studio records, censorship files, and the Catholic Legion of Decency archives (whose contents are published here for the first time), Hollywood Censored examines how hundreds of films were expurgated to promote a conservative political agenda during the 1930s. By taking an innovative view of how movies were made, and the conditions that made them, Hollywood Censored brings together such chapters as "Movies and Modern Literature," "Beer, Blood and Politics," and "Film Politics and Industry Policy" to form a rare look at America's most famous industry.
Lesson I : Excalibur, Michael Collins and Mona Lisa. Neil Jordan’s as auteur and sometime Hollywood-director for hire. Jim Sheridan’s The Field with Richard Harris: Famine in Ireland and China
Lesson II Gabriel Byrne: authentic Irish on RTE to Hollywood, from the Coen Brothers Miller's Crossing to the Usual Suspects.
Readings: Down All the Days by Christy Brown Readings: Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbon and John Hill, Cinema in Ireland.
Lesson IV Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father with Daniel Day Lewis./ Neil Jordan's The Crying Game. Back to the future: Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992); Marketing 'the other' in America; sexual politics vs colonial politics: theorist and author Jack/Judith Halberstam argued that Dil's transvestism and the viewer's placement in Fergus's point of view reinforces societal norms rather than challenging them.[15] Interview with Jordan and cast.
Lesson V Roddie Doyle on Film: The Commitments, The Van and The Snapper.
Lesson VI : Bloody Sunday by Paul Greengrass; Steve McQueen’s Hunger with Michael Fassbinder .Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth: The Wretched of the Earth preface and text; Professor Donovan on Mike Davis and the Black Panther Movement; Bobby Seale to Bobby Sands; Essay on Bobby Sands. Kneecap, hip hop trio from Belfast: Palestine, Genocide and Britain again. Kneecap (2024) directed by Rich Peppiatt.
Lesson VII Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy The Butcher Boy. Popular Culture, Cold War politics, Catholic hegemony, hysteria (moral panic); the Kennedy apotheosis and small town Ireland. Breakfast On Pluto. Readings: Patrick McCabe’s Breakfast on Pluto
Lesson VIII The Wind that Shakes the Barley by Ken Loach
Lesson IX The Magdalene Sisters/ Philomena/Small Things Like These Cillian Murphy based on the novella by Claire Keegan
Lesson X Ken Loach’s AE Fond Kiss/ The Guard Michael Mcdonagh
Lesson XI In Brughes; Martin McDonagh. Ireland after Hollywood/The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh
Lesson XII Tomm Moore: from the Song of the Sea to Wolfwalkers