IF IT has done nothing else, Neil Jordan's Michael Collins has certainly raised in the most immediate way the whole question of what is
Irish about Irish cinema. Having your first great national epic made by a Hollywood studio is, to say the least, an ambiguous achievement. Does the film represent the coming-of-age of a specifically Irish cinema or does it suggest that, in this age of global culture, there can be no such thing? Is it a moment of arrival or is it definitive proof that, where the notion of a national cinema is concerned we have definitively missed the boat?
In a piece of unusually good timing, the Irish Film Institute's centenary conference, Projecting the Nation, will this weekend's address precisely the question of National Cinema in an International Frame. The keynote address will be given on Friday evening by Fredric Jameson, Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina, and arguably the most important cultural theorist in the Western world. Jameson's 1990 book, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, is a keystone of any debate about the nature of contemporary culture. In Dublin, he will ask the questions Is National Cinema Possible?' Some of his answers, though not: addressed specifically to the Irish situation, have a striking relevance to the debate that has been provoked by Michael Collins.
Jameson has long been sceptical about the use of history in much of contemporary cinema. "The increasing number of films about the past", he has said, "are no longer historical; they are images, simulacra and pastiches of the past. They are effectively a way of satisfying a chemical craving for historicity, using a product that substitutes for and blocks it."
But he has seen Michael Collins twice and remains "fascinated" by it, in spite of his general belief that, in postmodern culture, "the older forms of historical representation - the you-were-there of the great historical epics, with their heroes and villains and their narratives of struggle and defeat or triumph - must increasingly fail to do justice to our current lived realities." He approached Neil Jordan's epic, therefore, with "hesitation".
"It certainly does try to recreate history, and in that sense it belongs to an older form of cinema. But, on the whole, I think it works wonderfully well. So I have to think that there are other factors involved. The kind of mass participation in the making of the film that Neil Jordan describes in his journal makes it more than a mere, representational epic, it seems to me. And then, I think the effort of historical re-interpretation involved also turns this into something a little different from what I was describing. It inserts itself into the present somehow, and it is not just a kind of screen on which epic action unfolds at a distance. So it left me feeling that there are a number of qualifications to be made to the general point I'm making. I'm divided about this in my own mind."
In a world where culture is increasingly homogenised and the reach of Hollywood has become almost limitless, the whole idea of a national cinema is problematic. The question Jameson will address is whether, in such a context, cinema in cultures outsider the United States can do more than react to the Hollywood norms. Can national cinemas play by rules of their own devising? Can they do more than provide local colour, an exotic variant on a story that Hollywood wants to hear?
THESE questions presuppose, of course, that Hollywood itself is not a national cinema for the United States. Whatever about Hollywood's golden age in the 1930s and 1940s, Jameson is adamant that the label cannot be, applied now.
"Today", he says, "I wouldn't think that under any conceivable imagining, Hollywood would be a national cinema. If one of the tasks of a national cinema is to reveal local social realities that we don't want to see or don't talk about, then probably the independent cinema in America is doing a better job. Because all that remains of what Hollywood does now are super action thrillers aimed at the lowest common denominator of a teenage audience. That's no longer a national cinema. But this reflects a crisis of the nation in the United States if we ever were a nation."
In his contribution to the Projecting the Nation conference Jameson will suggest two features of a successful national cinema that should help to concentrate Irish minds. One is that there is a relationship between a national cinema and a national theatre. Since much of the energy of Irish film-makers has been directed towards the idea of making a break with theatrical traditions,
Jameson's belief that "a national cinema must draw on something like a repertory company of actors" may seem surprising.
From his knowledge of, and affection for, the national cinemas of France, Poland and Taiwan, he concludes that one of the things that helps film cultures outside Hollywood to function on their own terms is "the return over and over again to familiar actors" in which "the well-known names swap functions, now a villain, now a hero, comic tavern keeper one day and threatening businessman the next, innocent blondes and fatal brunettes; a perpetual round in which our pleasure is split or divided, partly satisfied by the desire to see the same actors over and over again, partly by the novelty of difference and of new and unexpected roles and capacities."
This pleasure, depends, however, on the existence of something like a national theatre. "I can see arguments against this," he concedes. "Cinema acting is very different from acting on stage and the habits one develops in one are absolutely harmful to the other. But I have been struck, thinking about this, by the fact that, at least for the classic periods of, say, French cinema, one of the great pleasures is the recurrence of a team, not just of character actors, but of a kind of constellation of faces that come back time and again in various guises. What I was thinking about was not much a direct relationship with the stage, but that the stage in a capital city provides a pool of actors for a national cinema." Linking a national theatre and a national cinema is, he says, the idea of the actors as a kind of allegory of the nation, acting out "the utopia of unified nation".
THE other characteristic which Jameson finds at the heart of national cine is the idea of a collective enemy, an external Other, against which it can be defined. "For most national cinemas in the world", he says, "there is an Other which is American cinema. They offer themselves as something you don't get in Hollywood. But for many countries, socially and politically, there are various Others, often the United States, but sometimes other powers. I think every country has an imaginary cast of characters that it carries around witch it, and for every national situation this cast of collective others is different."
If this is true, then it suggests one of the reasons for the difficulty that Ireland has experienced in trying to develop a national cinema. As the debate over Michael Collins has shown, Irish culture is riddled with ambiguities on the question of who it is supposed to be against. Agreement on the nature of the Other - Hollywood?, Britain?, ourselves? - is not, in a divided society, readily available. The question it raises about whether or not an Irish national cinema can emerge in the absence, of an agreed enemy is perhaps, in itself, one of the fascinations of Michael Collins.
