Translating Ireland back into Eire: Gael Linn and film making in Irish

Without films in Irish all the work done for the language in the schools, on the radio and by voluntary organisations is doomed to ultimate failure no matter how effectively it is done.

Films in Irish, anonymous booklet published in 1950 by the Comhdhail Naisiunta na Gaeilge

The translator invades, extracts, and brings home.

George Steiner, After Babel

THE language revitalization organization Gael Linn is rightly famous for its embrace of "modern technology" in its work trying to revive Irish as Ireland's vernacular tongue. (1) While its traditional music label is perhaps the most widely known of these initiatives, equally important were its forays into film making. Here I offer a short examination of these forays, focusing on the newsreel series Amharc Eireann (A View of Ireland, 1956-64) and on George Morrisson's two films, Mise Eire (I Am Ireland, 1959) and Saoirse? (Freedom?, 1961). Two aspects of these films are particularly important; one is their Griersonian character--and I will explain John Grierson's ideas about cinema--and the other is their quality as translations, translations of a mostly English-speaking country into a series of Irish-speaking images. Gael Linn seemed to visualize film as something that was social and nation-building rather than commercial, an orientation that went against the otherwise capitalist-oriented development policies of the Lemass government. In this regard its film production strongly resembled those of the National Film Board of Canada and the film units of the United Kingdom's General Post Office and Empire Marketing Board, all of which were at some point run by Grierson. That Gael Linn sought to put this idea of film into action through the use of translation brings to light some interesting tensions in the role of translation in Ireland's ongoing process of cultural definition. A mixture of the progressive/social-democratic and the nostalgic/conservative are, we will see, problems that plague both the language revitalization movement and the Griersonian idea of cinema. Thus, these Gael Linn films, far from being merely a cine-historical curiosity, are in fact embodiments of deeply paradoxical moments in both film history and Irish history.

John Grierson (1898-1972) was an extremely influential figure in documentary cinema, though his legacy is a contradictory one. Born in Scotland, he first came to international prominence when he ran the film units of the Empire Marketing Board (1926-33; hereafter EMB) and the General Post Office (1933-38; hereafter GPO), both in the UK. This period is loosely known as the "British Documentary Movement," and Grierson oversaw the production of a number of films that stand as monuments of documentary, such as Drifters (EMB, John Grierson, 1929), Song of Ceylon (EMB, Basil Wright, 1933) and Night Mail (GPO, Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 1936). Grierson went to Canada in 1938, charged with surveying the country's film production; he subsequently became the first head of the National Film Board of Canada, whose original brief was primarily the production of wartime propaganda films. He also consulted on film commissions in New Zealand and Australia, and did film work for UNESCO from 1946 to 1948.

Overall Grierson's vision involved a socially oriented, non-commercial model for film, a model that was closely linked to strong government and national unity. He was influenced by Soviet cinema, whose important figures such as Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevlod Pudovkin saw film as a means to consolidate and unify the new, postrevolutionary state. Although many of the films made under his supervision (or by people influenced by his vision) were overly earnest or idealistic about working-class life, excessively dry, and vaguely patronizing in that educational-documentary sort of way, many Grierson-era films are also wonders of modernist aesthetics. Night Mail, for instance, features an editing style heavily influenced by Soviet film of the 1920s, a score by Benjamin Britten, and a W.H. Auden poem on the soundtrack (read by Auden himself).

The formal and ideological contradictions of Grierson's legacy have been the subject of a great deal of hand-wringing on the part of Canadian and British critics of the last two decades, and much of this sheds light on the situation of Irish film before the boom years of the late 1980s and 1990s. Although the later phases of Grierson's career were plagued by accusations of Communist sympathy, (2) he has been criticized as reactionary and crypto-fascist by Canadian scholars Joyce Nelson (1988) and Peter Morris (1986), both of whom discuss his admiration of Walter Lippman, as well as Grierson's desire to use film to manipulate mass opinion in order to "manufacture consent" in a way that anticipated contemporary methods of public relations. British scholar and film maker Brian Winston has also argued that Grierson's ideology, like that of his American colleague Robert Flaherty--director of Man of Aran (1934)--was paternalistic and rooted in Victorian ideas about art; Winston grumbles that "Grierson and his school could take government and industrial money for the making of liberal films selling the existing order and its capacity for gradual social amelioration" (1995:36). This recent work has sought to reject the idealism of Grierson the reformer or Grierson the social-democrat in favor of Grierson the corporate toady or Grierson the embodiment of the hyper-efficient, technocratic state apparatus.

