thinking in public || text and film

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Text and Film The Quiet Man by Luke Gibbons; The Field by Cheryl Herr Review by: Díóg O'Connell The Irish Review (1986-), No. 32, Thinking in Public (Autumn - Winter, 2004), pp. 114-116 Published by: Cork University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736253 . Accessed: 16/06/2014 03:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Cork University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Review (1986-). http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 03:41:30 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Thinking in Public || Text and Film

Text and FilmThe Quiet Man by Luke Gibbons; The Field by Cheryl HerrReview by: Díóg O'ConnellThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 32, Thinking in Public (Autumn - Winter, 2004), pp. 114-116Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736253 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 03:41

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cork University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Review(1986-).

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 03:41:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Thinking in Public || Text and Film

the later Patrick Kavanagh, that the ordinariness of the spiritual is more important

than the spirituality of the ordinary. Perhaps this is why the body is treated more

playfully in this volume than heretofore. In her 'Sunflowers' sequence here, for

example, the poet drapes wet black knickers over the impossible gold swan-shaped

bathtaps of her room at a writer's conference in Switzerland, in order to counteract

the ever-upward directed perspective commanded by an insistently differentiated,

primary-coloured 'Peculiar landscape'. And in the luminous poem from which the

volume's title is drawn,'After My Father Died', the communion generated by and

for the earth-bound body invoked therein is a release from the vice grip of such

oppositions between high and low, insiderhood and outsiderhood, the

maintenance of which leads truly to death:

And we ?

you, me, him, the starlings and thrushes -

we are all buried here,

mouths made of clay,

mouths filled with clay, we are all buried here, singing.

CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK

Text and Film

Luke Gibbons, The Quiet Man. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. ISBN

1859182879. ?15.00 pbk.

Cheryl Herr, The Field. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. ISBN 1859182925.

?15.00 pbk.

The Quiet Man by Luke Gibbons and The Field by Cheryl Herr are two books in

the series on Irish film produced by Cork University Press in recent years, edited

by Keith Hopper, with the illustrations arranged by Gr?inne Humphries. Similarly to the other books in the series (December Bride, by Lance Pettitt; The Informer, by

Patrick F. Sheeran; This Other Eden, by Fidelma Farley; The Dead, by Kevin Barry), The Quiet Man and The Field are based on films that were adapted or inspired by other sources. This provides for an interesting analysis in moving from one

medium to another but presents the author with a significant challenge. Although the original source, or in some cases sources, are obviously important, this is a film

studies series and if it is to contribute to the growing canon of publications in the

field of Irish cinema, the filmic nature of the texts is primary. What is interesting about these studies on The Quiet Man and The Field is that both Gibbons and Herr

provide an analysis of the film form, incorporating both theory and practice. Herr

looks at the different approaches to the practice of film and theatre in an interesting and unusual way. Leaning towards formal analysis she offers insights into the

114 0'CONNELL, Text and Rim', Irish Review 32 (2004)

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Page 3: Thinking in Public || Text and Film

various productions of the Keane text in different and diverse media, which goes

much further than the standard thematic textual analysis that can dominate Film

Studies. Gibbons reclaims The Quiet Man from surface readings that promote this

film as a representation of the 'stage Irishman' or an expression of'paddywhackery',

thus opening up the potential for multiple readings of the film as part of Ford's

oeuvre as an auteur and also as a text that relates to the culture and national identity

of Ireland at a particular time.

The Field, written by John B. Keane as a play in 1965, and based on a 1958

murder, was made into a film by Jim Sheridan in 1990 and has a complicated

genesis. Herr alludes to 'adaptational fidelity' as a 'perennial cinematic issue' -

in

summary she sees the film amounting to a critique of'the play's historical and

aesthetic premises'. In order to appreciate this film's transformation from the play on an 'emotional and intellectual level', the reader/viewer needs to be conversant

not only with Ireland's pastoral past but also with the 1980s Ireland to which the

film directs its inferences. Herr therefore situates her readings of both film and play within the discourse of tradition and modernity that pervades recent cultural

analysis. Effectively, she interprets the play and film as an expression of a time in

flux as expressed through its characters.

