Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood's Yellow Peril and Its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema
- Chapter 2 Berlin – The City of Sound and Sensation in Fritz Lang's M and E. A. Dupont's Varieté
- Chapter 3 Bond's Body: Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale and the Future Anterior
- Chapter 4 Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
- Chapter 5 Imperial Gazes, Hollywood Predators: A Cinema of Molestation in Postcolonial Indian Literature
- Chapter 6 Linguistic Identity in Fruit Chan's 1997 Trilogy
- Chapter 7 The Postnational and the Aesthetics of the Spectral: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon
- Chapter 8 The Art Object as Text in the Practice of Comparative Visuality
- Chapter 9 Exploring In-humanity: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and Still-Life Painting
- Chapter 10 Re-defining Art: Manuel Rivas' Mujer en el baño
- Chapter 11 Re-envisioning the Haunting Past: Kara Walker's Art and the Re-appropriation of the Visual Codes of the Antebellum South
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Notes on Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Projecting a More Habitable Globe: Hollywood's Yellow Peril and Its Refraction onto 1930s Shanghai National Cinema
- Chapter 2 Berlin – The City of Sound and Sensation in Fritz Lang's M and E. A. Dupont's Varieté
- Chapter 3 Bond's Body: Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale and the Future Anterior
- Chapter 4 Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
- Chapter 5 Imperial Gazes, Hollywood Predators: A Cinema of Molestation in Postcolonial Indian Literature
- Chapter 6 Linguistic Identity in Fruit Chan's 1997 Trilogy
- Chapter 7 The Postnational and the Aesthetics of the Spectral: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon
- Chapter 8 The Art Object as Text in the Practice of Comparative Visuality
- Chapter 9 Exploring In-humanity: Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons and Still-Life Painting
- Chapter 10 Re-defining Art: Manuel Rivas' Mujer en el baño
- Chapter 11 Re-envisioning the Haunting Past: Kara Walker's Art and the Re-appropriation of the Visual Codes of the Antebellum South
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
1975: ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’
Heaney talks of a Northern Ireland that is parochial and divided – a place of silence and fear where it is safer to keep quiet than to say the wrong thing. Heaney's poem speaks of a provincial people hemmed in by the past and silenced by the conflict. This was certainly reflected in the limited film culture of 1970s Northern Ireland and in my own experiences of the times. I was brought up in Northern Ireland during the worst period of these Troubles – a teenager in the 1970s. Although technically an outsider, my Polish background ensured I was subsumed into the Catholic Nationalist community even though I lived in a predominantly Protestant area. It was a time when people were forced to take sides to line up with one point of view or another.
2011: Now I am asking is Northern Irish Film finally, after nearly three decades of development, beginning to find its voice? I am going to argue here that it has come of age because of its ability to accommodate the demands of the cinematic popular form while investigating the controversial. I believe that this new confidence has been achieved over the past thirty years through the creation of a whole series of interesting if not always commercially viable feature film experiments.
To understand why I am being so optimistic it is first necessary to set out some of the history and filmmaking practice that has led Northern Ireland Screen in 2009 to suggest: ‘The screen agency's profile is at an all time high amongst the global filmmaking community.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- World Cinema and the Visual Arts , pp. 59 - 72Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012