The British New Wave Screens Ireland: Desmond Davis’s The Girl with Green Eyes (1964)

Abstract

The paradoxical truth, John Hill rightly observes, is that “Ireland has held a special place in the cinematic imagination, but its representation in film has, until relatively recently, been left to the British and American cinemas,” with overseas Irish communities frequently the focus and even supplying the filmmakers (Hill 1994, 3; and see the various essays in Barton 2009). One can even argue, as does Michael Patrick Gillespie, that the idea of an Irish cinema is more myth than reality, a concept lacking a “stable denotation” that is “more misleading than illuminating”; what Gillespie terms “Irish-themed” films have long been a feature of anglophone cinema, giving rise to complex, often compromised forms of representation, but Ireland itself for decades hardly offered much of a home to commercial filmmaking, never developing a consistently profitable and artistically successful production sector, while failing to nourish an urbane, engaged cinema culture (such as had appeared elsewhere throughout Europe by the end of the 1920s), which might have become an intellectual engine driving industrial change (xi; see Pettitt Chaps. 1–6 for full details).