Office 307

Hours:     Tuesday 1:00-3:30, Wednesday 1:00-3:30, Thursday 1:00- 3:30 or by appointment.

Two essays 50%, class mark 10%, final take home, or open book in-class exam, 40%. 

Topics for your first paper include: “Guns, priests and boxers: Hollywood's image of the Irish”; “The Two World's of John Ford: from The Searchers to The Quiet Man”; Leo McCarey, Catholics, and the Hayes Code;" "John Wayne, John Ford and the myth of Irish America." Students may also choose five or more feature films prior to 1980 and discuss their treatment of Irish themes. Your second essay topics are "Ethnicity, Race and Identity: Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York"; " Irish Film Noir: Carol Reed's Odd Man Out." "Irish America's Long Days Journey Into Night: reading and watching Eugene O'Neil's masterpiece." Miller's Crossingand the Myth of Irish Emotionalism"; "Institutions, Catholics and Cinema: from the Bells of St. Mary'sto the Magdalene Sisters". Your papers should be between six and eight, typed pages double-spaced.  

Your second essay is due on the exam day in December

You may do your final exam as a take home or as an in-class open book essay. You will be given 6 or more questions on the last day of classes from which you will choose two questions and write two essays from four to six typed pages in length. All take homes are due on the day of the exam. Only a legitimate excuse from the Registrar’s office will be accepted for late exams or papers at the end of term.

Students who miss more than 3 classes without a written excuse from the Registrar's Office will be awarded a green F from the academy.

Course description.  

This course is, among other things, a study of the portrayal of the Irish in feature films from the birth of cinema to the present day.  The course is interdisciplinary by nature and includes Film and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature, History, Sociology, Political Science, Native Studies and Religious Studies. 

Lesson I

Lecture and Topics: Overture to Ethnicity: diaspora, refugees, nation, identity, race and the legacy of a 19^thcentury boat people in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.  Intro to film as cultural studies, art, narrative, history and politics.

Readings: Chapter One of The Lie of the Land by Fintan O'Toole Lie of the Land, Fintan O'Toole, Verso, 1998. The Lie of the Land is a highly engaging study of Ireland's fractured and shifting identities. From its sometimes confused sense of place, caught somewhere between Europe and America, Ireland has redefined itself in the1990s. Fintan O'Toole highlights the contradictions and the mythologies at work in Ireland's ever-changing idea of itself. A riveting look at the state of Ireland at the end of the century. Drawing from two decades of writings, Irish Times columnist O'Toole discusses everything from parallels between the American West and Ireland, John Ford's films and the myth of JFK. O'Toole introduces the collection with an examination of what globalization--Ireland's entrance into the ""world's fair of consumerism""--means for a country where ""emigration has been the single biggest fact in the 75-year history of the Irish state."" He also examines the previously taboo--including the Catholic Church and its silences regarding adulterous priests and pedophiles. O'Toole is at his most affecting when he recounts the story of the birth and abandonment of a baby in the west of Ireland in 1995. A country where the illegality of abortion is written into the constitution now has a tacit understanding that the death or abandonment of an infant doesn't require prosecution or punishment. While such a position would be considered shocking in the US, O'Toole counts it as progress for Ireland, a sign of compassion toward women. Affirming the long-term existence of the Irishdiaspora, O'Toole says, ""Ireland is something that often happens elsewhere."" These writings serve as a reminder that global, mass culture is formed by experiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Heartfelt and passionate, O'Toole's ruminations effectively map a changing Ireland.

Lesson II

Overture to ethnicity PART II : diaspora, nation, identity and race in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.

Recommended reading: How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev '...from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called 'path breaking,' 'seminal,' 'essential,' a 'must read.' How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University ofMassachussetts, Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country - a land of opportunity - they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person's skin. Noel Ignatiev's 1995 book - the first published work of one of America's leading and most controversial historians - tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White, Routledge, 1995.

Lesson III

Race, violence, religion and the image of the Irish: Angels With Dirty Faces, Public Enemy and Scarface. Bogart as Irish in Dark Victory, St. Dominic, the mortgage, and the myth of Irish emotionalism: The Bells of St. Mary's and Going My Way (Barry Fitzgerald and Maureen O' Hara as the tourist 's/stage-celluloid Irish). Ginger Rodgers as Bowery Cinderella, Kitty Folyle (1940); The Fighting Sullivans (1944) as tragic elegy and war-time propaganda.

