Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Getting It All in the FrameAuthor(s): Mark RobinsonSource: Fortnight, No. 265 (Sep., 1988), p. 28Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25551680 .

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Maurice O'Donoghue (left) and Jimmy Brennan in Pigs

Getting it all in the frame THADDEUS O'Sullivan has been spending a

lot of time in Northern Ireland lately. He is to

direct the film adaptation of Sam Hanna Bell's

December Bride?the story of a woman who

keeps house for, and is loved by, two men and

the pressures she has to face in Ulster Protestant

rural society at the turn of the century. The project was mooted by Ulster Television

a couple of years ago but has been taken over by the Dublin-based independent Little Bird. Its

production of J G Farrell's Troubles was re

cently screened by both UVT and RTE. Thaddeus O'Sullivan is at the heart of new

Irish cinema, despite being based in London for

more than 20 years. He left Ireland in the mid

60s as a 17-year-old, he recalls, working at "this

and that" before studying film at the Royal

College of Art. This was in the days before

Channel Four, when an independent film-maker

was "a queer character outside the Pale". It is

different now, he adds. People have got "grown

up" jobs as directors and cinematographers. An RCA training tended to produce its own

perspectives. O'Sullivan shot his own films

because "that was the way you did it". The

theory was the "diary film", a tradition inherited

from American underground films of the 60s.

"Your camera was a notebook. What you looked

at, and the way you looked at it, were more

important than technical quality." Underground films were not expected to be commercial.

O'Sullivan made two films then which still

enjoy a circulation. A Pint of Plain (1975) and On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978) both deal with the Irish emigrant experience in London.

They were made "instinctively", he says. "I was

not comfortable with making films about the

new culture I was involved in, but felt I could

make films about what I had left behind."

They are not, however, easy exercises in

nostalgia. On a Paving Stone Mounted was at

least partly inspired by John Berger's A Sev

enth Man, a series of poetic essays on migrant workers in Europe. O'Sullivan recalls being struck by how the memories of home of Turkish

workers in Germany were burnished by exile.

Writing about On a Paving Stone Mounted, he

said: "The film is about memories, a patchwork of spare, reduced, cynical memories ... the

memories becoming fiction, and the fiction

becoming memory, the 'back home' in Ireland."

Back home film-makers like Bob Quinn, Joe

MARK ROBINSON talks to film-maker Thaddeus O'Sullivan about his work?and the film he

plans to shoot in Co Down

Comerford, Cathal Black and Pat Murphy were

also experimenting with form and subject matter

in an attempt to portray their own instinctive

view of contemporary Irish experience. Work

ing in London, O'Sullivan was separated from

the beginnings of this movement but, after a

spell in America, he worked as a cameraman on

many of the distinctive Irish films of the 80s. He shot Traveller and Waterbag for Comerford,

Our Boys and Pigs with Black and Murphy's Anne Devlin, and recently he has been filming a series of documentaries with Quinn.

"It may look like a kind of incestuous Irish

thing," he says, "but was really a meeting of

serious like minds." People making films knew

they were working outside the "straight" indus

try. They didn't like much of what that industry

produced, and wanted to make films about sub

jects it wouldn't touch. But there was no infra

structure: most of the technicians had grown up in television, and because they thought film had

to be a means of mass communication like TV

they found the new ideas "pretentious". So the

film-makers had to find other film-makers,

people who spoke the same language, to help. O'Sullivan respects the film-makers he has

worked with because, he says, "whether they have a good one or a bad one they have a belief

in cinema. Without this belief film-makers are

just factory workers." He believes there are

always two ways to make a film. It is possible

just to tell the story?as much television does?

or to tell the story in such a way as to create all

the space needed for the mise en scene to support it in a meaningful way. It is a question of "visual

literacy". Decor, costume, sound, lighting, camera movement are all "letters in an alphabet" which have to be juggled to bring their own

depths of meaning to the story. "In cinema there

is a way of getting everything in," he says. The job of a cinematographer is to interpret

what the director is trying to do, to arrange the

letters of the alphabet in the frame. As a camera

man the actors are for him part of that alphabet,

but as a director O' Sullivan says he is "obsessed

with performance". He thinks first about putting faces to the story; everything else makes up the

further layers of meaning. Although the director

is responsible for the finished film, O'Sullivan

belives good film-making is a collective effort.

"You have to give people room to do their jobs, to let them contribute," he says.

O'Sullivan returned to directing in 1985 with The Woman who Married Clark Gable, an

adaptation of a short story by Sean O Faolain, in

which he cast Bob Hoskins as an Englishman in

1930s Dublin whose resemblance to the great screen idol seems to offer to his wife (Brenda

Fricker) the promise of temporary escape from

an oppressive working-class family existence.

Like most of the films with which he has been associated, The Woman who Married Clark

Gable benefited from support from Bord Scan

nan na hEireann (the Irish Film Board). O'Sull

ivan is saddened and angered by its recent abo

lition. He feels that it involved "a ridiculously small amount of money" (around IR?500,000 a

year) and that arguments by Mr Haughey's

government that 80 per cent of films supported

by BSE failed to make a profit are short-sighted to say the least. Denmark, which he has recently visited, puts ?6 million a year into film produc tion?often up to four-fifths of a film's budget.

He believes that because so few Irish films

are produced they are subjected to an unfair

amount of attention: each is taken as a measure

of the state of the industry. And, after all, 90 per cent of Hollywood films are awful, or lose

money. He believes the Republic's government should realise that film is in a state of develop

ment and should support it, but he is not optimis tic: "It is hard to struggle against ignorance."

Despite the lack of support there is a good deal of activity and a fair amount of money

about, if mainly for television. O'Sullivan does

not feel threatened by the availability of TV money for films: "People interested in cinema

will make films. If they're not they can just make

television. But I've never yet met a film director

who, when it came to the crunch, worried about

framing a shot differently or using more close

ups. Television likes cinema. It knows the value

of it. It knows it has to break out of the parochi alism of the studio and deal with the bigger issues that come with cinematic sensitivity."

He is also impatient with arguments that set

individualistic independents against what are

perceived to be commercially orientated pro duction companies. For him the bottom line

must be "the development of Irish film culture".

People have "to want to make films"?films

which "open up another world, another way of

thinking". December Bride is backed by television

money, but is intended initially for cinema re

lease, so production values must be kept high. Sam Hanna Bell's novel is set around the shores

of Strangford Lough and O'Sullivan and other

key members of the production team have been

looking for authentic Co Down locations and a

suitable production base. Filming was tenta

tively scheduled to begin this month, but princi

pal photography has been put back to next April. The director is not unduly concerned: the back

ers appear very keen on the script and he is

confident that "the money will wait".

It could be a blessing in disguise. There will

be more time to recreate the landscape of nearly a century ago by planting long-forgotten crops like flax, while shooting some inserts through the winter will give the film the sense of chang

ing seasons so important to the original story. If

everything goes according to plan, the Decem

ber Bride should be well worth waiting for.

28 September Fortnight

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