ABSTRACT
In its explorations of national identity, the Irish film renaissance has produced movies whose international success derives in part from inventive uses of Hollywood genre formulas: My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989) as a biopic, The Snapper (Stephen Frears, 1993) as a family comedy, Intermission (John Crowley, 2003) as an urban thriller. For many critics, however, this international success has come at a cost; commercial Irish films, they claim, compromise authenticity and integrity in their representations of the political and cultural life of Ireland. A leading voice in this discourse is Martin McLoone, who suggests that reliance upon the formal conventions of popular American films instead of native narrative and cultural materials results from the “special relationship [of Irish filmmaking] to the cinema globally and to Hollywood cinema in particular,” its cultural representations necessarily responding, “consciously or not, to the preexisting representations of the Irish that have emerged originally as a result of the Irish diaspora, especially in the case of Hollywood” (2000: 87). Given the long history of cinematic representations of Irish culture—mostly stereotypical—emanating from across the Atlantic, with the active involvement of eminent Irish-American directors like John Ford and John Huston, Ireland's filmmakers seeking an international audience typically find themselves working in genre traditions of Irishness established by the American film industry. 1
