Directed by Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley Club, IFI, Dublin, 70 min
STILL FILMS, the impossibly hip Irish boutique imprint founded in 2006 by film-makers Maya Derrington, Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley, was presented with the Michael Dwyer Discovery Award at this year’s Dublin International Film Festival.
It’s an odd notion to honour a production company in such a way but, with three theatrical features to their credit, the young trinity of film-makers have found a voice as distinctive as any auteur.
Switching between job titles and job shares (the new film was produced by Derrington, who directed the last one), the Still cooperative share characteristics with many fine practitioners from Ireland's apparently unpoppable doc.com bubble: Shimmy Marcus's eye for story ( Aidan Walsh: Master of the Universe); Liz Mermin's patient gaze ( Horses); Ken Wardrop's humanity ( His & Hers). But Still Films has embellished national genre preferences for homespun, heartfelt miniature real-life drama with quirky and experimental leanings.
In this spirit, Dennis McNulty's angular, minimal electronic score provided a neat counterpoint to the earthy antics of last year's Pyjama Girls. Seaview,a 2008 documentary history of Mosney, juxtaposed the spooky remnants of a family holiday resort with later asylum seeking residents and revelled in many uses for the work "camp".
Like its predecessors, Build Something Modernfinds a peculiar nook in Irish history and reanimates it with occasional geometric graphics and split images. It's an appropriately leftfield form for the subject matter. Working from talking head testimony, archive footage and weirdly familiar buildings, directors Gogan and Rowley unearth a strange cross-cultural architectural mash-up between Ireland and Africa.
Starting in the 1950s, just as Ireland’s draftspeople were getting radical enough to produce Brutalist classics such as Dublin’s Busáras, pioneering Irish modernists travelled to Africa, where they would build splendidly severe-looking churches, hospitals and seminaries. Architects Seán Rothery, Richard Hurley and Gerald Fay made the trip, while many others built the developing continent from Dublin through erratic correspondences. “It was like a Lego set,” recalls one. “We’d get a letter saying we have 50,000 blocks. Can you make a building?”
The men who travelled alternately recall Nigeria under British rule and “the sweet smell of decaying matter” or handing over keys on projects, knowing they’d probably never see them again.
The stark square schools and unadorned clinics they built make for eerie spectacle. Configurations we think as characteristically Irish and awfully 1970s look downright odd bathed in sunlight or glinting from deserts. The constructions may not be TV pretty and, too often, we’ve seen maverick configurations on news items about institutional cruelties. But until now we were sure we had exclusive dibs on the look.
Build Something Modernfinds Irish fingerprints in unlikely places. Slyly, the film-makers set up a complex tangle of post-colonial ironies using small, evocative images. We're not at all surprised when contemporaneous African women pop up dancing in tutus.
Everything about the film and, indeed, everything about Irish Modernist Mission to Africa, is impressively incongruous. Much of the building programme took place under the auspices of the Catholic Church, which had objected to the construction of Busáras. The notion, too, of Irish architects working as English engineers once did, composing a landscape without necessarily seeing it, is a curveball every bit as effective as the fancies of the bravura builders.
