“The Ireland they dream of”

As the essays in this volume discuss, Irish cinema has become increasingly preoccupied with (at its best) interrogating and adapting, and (at its least inventive) absorbing generic templates, themselves borrowed from the more industrialized British and Hollywood models. The attractiveness of the generic formula to an emerging generation of filmmakers is evident—genre films tend to be cool, to appeal to an equally young audience, and have the potential to crossover into other territories. They provide easily identifiable narrative plotlines, characters, and mise-en-scène that only take a little alteration to testify to authorial intent. From the critical perspective, however, such films may often seem like little more than lazy imitations of well-worn formulae that have been executed better elsewhere. The “boys with guns” caper movies with their inevitable homages to Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie are dispiritingly interchangeable, while the advent of our own brand of “romzomcom” in the shape of Stephen Bradley's Boy Eats Girl (2005) was widely seen as a poor copy of the successful British romantic zombie comedy, Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004). As I have argued elsewhere (Barton 2002: 111–112) and others have argued here, the adoption of generic formulae enabled filmmakers to signal their desire to move away from the often sententious art films of the 1980s and 1990s, with their obsessive dissection of issues of national identity and nationalism, and to embrace a commercial formula that celebrated its global allegiances. The films that achieved canonical status as part of that shift have been celebrated for their combination of local concerns and global style; here I would like to turn my attention to a collection of lesser-known productions: short films that achieved limited commercial release but that, I will argue, utilized the language of genre cinema and simultaneously commented on that language in order to produce works that were what we might term critical pastiches of existing genres, in this case, the science fiction film. ¹ I would further like to propose that the adoption of the medium of the short film has been crucial to the impact of these productions and that the aesthetics of this medium are particularly suited to the thematic concepts explored by these filmmakers.