ABSTRACT
In this essay, I will consider the application of conventions of genre theory that establish boundaries of feature film production along mainstream and indigenous axes. I hope to reflect upon the functions and roles of these applications in writing about minor cinemas—in this case, specifically, Irish—in as much as they draw upon critical discourses of cultural empowerment and control. Because I am setting out to consider a number of cinematic texts from the 1990s, I will seek what Martin McLoone praises in much Irish cinema of that time as “a new film culture emerging under both American and European influences […] attempting to find its own aesthetic” (McLoone 2000: 199). Rather than focus uniquely on the positive cultural impact of this new cinematic aesthetic, I will consider certain formal aspects of contemporary Irish films that display acute awareness of the value of engaging dialectically with historically developed and inherited mainstream cinematic systems. I want to avoid reductive binaries that have sometimes posited the local against the international: the latter as the embodiment of threatening hegemonic practices of a commercially interested center that impairs development on the margins. Instead, I will offer a perspective on recent Irish productions that is based on a dialectical connection between core and periphery that benefits indigenous cinematic development and also provides transcultural contact points as instances of explanation for foreign audiences. I will argue, therefore, that transatlantic market forces and cinematic structures, both based in a generic reading of film, may be understood healthily as already established sites for the development of a local visual culture and for indigenous filmmakers' exploration of the medium within its fields of inherited imagery. I do not want to treat generic film structures (or structural relations) simply as culturally imposing, restrictive, and destructive forces for indigenous cinema, nor do I want to suggest that genre is the only useful cinematic field in which minor film industries can register parochial inflections. My approach will generally reexamine Steve Neale's understanding of genre as something of an artistic constraint on popular culture managed by economic imperatives (Neale 1980), in favor of a bilateral reading that includes audience selective processes. From the producer's perspective, I will suggest that generic networks in film can provide space for the realization of three objectives, all of which assist in the contribution of national filmmakers to developments in cinematic art. Firstly, they can bind the local “familiar” with a global “familiar” in order to facilitate connections between indigenous and international unknowns. Secondly, they can provide a representational cinematic space for the exhibition of local cinematic topographies and, thirdly, they can work dialectically as a constant reopening and interrogation of conceptions and evaluations of genre.