Lesson IV

Race, violence, religion and the image of the Irish. Part II

Readings

From the Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson on John Ford, John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara; Michael Rogin on John Wayne from The London Review of Books. Andrew O'Hagan on John Ford from the London Review of Books. Hollywood Censored, Gregory D. Black, Cambridge University Press, 1994. In response to a series of sex scandals that rocked the movie industry in the early 1920s, the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency implemented a code stipulating that movies stress proper behavior, respect for government, and "Christian values." Based on an extensive survey of original studio records, censorship files, and the Catholic Legion of Decency archives (whose contents are published here for the first time), Hollywood Censored examines how hundreds of films were expurgated to promote a conservative political agenda during the 1930s. By taking an innovative view of how movies were made, and the conditions that made them, Hollywood Censored brings together such chapters as "Movies and Modern Literature," "Beer, Blood and Politics," and "Film Politics and Industry Policy" to form a rare look at America's most famous industry.

Lesson V

The Irish and the myth of the west: John Ford, John Wayne, Cold War Politics, American militarism and the demonization of the American Indian. The Sands of Iwo Jima and The Searchers.

Readings

Gunfighter Nation by Richard Slotkin, 1997,Concluding a trilogy that began with Regeneration Through Violence (1973) and The Fatal Environment (1985), Slotkin (English/Wesleyan Univ.) now offers a subtle and wide-ranging examination how America's fascination with the frontier has affected its culture and politics in this century. As used by Slotkin, ""myth"" means not a falsehood but a story derived from history that expresses a people's ideology. Beginning with Frederick Jackson Turner's landmark 1893 address on the closing of the frontier, Slotkin relates how Americans have used the unusually resonant myth of the West to explain ongoing issues of the present. Two works that helped establish the myth were Theodore Roosevelt's history The Winning of the West and Owen Wister's novel The Virginian, which pictured an Anglo-Saxon managerial elite toughened by exposure to remorseless ""savage wars"" against enemies, red-skinned and otherwise. Slotkin skillfully traces how the myth was used against the upstart labor movement, anti-imperialists, immigrants, and blacks. Although such media or genres as Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, the dime-stock novel, and the formula fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Zane Grey, and Edgar Rice Burroughs are explored here, much of the book is given over to a searching analysis of crucial western films like Stagecoach, Shane, The Searchers, Vera Cruz, The Wild Bunch. Allowing forSlotkin's occasional lapses intoacademese, overemphasis of the western's influence (e.g., theWW II combat film is interpreted in light of ""the savage war,"" as if wars by their nature weren't), and oddly perfunctory nod to recent works such as Lonesome Dove and Dances With Wolves, the reader will get a provocative summary of how Americans fromJFK on the left to Ronald Reagan on the right have exploited the power of the myth of the West. Intellectual history at its most stimulating--teeming with insights into American violence, politics, class, and race.

Lesson VI

John Ford, Walt Disney, and the celluloid Irish: from The Quiet Man, to Darby O'Gill and the leprechauns (with a footnote to Francis Ford Coppola and Finian's Rainbow).

Lesson VII

Hollywood, England, and the Irish. An English auteur among the Irish: Carol Reed's Odd Man Out. Film noir and the IRA. "While the war had helped to cement Northern Ireland's place within the United Kingdom, the immediate postwar years were initially ones of anxiety for unionists, and led to the creation of the Irish Anti-Partition League. It was against this backdrop that the first major fiction feature to deal with the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland since partition, Odd Man Out, was made. Odd Man Out (1947) was based on a novel written by F. L. Green, who was born in England but had moved to Belfast in 1934. The novel was published in 1945 and the director Carol Reed went to Belfast to ask Green to work on the script, which subsequently became a Two Cities Film production for the Rank Organization. The Prime Minister, Basil Brooke, adopted the view that 'he would have no objection to a film which faithfully reproduced the atmosphere of the book' (which he regarded as 'fairly objective') but would oppose 'any attempt to glorify the activities of an illegal organization or to build an aura of heroism around the gunman'. The film would contain 'no political significance or suggestion whatsoever'. The film's associate producer Phil Samuel cleverly set up a series of meetings with ministers and the film was finally shot in London to huge acclaim on its release." Extract from Cinema and Northern Irelandby John Hill.

Lesson VIII

Strange interlude: Eugene O'Neil's "Long Days Journey Into Night". Being Irish in the Empire: from Sidney Lumet to David Wellington.  Ethnicity, Class, American Dreams and Poor Houses in the shadow of the Great Famine.    

Lesson IX Strange interlude Part II: Eugene O'Neil's "Long Days Journey Into Night".  

Lesson X

Miller's Crossing and the myth of Irish Emotionalism.