In a way that Grierson would no doubt have approved, films in Ireland until the 1970s were, with the exception of work done at Wicklow's Ardmore Studios, (3) mostly produced by organizations with semi-pedagogical aspirations. Important examples of postwar Irish documentary include informational films produced by the departments of health or local government, and A Nation Once Again (1945), a film commemorating the centenary of Thomas Davis's birth, produced by Fianna Fail and seen by many as espousing a self-satisfied nationalism. Indeed, two years later Liam O'Leary, working for the opposition party Clann na Poblachta, produced Our Country (1947), which, although lacking specific mention of Fianna Fail, was seen as an attack on its legacy, documenting the tremendous poverty and deprivation that was prevalent in the last days of the Free State. All this Irish film-making activity was didactic and, in one way or another, nation-building.

Rather than working toward a vision of a commercial, narrative cinema, Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s was moving in a much more Griersonian direction. Indeed, part of the critique of Grierson's legacy, especially from Canadian critics like Nelson and Morris, is that he willfully held back feature film production in countries where he was influential not because he believed film had a higher calling than crass commercial entertainment (as would be suggested from his public statements and writings), but because he wanted to help his friends at the head of American studios maintain worldwide hegemony. But for good or for bad, indigenous feature film production was almost completely absent, even though Irish films made as part of social or governmental activities could be seen in Irish cinemas. Films in Irish, a booklet on Irish-language film making published in 1950 by Comhdhail Naisiunta na Gaeilge (the organization that eventually founded Gael Linn), openly acknowledged this fact: "Even if we had a fairly extensive film industry in Ireland, it could not be expected to produce two hundred, of even one hundred, new and suitable short films per year. Since we have as yet no film industry, it is obvious that we must, for a long time to come, resort mainly to dubbing. It is easy and comparatively inexpensive to dub films which have only a commentary," and so which are presumably pedagogical films or newsreels (1950:4).

Indeed, I am struck by Grierson's statement in his 1944 manifesto, "A Film Policy for Canada," in favor of increased attention to 16mm exhibition that could be done all over the huge country of Canada, a concept not so far from the "Film Trains" that went through the Soviet countryside with portable projectors. In that manifesto Grierson writes:

   When you think of this nation's [Canada's] organisations, you will
   readily see how big this new 16mm audience can be. It includes
   educational classes in schools, high schools and universities, and
   industrial workers in the factories and trade union halls, farmers'
   groups, women's groups, Rotary groups, chambers of commerce, and so
   on and so on. (1986:62-63)

This sounds very much like Proinsias O Conluain's assessment of short film making in Ireland during and right after World War II. In his history of world cinema Sceal na Scannan (Story of Cinema), O Conluain writes about the films produced by various branches of government, including the Red Cross, Bord na Mona (the Irish Peat Board), Glun na Buaidhe (Victory Generation, a right-wing language revival organization), and the Economic Cooperation Administration (which produced a drama written by Sean O Faolain; see Rockett 1987:82). O Conluain writes that "is leir go dtuigeann na heagraiochtai seo uilig go bhfeadfadh an scannan a bheith ina chuidiu mhor acu chun na nithe a bhfuil suim acu iontu a chur chun cinn" ("it's clear that each of these organizations understands that film would greatly help them in advancing their interests"; 1953:100-1, my translation). This vision of a national cinema comprising principally films commissioned by corporations, social groups, and governmental bodies seeking to generate or fulfill interest in their activities is Griersonian to the core.

Furthermore, the Comhdhail Naisiunta na Gaeilge booklet asserts that films in Irish will never be profitable, and so "the provision of films in Irish must, therefore, be recognized from the outset as a public duty, as an educational, a cultural, and a national service" (1950:9-10). O Conluain also sees the matter in terms of duty, having sections entitled "Dualgas an Rialtais" ("The Duty of the Government") and "Ar nDualgas Fein--Bheith Readuil' ("Our Duty--Being Realistic"), and writing of the tension among businessmen between "spiorad an ghaimbin agus an leithleachais no spiorad na heachtraiochta agus an tir-ghra" ("a spirit of self-interest and selfishness or a spirit of adventurousness and patriotism"; 1954:5, my translation). The civic-minded Griersonian writing was on the cinematic wall in 1950 before a single Irish-language newsreel had been produced.

