ABSTRACT
The subtle equation of beauty and truth at the end of this quotation should perhaps alert us to the possibility that what passes for realism may often be little more than romanticism in disguise. The view that truth can only win out in the struggle against myth and prejudice manifested itself in film debates in the call for greater realism in Irish cinema. The appeal to graphic clarity evident in this passage, the belief in the superiority of vision over language as a vehicle of truth is, of course, inspired not simply by aesthetic imperatives of realism but by a desire to subject a refractory body of experience to the controlling gaze of the outsider. Victorian melodrama lent itself particularly to the type of pictorial aesthetic which was to dominate romantic representations of Ireland. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, technical advances in lighting and stage machinery brought about a revolution in visual realism and scenic illustration.