Recommended Reading: Tom Hayden, Irish on the Inside "A pugnacious autobiographical treatise, in which former California state senator Hayden reclaims his Irish identity. Hayden's family emigrated to the US during the years of the Famine and quickly assumed the assimilationist role, both out of a desire to survive (the "wild Irish" were perhaps as despised as Natives and African-Americans, though they had an ace up their sleeve: the right to vote) and out of the shame that accompanied the Great Hunger and the subsequent flight into amnesia. Here, Hayden tells his story of regaining his Irishness, and why In the Irish soul he finds appealing elements: rebelliousness, moral idealism, communal ethics, mysticism, all still in circulation despite the best efforts of the church and an occupation state. He finds in the language and music a cultural diversity akin to biodiversity, not only an intrinsic value but a strengthening and protective character for society writ large, for it is at once very much itself and inclusive. Equally attractive are historical ties of the Irish to radical movements and their experience with servitude: As both victims and victimizers—Hayden draws upon the treatment of African-Americans by the American Irish during the latter half of the 19th century—he also considers the Irish experience invaluable in examining how racial attitudes are formed, and how it can be subverted to form links with the nonwhite world through a common history of colonialism, starvation, poverty, and threats of genocide. The heart here, though, is in Hayden's time spent in Ireland, particularly Northern Ireland, and his efforts to understand—more so, to live—the unfolding of Irish history as it is played out along political, economic, and human fronts. An electric piece of emotional archaeology and a welcoming back of an ethnic spirit—nonconformist, open, ancient—that anyone could be proud to claim. "Kirkus Review.

Lesson XI 

Roddy Doyle and Alan Parker The Commitments: music, ethnicity, race and class. The Irish as European other.

Lesson XII

Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. Popular Culture and the return journey; Cold War politic, Catholic hegemony, hysteria (moral panic) and the McCarthy legacy; the Kennedy apotheosis, the Catholic Church and small town Ireland. 

Lesson XIII

Peter Mullen's The Magdalene Sisters

James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries: And The Nation’s Architecture of Containment Indiana: university of Nortre Dame Press, 2007. P.155. Smith’s book is the most exhaustive study available thus far of the laundries and their impact on Irish society: “In late August 2003, almost one year after Mullan’s film premiered a the Venice Film Festival and within weeks of its release in the United States, The Irish Times revealed disturbing details of the exhumation, cremation, and reburial of 155 Irish women who had lived and died at the High Park Magdalen asylum operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Refuge in Dublin (Humphreys 2003). Buried between 1858 and 1984 and interred anonymously, these women were denied a proper burial and final resting place.  The religious order sought and received the required state license to exhume the bodies in 1993. However, the license listed only 133 sets of remains. Death certificates, legally required, in Ireland, were missing in some fifty-eight cases (Raftery 2003). It was not until 2003, ten years later, that Irish society learned about the twenty-two bodies for which the nuns could not account. Although such irregularities should have led to an immediate police investigation, Ireland in the early 1990’s on the cusp of an economic and cultural transformation popularly termed the Celtic Tiger, had little interest in digging up old ghosts. Instead, the state provided the Sisters with a hastily reissued exhumation license, and all the bodies were cremated and reinterred anonymously at Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. Creamation, of course, destroys all trace of historical evidence, and thus no one will ever know with certainty who is buried at the Glasnevin plot (Raftery 2003). The history of the Ireland’s Magdalen asylumns is, then, incomplete and the still-emerging facts are even more disturbing than the fiction of Mullan’s film.” p. 137. See also Diarmaid Ferriter’s Occasions of Sin (2009). The critic and writer Patricia Craig has written that Occasions of Sin “shows the puritanical system evolving into a monolithic monstrosity.” See also Joni Mitchell’s song Magdalene Laundries. Her version recorded with The Cheiftans on the Tears of Stone (RCA, 1999) CD is the most poignant.   Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland by Diarmaid Ferriter "Sex – my introduction to sex was in the back kitchen of Letterfrack, jammed up against a boiler, getting my leg burnt and getting raped by Brother Dax." Testimony such as this has racked Ireland since the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse published its report in May this year. The 2,600-page Ryan report exposed "endemic" physical and sexual abuse in church-run schools and orphanages in Ireland – 800 alleged abusers in more than 200 institutions during a period of 35 years. This grim litany reveals obvious failings in the Catholic church, the negligence of the state and an alarming capacity for collective bad faith, which no amount of public hand wringing now can mitigate or disguise. Diarmaid Ferriter's Occasions of Sin is thus an important and timely book: it is a richly textured history of modern Ireland's complicated attitude to sex." David Dwan

Lesson XIV

Irish Short films: Six Shooter and Films from the Nerve Center in Derry. The Irish animation of Tomm Moore: from Puffin Rock to Song of the Sea.