Thus, even if Grierson's film groups did almost no work in Ireland itself, apart from two EMB shorts in the 1930s made in County Down, (4) it seems clear to me that the national cinema, at least from the 1930s to the 1950s, was an extremely Griersonian one. In important respects Ireland took exactly the path that Britain had and that Canada would later: the neglect of feature-length narrative film making in favor of film making that was organizationally based (and often created by corporations working in tandem with government, as was the norm at the EMB), even if not always activist in character (many of the EMB films were purely commercial endeavors). (5) Gael Linn is a very good example of such an organization that was interested in sponsoring films to generate interest in its activities.

AMHARC EIREANN

Gael Linn's first foray into film making, the Irish-language newsreel series Amharc Eireann, was a combination of a Griersonian/educational model and a traditional newsreel model (whose American and British versions were widely shown on Irish screens). Gael Linn itself was an offshoot of Comhdhail Naisiunta na Gaeilge, which Terence Brown writes "was responsible in 1953 for the establishment of Gael Linn, which through its exploration of modern media has been the most successful and energetic proponent of [Irish-language] revival in the last three decades" 1985:149). As Rockett documents, there were 267 installments of the Amharc Eireann series produced between 1956 and 1964 (1987:86), (6) and Harvey O'Brien has written of how they were distributed on Irish screen by the British-owned Rank Film Distributors when Rank's own newsreel ceased production in 1958 (2000:335-36). These films were, then, fairly widely seen throughout Ireland; O'Brien writes that they "became the staple for Irish audiences during that period" (2000:336).

And yet, the focus of Amharc Eireann, with some exceptions, was on rural life: fairly logical given that Gaeltacht areas are, for the most part, rural. Indeed, a number of the films deal with islands. Again, this is fairly logical given that most of Ireland's islands, although not all of them, are part of the Gaeltacht. Some of the topics include "Inish Turk Relieved: Supplies by Helicopter" (Amharc Eireann, February 1961), a newsreel that features some great shots out of a helicopter making its way through an Atlantic storm to drop off food and supplies after ferry service had been suspended because of bad weather. In short, some of the imagery of Amharc Eireann is a bit heavy on the Man-of-Aran-influenced romance of the stoic, soggy islander hacking out a rough existence in the shadow of the mighty sea. Indeed, Rockett's precise critique of Irish film making of the 1930s is that it tended to manufacture or glorify "the ahistorical ethnicity represented in Man of Aran" (1987:71).

I would point out, however, several differences between the imagery of Amharc Eireann and that of Robert Flaherty's famous 1934 film. Several commentators have observed that Man of Aran puts forward a vision of Irish life based on frugality and struggle, a vision that is conveniently consistent with the austere economic policies of Fianna Fail, whose leaders heralded the film upon its release (see Pettitt 2000:80; Rockett 1987:71-72). These Gael Linn documentaries, by contrast, sometimes put forward a less harshly ascetic view of non-urban Ireland. Indeed, the 1957 newsreel "Leictriu Chonamara" ("The Electrification of Connemara," Amharc Eireann, June 957) has toward its end images of a taispeaint ('exhibition') of things you can buy that use electricity; these include an electric oven and what looks like a giant meat grinder. Admittedly, the images of the exhibition are still couched in terms of domestic labor, but this is nonetheless a long way from the grizzled wife making dinner at the hearth in Man of Aran.

Moreover, even though Amharc Eireann tends to focus on rural settings, it portrays these settings as relatively comfortable with modernity. "Leictriu Chonamara" provides a good example again, featuring shots of electricity poles being put up and a new, electricity-aided greenhouse being used. Although the film starts out by proudly asserting its setting as "Conamara: an ceantar Ghaeltachta is mo in Eirinn" ("Conamara: the largest Gaeltacht region in Ireland"), this is clearly a region in transition, not some sort of mystical world apart. Similarly, it seems to me important that the celebration of folk culture in "Fleadh Ceoil na hEireann" (7) ("Ireland's Music Festival," Amharc Eireann, June 1960) takes place not in some remote paradise but on the streets and in the buildings of the medium-sized town of Boyle. There's very little of the fantastic romanticism of Man of Aran or, as reports of the film's reception would suggest, its companion Irish-language short Oidhche Sheanchais (A Night of Storytelling, Norris Davidson, 1934). (8)

Brian McIlroy has written of Gael Linn's secularizing mission in contrast to the explicitly Catholic film unit Radharc (1959-96), and he is identifying an impulse similar to what I am trying to explain here: a combination of semi-nationalist desire to create distinctly Irish images and an openness to the ways that Irish identity was changing. "To a Northern Protestant, it may be difficult to distinguish the net results of Gael Linn and Radharc but the former, unlike the latter, had a wide enough brief to de-Catholicize the Irish language and thus pose a threat to the cultural space assumed by the Roman Catholic Church," McIlroy writes. "Gael Linn was made up not of altruistic amateurs but of people who felt that it was important for Irish people to see their way of life on-screen, if only to offset the imported lifestyles normally presented in their local cinemas" (1988:44). This mix of nationalist idealism and openness to the complications and "impurities" of modernity is a characterizing feature of these Amharc Eireann films.

