Cumhaidh na hAithrise/ Nostalgia de la imitación

Niall Ó Murchú (Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Western Washington University)

This videoessay is a meditation on transtextuality and nostalgia in three films set on Ireland’s Atlantic coast: Man of Aran (1934), The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), and Arracht/Monster (2019) (Flaherty, 1934; Sayles et al., 1995; Sullivan, 2021). Household labor, or domestic production, is a device for passing (filmic) time and marking (historical) time in the new Irish language cinema, particularly in Arracht/(Monster and An Cailín Ciúin/(The Quiet Girl) (Bairéad, 2022). The Secret of Roan Inish (Sayles et al., 1995), also renders maritime labor on Ireland’s Atlantic coast as a key motif. Sayles’s film in turn includes homages to another Irish American film, Man of Aran (Flaherty, 1934), which sought to re-stage and re-present survivance labor on the Aran Islands. What does Arracht/Monster, a contemporary indigenous Irish-medium film on famine history, owe to twentieth century Irish-American cinematic imaginings of Irish labor history? Are Irish filmic memories of the past inflected with Irish American cinematic imaginings of Ireland’s past?

An intellectual of departure for this project lie with the videographic scholarship of Catherine Grant, specifically her article reviewing her video essays on transtextual motivation in film (Grant, 2013). Grant grounds her work in the theories of Mikail Iampolski who holds that time’s arrow can be reversed and subsequent inter-text can remake its precursor(s) (Iampolski, 1998). Grant’s video essay “Dissolving The Secret of Roan Inish,” based methodologically on her “Dissolves of Passion,” reveals a story-within-a-story of household re-production in Sayles et al’s film (Grant, 2016, 2020). The challenge of this video is to tease out the pluri-functional role of maritime labor as a filmic device: filling time in a small budget film (Arracht); indexing material culture in building the story-world (Arracht, Roan Inish); developing a central character through whom audiences access place and time (Arracht, Man of Aran).

The films are instances of what Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky terms the process genre (Skvirsky, 2020); all three center on maritime labor as a theme, a motif, and a device. The filmmakers reconstruct place and time, and fill screen time, through the re-enactment of manual labor on the margins of the capitalist world economy. The later films’ labor history is transtextually motivated. The Secret of Roan Inish explicitly reshoots scenes of seaweed harvesting, boat repair, and fire-tending from Flaherty’s Man of Aran. Arracht/Monster names its hero Colman Searcaigh after Man of Aran’s Colman ‘Tiger’ King (Mac an Rí) and that film’s notorious, staged shark-hunt.

The video-essay doubles down on the nostalgia inherent in the three films to make a simple point about cinema and memory. I’ve transformed the clips from The Secret of Roan Inish and Arracht/Monster from color into black and white to showcase the transtextual ties among the three films. The use of black-and-white illustrates the authority Flaherty’s Man of Aran acquired as a docu-drama despite its staged and impractical labor practices (Carney, 2012; Messenger, 2001). In contrast to Man of Aran, The Secret of Roan Inish and Arracht/Monster both reckon narratively with their subjects’ enmeshment in the capitalist – and British — world economy, even while lovingly reconstructing their household production on the margins of global markets (Bould, 2006).

The video uses originally recorded airs on single flutes and whistles to accompany the three-way comparison as an experimental way of exploring the place of nostalgia across these films. This soundscape comprises the melodies of Irish (Gaelic) songs chosen thematically for different parts of the essay, e.g. a fishing song, boating songs, a selkie song, a wistful lament for forced migration, and a lament for a drowning. The music is thematic and hyper-local, yet inauthentic. The melodies are predominantly from Northwest Donegal, while Man of Aran and Arracht are both set in Galway.

Cinematographically, Sayles’s and Sullivan’s films remain heavily indebted to Flaherty’s reminding us that the vision of Irish material cultural history in Arracht is shaped in part by the nostalgia of earlier Irish American directors. Cinematic renderings of the past can never be authentic but will always be infused by the nostalgia of later generations. And the contemporary cinema of Irish labor history may rest inevitably on the history of the cinematic rendering of Irish history. Whether later films are beholden to the conservative politics of their antecedent is less apparent.

Bibliography

Bould, M. (2006). Fantasizing the real: The Secret of Roan Inish. Film International, 4(6), 28–38. https://doi.org/10.1386/fiin.4.6.28

Carney, J. (2012). Homo Hibernicus: Myth, ethnography and nationalism in Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran. Studies in Documentary Film, 6(1), 61–79. https://doi.org/10.1386/sdf.6.1.61_1

Grant, C. (2013). Deja viewing?: Videographic experiments in intertextual film studies. Mediascape : UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2013_DejaViewing.html

Iampolski, M. (1998). The memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and film (H. Ram, Trans.). University of California Press.

Messenger, J. C. (2001). Man of aran revisited: An anthropological critique. Visual Anthropology, 14(4), 343–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2001.9966840

Skvirsky, S. A. (2020). The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor. Duke University Press.

Filmography

Bairéad, C. (Director). (2022). The quiet girl = An cailín ciúin [Video recording]. Decal.

Flaherty, R. J. (Director). (1934, October 18). Man of Aran [Documentary, Drama]. Gainsborough Pictures.

Grant, C. (2020, May 18). Dissolving THE SECRET OF ROAN INISH. https://catherinegrant.org/2020/05/18/dissolving-the-secret-of-roan-inish/

Sayles, J., Lynch, J., Lynch, S., Colgan, E., Courtney, J., & Lally, M. (1995). The Secret of Roan Inish. Columbia Tristar Home Video.

Sullivan, T. (Director). (2021, September 14). Arracht [Drama]. Macalla Teoranta.