Abstract
The Irish narrative cinema of the last 20 years has been preoccupied with themes of loss and grieving, often setting stories of individual mourning within the context of wider national traumas. Dealing with such cataclysms as the Irish Civil War, institutional abuse, mass emigration, the Northern Irish Troubles and the societal ruptures of the Celtic Tiger (the economy of the Irish Republic), these recent films provide a site for confronting and negotiating the troubled past. In this essay, I explore the idea of an ‘emotional reading’ of historical films, using a few of these recent films as examples.
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Notes
I name here just a few of the many ‘fractured’ films produced on these topics over the last two decades. 2. It is worth noting that representation of the traumatic aspects of Irish history has also been a contentious issue within Irish historiography. The principal criticism made of Irish historians during the ‘revisionist controversies’ of past decades was that by adopting a detached and neutral style in analysing episodes such as the Great Famine of 1845, they have failed to represent the traumatic dimension of the past that gives meaning to popular historical narratives and consciousness. See, for instance, Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 24 (1989), pp. 329–351.
Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 240.
Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘The Historical Film as Real History Film’, Historia 5 (1) (1995), p. 13.
Debra Ramsay, ‘Flagging up History: The Past as a DVD Bonus Feature’ in Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (eds), A Companion to the Historical Film (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 69.
Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 2.
See Alison Landsburg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 3.
Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 146.
Susan Feagin, ‘Imagining Emotions and Appreciating Fiction’, in Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (eds), Emotion and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 57–58.
Greg Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 42.
Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989).
In my MA thesis, I considered the generation of resistant readings and political ambiguity within Bloody Sunday and other Troubles films; some of these ideas were first expressed in that discussion. [Jennie Carlsten, ‘A Cinema of Resistance, A Resistance of Cinema: On the Limits and Possibilities of Northern Ireland’s Commemorative Cinema’ (unpublished MA Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2005), pp. 46–47].
Elana Gomel, Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), p. 163.
See Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);
David Martin-Jones, Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
Luke Gibbons, ‘The Global Cure? History, Therapy and the Celtic Tiger’, in Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (eds), Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the New Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 97.
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© 2015 Jennie M. Carlsten
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Carlsten, J.M. (2015). Not Thinking Clearly: History and Emotion in the Recent Irish Cinema. In: Carlsten, J.M., McGarry, F. (eds) Film, History and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137468956_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137468956_10
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