Furthermore, these films actually have a very progressive aesthetic, often steering away from the stagy and manipulative formal strategy favored by Flaherty. "Fleadh Ceoil na hEireann" mostly features images of musicians in street crowds and in pubs that are shot cinema-verite style, (9) and there are also some very nice images shot out of second-story windows. The (no doubt lightweight) camera moves freely through these groups and so the images feel far more spontaneous than many of the documentaries of the period. (10) The newsreel feels energetic, modern. Even "Inish Turk Relieved: Supplies by Helicopter" seems to be shot "on the fly"; the images seem to have been taken (again seemingly with a lightweight camera) by someone crammed into the back seat of the helicopter itself (one image is shot over the shoulder of a co-pilot). The film has a sense of immediacy, of closeness that is actually quite similar to "Fleadh Ceoil na hEireann." While I would not want to argue that Amharc Eireann is an unheralded example of early spontaneous documentary, there are a number of episodes in the series that do seem consistent with the kind of experimentation with portable sound and camera gear that was going on in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the US, Canada, Quebec, France, and England.

Another key part of Amharc Eireann's identity is its status as a translation project. Colm O Laoghaire, who made many of the newsreels, said of these films in a 1957 issue of Irish Film Quarterly that "their primary pufpose is to encourage the public to accept Irish in the cinema as something normal and everyday (no more: not even to teach a few words)" (qtd. in O'Brien 2000:335). They attempt, in short, to present Ireland as a place where it is not at all unusual to hear Irish spoken, whereas, of course, Ireland is and was in the 1950s a place where spoken Irish was very rarely "normal" or "everyday." Here we can compare translation strategies that result in "domesticated" texts: translations which do not advertise their status as translations per se. In such a translation the rough edges of the process of changing language are smoothed over in hopes of achieving "the appearance ... that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the 'original'" (Venuti 1995:1). In this sense Amharc Eireann translates the Ireland of history into an Ireland that is in Irish "in the original."

There are, naturally, markers of the domination of the English language in the series. English titles for individual episodes, for example, were often used. Furthermore, in one such episode, "Ploughing Championships at Athenry" (Amharc Eireann, November 1963), there is a montage that has close-ups of signs on the competing ploughs. They read "Wexford," "Louth," "Dublin," "Laois," "Wicklow," "Kilkenny"; the Irish-language county names that were visible even on road signs throughout the state are absent here. Moreover, unlike many contemporary verite documentaries, Amharc Eireann relies almost entirely on voice-over for speech, though other forms of "wild sound" are sometimes heard (the music in "Fleadh Ceoil na hEireann" is an example). This reliance on voice-over allows the Irish language to be privileged on the soundtrack, increasing the sense that the Ireland of the 1950s presented in Amharc Eireann is a confidently Irish-speaking one. Thus, the complex ideology and history of the decline of the Irish language is smoothed over and obscured.

Although these films are produced just as state-sponsored translation schemes were being abandoned, they share a great deal with the translation project. Shortly after its establishment in 1925, the state-sponsored agency An Gum began publishing translations of literature into Irish (mostly, although not exclusively from English), hoping for popular acceptance especially in Gaeltacht regions. Michael Cronin writes that "general disenchantment with the scheme led to its gradual abandonment after the Second World War, with An Gum concentrating on the translation of school textbooks and children's literature" (1996:158). The scheme came in for considerable criticism from language activists (including Mairtin O Cadhain and Seosamh Mac Grianna), although Cronin defends the books as being both "storehouses of dialectical difference" and serious attempts to uphold "[caint na ndaoine advocate Peadar] Ua Laoghaire's prescription against anglicisms or bearlachas" (1996:161-62). Cronin also admits that the translators involved in the project had a hard time finding linguistic equivalences for urban experiences, a difficulty that is also visible in Amharc Eireann's rural focus. Indeed, An Gum's program, like the Amharc Eireann series, was trying to present Irish as an autonomous language that is a natural part of Irish everyday life. Irish need not only tell heroic tales of quaintly evoke Gaeltacht life, but could also be part of the dynamics of mass culture; Cu Chulainn needed to learn to coexist with Cu na mBaskerville, to choose a particularly well-known example of one Ah Gum translation. (11) This seems to me not so far from the Amharc Eireann presupposition that Irish and the culture of the Gaeltacht needed to emerge into modernity. And like An Gum's translations, the emergence into urbanity is still problematic in these newsreels. For the film makers associated with Gael Linn, that emergence comes a few years later through an evocation of an earlier period in Irish history, an emergence that in turn entails a vision of Irish that is much more problematic in terms of nationalism, internationalism, and the place of Irish in a postcolonial state.