Highhghting the issues that suffuse Keanes works, including 'greed and jealousy, resentment and domestic abuse, pagan attachments and harsh authoritarianism,

verbal indulgence and sexual repression', Herr signals not only the similarities to

but also the differences from Ford's The Quiet Man. Whereas The Field concentrates

on the choice between authoritarian morality and local folkways, between the

rules of administered society and what, in the film, the Bull calls 'the law of the

land', The Quiet Man, according to Gibbons, explores how Ford complicates tradition and custom in order to refute a surface and superficial reading.

For example, while one reading of Mary Kate's character in The Quiet Man may

interpret her behaviour as regressive, hanging on to a traditional custom that

subjugated women to both their fathers and their husbands, Gibbons argues that

while she rejects the financial aspect of the dowry, she does not turn her back on

tradition totally. In this way, the film The Quiet Man plays out common themes in

the work of auteur John Ford that see tensions between tradition and modernity,

individual and community, nature and culture as central filmic preoccupations. The

Quiet Man, as Gibbons reveals, seeks to play out these opposites as they struggle

with each other to gain dominance within a culture and society at a given time,

rather than simply supplanting one with another. This is further exemplified in the

mise-en-sc?ne that complicates the use of studio sets with location shooting. While,

as Gibbons notes, the inserts from studio settings alongside location shots caused

some problems for contemporary viewers who valued the film for its location

shooting, Gibbons sees this as a 'Fordian' device that further articulates the

complex nature of these cultural changes in an emerging society at a formal level.

Furthermore, far from reading the inclusion of the dowry episode as a form of

endorsement of this system, or the scene where Sean Thornton is presented with 'a

good stick to beat the lovely lady [with]' as a way of legitimizing domestic violence,

O'CONNELL, Text and Film', Irish Review 32 (2004) 115

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Page 4: Thinking in Public || Text and Film

Gibbons teases out the narrative purpose of these scenes, which he interprets as a

transformation of Sean Thornton's character, whereby his 'nostalgic vision' dissolves

and he comes to terms with his violent past. As Gibbons states, '[t]he task of

challenging or

combating a stereotype

... is not simply a matter of showing the

reality behind the myth but the reality of the myth, and the dynamics of its

construction'.

In contrast, the Bull McCabe in The Field does not attempt to negotiate change and thus sows the seeds of his own downfall. Taking a different approach, in her

analysis of The Field, Cheryl Herr offers an ethnographic reading of customs,

practices and behaviour within the community, which is central to reading the play

and the film. What is most interesting about Herr's analysis is her close and careful

reading from play to film. As she points out, Sheridan's film explicitly stated that it was 'based on' Keane s

play and thus does not claim adaptation status. Consequently,

what emerges from the readings is the importance of contemporary resonances for

the texts and how the staged versions, whether theatrical or cinematic, echo many

of the cultural and national concerns of the production setting. Sheridan,

according to Herr, adopts a

writing strategy of'what if?'As Herr concludes,'One

result is that, whereas Keane adds the reflections of life in the late fifties and early sixties to a sort of Arensberg-based pastiche of the thirties, Sheridan updates this

outlook to include the cultural debates of the eighties.'Thus, Tadhg represents the

experience of many Irish people in the 1980s who felt the only option, for

economic, political or cultural reasons, was to leave the 'land' or Ireland through

forced and/or voluntary emigration.

Herr weaves her analysis of play and film without elevating one over the other.

In her celebration of both media, she presents an analysis that is both filmic and

dramatic, and thus useful to the theoretical as well as production-based student.

Luke Gibbons' reading of The Quiet Man reclaims this text from knee-jerk criticism to reveal the complexity of what is a 'Ford film', exploring the tensions

between traditional and modern value-systems without pitting one against the

other but illustrating the organic nature of the transformative process. Herr

identifies in Sheridan's The Field a far more extreme representation of the collapse

of traditional practices than Keane suggested in his play. These books, along with the others in the series, are a welcome addition to the

growing canon of Irish Cinema Studies. While rooting the analyses within the

field of Cultural Studies and providing a literary, cultural and ethnographic

approach to the subject, both publications explore and dissect the filmic nature of

the texts, contributing productively to film scholarship for both the practitioner and theoretician alike.

D??G O'CONNELL

116 O'CONNELL, Text and FilrrT, Irish Review 32 (2004)

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