thinking in public || text and film
TRANSCRIPT
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 .
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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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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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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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