GEORGE MORRISON'S DOCUMENTARIES

In terms of film making activity, Gael Linn is best known for the feature-length historical documentaries Mise Eire (1959) and Saoirse? (1960). These are both compilation films, made up almost entirely of photographs and documentary footage shot between 1895 and 1922. Mise Eire focuses primarily on the period 1893-1918 and thus covers highly romanticized events such as the Easter Rising and Sinn Fein's victory in the general election of 1918, which is where the film ends. Saoirse? on the other hand is much more muted. Opening with the first meeting of the Dail and covering the period between 1918 and 1922, it depicts the war of independence and the creation of the partitioned Free State; it ends just as the Irish civil war breaks out. A third film on the civil war and its aftermath was planned but never realized.

Certainly the Irish language was an integral feature of this initial period of anticolonial struggle and early postcolonial nation building (the first meeting of the Dail was conducted in Irish, for example), but it is also clear that the anticolonial struggle had primarily ah Anglophone character, at least in Dublin, which is where a fair bit of the action of both films takes place. Indeed, this linguistic character is borne out by Mise Eire and Saoirse? themselves, which often rely on images of newspapers to keep their narratives clicking along; with a few exceptions (such as bits from the Gaelic League's journal An Claidheamh Soluis [The Sword of Light]), the headlines that advance the narrative are in English, with a somber voiceover explaining them in Irish. So while Amharc Eireann can be viewed as a kind of cultural translation project, Mise Eire and Saoirse? are performing a much more literal sort of translation. They force upon images of struggle a language that itself has important connections to that struggle's brand of romantic nationalism, but that was, with a few exceptions, historically incongruent with the central events of the struggle as such.

The critical consensus on Mise Eire and Saoirse? is that both are romantic nationalist tracts. Harvey O'Brien writes that "Mise Eire and Saoirse? pandered to the Irish obsession with recent history embodied in the teachings at school and the idolatry practised through commemorative public monuments and plaques since the establishment of the Republic" (2000:336). Lance Pettitt writes that "Mise Eire ... can be viewed as a cinematic swan-song of nationalism at the end of the 1950s" (2000:81). Rockett writes that "Mise Eire and Saoirse? are in effect official histories of the struggle for independence produced at a time of transition in Irish society" (1987:87-88). It is not difficult to see the reasons for this consensus. Mise Eire especially but also Saoirse? construct Irish history as a steady progression toward liberation through anticolonial struggle, even if the more muted Saoirse? portrays the dream of a peaceful, united Republic as unachieved. The pantheon of important characters--W.T. Cosgrave, Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins--is central here, and the important events--the Easter Rising in Mise Eire, de Valera's trip to America in Saoirse?--are evoked in breathless detail. Sean O Riada's booming, sometimes vaguely militaristic score provides extremely emotive punctuation. (12) The British are also skewered, especially in Saoirse? In that film the Auxiliaries sent to battle the Irish Volunteers are referred to as "forsai nua ... forsai uafais" ("new forces ... forces of terror"). Elsewhere in Saoirse? the creation of Northern Ireland is evoked with a zoom-in of the map of the island of Ireland with a black line around the border of Northern Ireland, a long silence, and then a sudden, almost comically sinister burst of harpsichord music.

This brand of nationalism is entirely consistent with some of the contradictory tendencies of postcolonial translation. Maria Tymoczko writes that "translations of early Irish literature facilitated cultural nationalism and the independence movement, but they also resulted in a rigid, petrified and even fetishized image of Irish culture and tradition for decades after independence" (2000:134). The images of the Irish struggle--the Easter Rising, the burning of the Custom House, de Valera and his diplomacy in London and the United States, and so forth--are all in these documentaries, asking to be fetishized. But there is a different way of seeing this kind of nationalist-minded translation, and Tymoczko has written elsewhere that:

   The translation movement was central to the Irish cultural revival
   and from the Irish revival grew the political and military struggle
   for freedom from England. When we perceive resistance to colonialism
   encoded in translations of early Irish literature as leading to
   engagement between Ireland and Britain, then the translation
   movement investigated in this volume must be understood as having
   contributed notably to shaping the postcolonial world we live in
   today. It was a translation practice that changed the world, a form
   of engagement as much as a form of writing.

