The Ironic Gaze: Roots Tourism and Irish Heritage Cinema

Abstract

Writing in 2004 on Irish cinema, I identified a trend that had emerged in the previous decade of films defined by nostalgia for a pre-modern Ireland. Such films—Hear My Song (Peter Chelsom, 1991), Into the West (Mike Newell, 1992), War of the Buttons (John Roberts, 1993), Broken Harvest (Maurice O’Callaghan, 1994), The Run of the Country (Peter Yates, 1995) and others—were distinctive for being structurally and thematically conservative, particularly in terms of their gender representations. They were also all rural-based and many centred their narratives on children, whose state of innocence became a palimpsest for Ireland of old, and by extension the innocent Irish people of bygone times. The impetus behind this wave of heritage films was, I concluded, a desire to make a break with the pervasive legacy of The Troubles and the image of a country defined by lawlessness and violence. In this, the films had much in common with Irish Tourist Board (Fáilte Ireland) campaigns designed to persuade tourists that a visit to Ireland was a visit to a country of timeless and ancient beauty, populated by welcoming natives who had no axe to grind with foreigners (particularly the lucrative UK tourist market). Drawing on theories of the tourist gaze, it appeared that many of the films replicated such a gaze as part of their aesthetic (Barton 2004: 148–56).