   (1999:287)

Mise Eire and Saoirse?, I believe, are best seen as examples of this latter kind of translation, part of a practice that uses translation to encourage the viewer to engage with the history of British-Irish relations, even if that engagement is not as rational or nuanced as it should be.

Ironically, for example, the films take events that happened in a language indigenous to England and transpose those events into the language indigenous to Ireland. At the same time matters are not simple, since the overwhelming majority of the population of Ireland consisted of native speakers of English. Here the intermingling of self and other are complex, and the translation movement is unlike--even a reversal of--translation strategies which rely on "a process of fashioning an ideal cultural self on the basis of an other, a cultural narcissism, which is endowed, moreover with historical necessity" (Venuti 1995:110). Although Morrison is in some ways "fashioning an ideal cultural self on the basis of an other," namely the occupying British, and although he depends on a certain cultural narcissism through his romanticized images of struggle, he is doing so not through the use of a foreign language as such, but through a language that although indigenous to and understood by many people in Ireland was not really the vernacular. Thus, as in "foreignizing" strategies of translation (Venuti 1995), Morrison makes his translation projects difficult to access without some sort of specialized knowledge, knowledge linked to the nationalist project, thereby demanding the active participation on the part of the audience in making meaning out of the films. That specialized knowledge is, of course, in Morrison's case the Irish language.

One might criticize such a translation project as elitist (cf. Robinson 1997), and in fact there is a palpable elitism at work through the use of Irish in Mise Eire and Saoirse? In this regard it is significant that Gael Linn has never struck subtitled prints of these films (in any language), suggesting the cultural narcissism of the project, since, lacking subtitles, they are unlikely to be exported anywhere. The films could even be seen as the work of Gaeilgeoiri (13) indulging in their most nationalist predispositions, rewriting, rehearsing, and retranslating nationalist history yet again. Such a project is not without significance, however, and Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) has addressed the ways in which retranslation could be used as a strategy of anticolonial resistance. Explaining the importance of postcolonial rewritings of history through translation, she asserts

   there is no simple rupture with the past but a radical rewriting of
   it. To read existing translations against the grain is also to read
   colonial historiography from a post-colonial perspective, and a
   critic alert to the ruses of colonial discourse can help uncover
   what Walter Benjamin calls "the second tradition," the history of
   resistance. (1992:172)

Such a history of resistance is the central concern of both Mise Eire and Saoirse?, and the fact that this history had, at least in the twentieth century, unfolded in English, is an after-effect of the colonial project of Anglicization. For Morrison the reclaiming of this history happens through a form of rewriting and translation, using newsreel images and newspaper headlines that often betray a colonialist perspective, but translating them into an Irish-language context. Mise Eire may have images of the English-language declaration of the Republic that was pasted onto the General Post Office during the Easter Rising in 1916 and painful images of the destruction wreaked by the British Army, but equally common are images of British troops marching in formation, keeping order. In Morrison's films colonial British materials are intact, but the voice-over as well as the assembly of images make it clear that this material is meant to be read "against the grain," as contributing to a rewritten, insurgent, and translated view of the period.

O'Brien recounts that "Morrison maintains that the films were based on the principles of the dialectic, and purported to critically examine the failure of the bourgeois revolution" (2000:336), making the film sound quite Soviet in its use of fragmented editing and historical content. Moreover, Mise Eire and Saoirse? are nothing if not montages; there is next to no emphasis placed on continuity editing. Both films are instead compilations of discreet newsreel images which, when put together, come to signify something not contained in any of the images individually. One sequence in Mise Eire, following the crushing of the Easter Rising, features a fragmented montage of the statue of the royal insignia, looking as if the "lion of England' is asserting itself. A shot of a unicorn is followed by a roaring lion, followed by a shot of the crown (the middle of the insignia), and then followed by mournful pans across the ruins of post-Rising Dublin. This is a bitterly ironic reference to a famous sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1926), which uses quick shots of three lion statues (one reclining, one alert, one growling) to make it suggest that the people of Russia are rising up after a massacre on the Odessa Steps. There is a similar sequence earlier in Mise Eire when photographs of the Dublin strike are cut together in a way that suggests motion; this is clearly influenced by aggressive Soviet editing styles. O'Brien concludes, however, that the film is far less demanding and aesthetically ambitious than the comparable Soviet work. (14) He writes that "if Morrison's intention was that the political tragedies detailed in Saoirse? would contrast with the triumphs of Mise Eire and thus operate within a dialectical mode, he was at best ambitious and at worst naive in his estimate of the public's engagement with the cinema" (2000:341).

I am not convinced that the public had a similarly low degree of engagement with Morrison's translation. Although O'Brien criticizes Morrison's view of Irish history, he seems frustrated with Mise Eire and Saoirse? principally on formal grounds, linking their aesthetic to Ken Burns's manipulative, romantic megadocumentary The Civil War (1990) and using Soviet, British, and Canadian films (15) as examples of how far behind international work in documentary aesthetics Ireland was in the 1950s and 1960s. While I certainly do not wish to minimize the importance of formal critiques of documentary cinema, this does not seem the most organic approach to take to Mise Eire or Saoirse? Although the problems with attempts at Irish-language revitalization are numerous, the entire project certainly seems to have been part of a spirit of urgency and sometimes of innovation in matters regarding the language. The 1950s and 1960s could be seen as bland times for Ireland in terms of cinematic experimentation (though here I would mention the cinema verite qualities of Amharc Eireann as something of a rejoinder to a monolithic view of the situation), but the period is less lacking in arguments about Irish and its relationship with English and with English colonialism.

In addition to being works of nationalist polemic through translation, these films are also important works of recovery and preservation. During the period of their production, Ireland had no central film archive. Thus, the work done by George Morrison in tracking down the photographs and motion picture footage for the films, which he found in archives and private collections in about a dozen countries, including Ireland, was nothing short of heroic, a literal form of reclaiming of Ireland's history. Morrison amassed an enormous collection of material, which he used not only for these films but also for the compilation of photo-history books such as The Irish Civil War (1968, with text by Tim Pat Coogan) and The Emergent tears: Independent Ireland 1922-62 (1984). In the years following the production of Mise Eire and Saoirse?, Morrison became quite a vocal advocate for the establishment of a proper Irish film archive. He often couched these arguments in terms that are very close to the nationalist ideology of his films. Writing in 1965, he asserted that "there is no doubt whatsoever that to make some of our historical actualities available for showing on a national scale would be one of the more potent ways of arousing that interest and enthusiasm which are prerequisites to our national development" (1965:48).

Finally, then, I am in agreement with Tony Tracey's summary of Mise Eire as "simultaneously a nationalist diatribe, an extraordinary work of film preservation, a promotional film for the Irish language, and an exceptional work of Irish cinema" (1999:64). None of this has much to do with the formal properties of cinema itself. Instead, to return to the Steiner epigraph that opens this essay, Morrison is invading through his "nationalist diatribe" so closely linked to an anticolonial struggle of relatively recent memory, extracting through his work, culling international archives, and trying to bring this material back to the imaginary "home" of an Irish-speaking Ireland. Whatever value his films may have as history or cinema, the work is important as ah act of politically charged translation, translation that seeks not so much to explain as to engage.

CONCLUSION

Gael Linn's activity in film making, which was not limited to the films I have detailed in this article, (16) represents an important and too-little-discussed moment in Irish film history. The Amharc Eireann series, Mise Eire, and Saoirse? are all worthy of wider attention in both Film Studies and Irish Studies not so much because they are misunderstood masterpieces, but because they so aggressively address important contradictions in Griersonian idealista about the civic role of documentary, the problems of writing and visualizing Irish history through a nationalist lens, and the complex place translation plays in the postcolonial world. As Ireland's film community tries to plot out its course for a sustainable national cinema, and as language activists struggle to come up with new strategies for reviving a language badly damaged by so many years of problematic pedagogy and folkloristic simplicity, the time is ripe for the wide reevaluation of Gael Linn's films.

(1) I am indebted to Thomas Dillon Redshaw, who drew my attention to and sent me a copy of Films in Irish, and to Kevin Rockett who sent me a copy of Ar Scannain Fein, a booklet so difficult to find that it can only be thought of as a ghost-book; even Proinsias O Conluain told me he did not have a copy. Go raibh mile maith agaibh.

(2) A Soviet defector to Canada named him in a spy scandal, and he was suspected of having "Communistic" sympathies by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

(3) Used mostly by American and British companies shooting in Ireland.

(4) Meat for Millions and Hen Woman, produced by Irish film maker Norris Davidson; see O Conluain 1953:98.

(5) Brian McIlroy has done a lot to clean up my thinking on these matters, and I am grateful to him. For a contrary assessment to my views, see Rockett 1987:71.

(6) Images from this newsreel series were a major part of Louis Marcus's 1997 RTE documentary The Years of Change. As a part of the production of this series, every installment of Amharc Eireann was transferred to video; these videos are now available for viewing at the Irish Film Archive in Dublin.

(7) We expect "Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann," but the lenition does not appear in the title card for this newsreel.

(8) Oidhche Sheanchais has been the subject of furious criticism for both its romanticism and lack of cinematic feel. Sunniva O'Flynn, curator of the Irish Film Archive, has told me that to her knowledge no copies of the film survive.

(9) "Cinema verite" generally refers to a documentary style that is candid and unstaged, and that seems to aspire to catching life unawares. The term is Soviet in origin, after Dziga Vertov's weekly newsreel series Kino Pravda, produced in the 1920s. There is debate about what constitutes cinema verite as opposed to "direct cinema" or other similar techniques. This is not the place to enter into such debate; suffice it to say that with the availability of lightweight camera and sound gear in the late 1950s and 1960s, documentary film makers became more interested is capturing spontaneous images and less focused on direct address and or staged illustration of a given point.

(10) Louis Marcus also produced a film for Gael Linn called Fleadh Ceoil (sic, Music Festival, 1967), which drew on cinema verite techniques and won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The program notes from the Irish Film Centre (June 2002) state that "this odd little gem of a film was lost--its negative destroyed somehow over the years--and found again in 1997."

(11) See the Eire-Ireland special issue on translation edited by Philip O'Leary (2000) for a reproduction of the original cover of the Irish translation of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

(12) Sean Mac Reamoinn wrote in the liner notes of the album issued by Gael Linn collecting the soundtracks of Mise Eire, Saoirse?, and An Tine Bheo that "now we have music to listen to and a nation will march to it again."

(13) A sometimes derisive term for Irish enthusiasts or learners of Irish.

(14) He specifically draws upon Esfir Shub's documentary Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1929)

(15) Specifically the classic City of Gold, directed by Colin Low and Toro Daly in 1957 for the National Film Board of Canada.

(16) Louis Marcus went on to make several more films for Gael Linn, including Paisti ag Obair (Children at Work, 1973), which was nominated for ah Oscar as Best Documentary Short Subject, and, as mentioned above, Fleadh Ceoil (1967).

WORKS CITED

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Brown, Terence. 1985. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922 to the Present. Expanded ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Coogan, Tim Pat, and George Morrison. 1968. The Irish Civil War. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

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Films in Irish. 1950. Dublin: Comhdhail Naisiunta na Gaeilge.

Grierson, John. 1986. "A Film Policy for Canada." Documents in Canadian Film. Ed. Douglas Fetherling. Peterborough: Broadview Press. 51-67.

McIlroy, Brian. 1988. World Cinema 4: Ireland. Trowbridge, England: Flicks Books.

Morris, Peter. 1986. "Re-thinking Grierson: The Ideology of John Grierson." Dialogue: Cinema canadien et quebecois: Canadian and Quebec Cinema. Ed. Pierre Verronneau, Michael Dorland, and Seth Feldman. Montreal: Mediatexte Publications/Cinematheque Quebecois. 21-56.

Morrison, George. 1965. "An Irish National Film Archive." Eire-Ireland 1:4.39-62.

--. 1984. The Emergent Years: Independent Ireland, 1922-62. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.

Nelson, Joyce. 1988. The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend. Toronto: Between the Lines.

Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley' University of California Press.

O'Brien, Harvey. 2000. "Projecting the Past: Historical Documentary in Ireland." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20:3.335-50.

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--. 1954. Ar Scannain Fein. Dublin: Foilseachain Naisiunta Teoranta.

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Pettitt, Lance. 2000. Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Robinson, Douglas. 1997. Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome.

Rockett, Kevin. 1987. "Part One: History, Politics and Irish Cinema." In Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill. Cinema and Ireland. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Steiner, George. 1992. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Second ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tracey, Tony. 1999. "Mise Eire." Nationalisms: Visions and Revisions. Ed. Luke Dodd. Dublin: Film Institute of Ireland. 64-65.

Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome.

--. 2000. "Translation in the Crucible of Modernity." Eire-Ireland 35:1-2.122-38.

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Winston, Brian. 1995. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute.

JERRY WHITE is assistant professor of film studies at the University of Alberta and president of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies. He has published on Irish film in Cinema Journal, CineAction, the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, ire-Ireland, and Wallflower Press's Critical Guide to British and Irish Filmmakers. He has also co-edited the anthology North of Everything: English Canadian Cinema Since 1980 (2002) and recently served on the Toronto Film Festival's jury of the 10 Best Canadian Films of 2002.

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