WEIGHING in at 2.5 kilos with a retail price of £65, Kevin Rockett's The Irish Filmography is a massive undertaking which fills an important gap in Irish cinema historiography. The book is the result of 15 years of work by the film historian. "In the early 1980s I began to build up a bank of information on Irish cinema, but also to try to build a picture of representations of the Irish in films from other countries, particularly the diaspora in Britain, Canada and Australia."
The index alone is an impressive feat, with 12,000 names listed. "I wanted to make it as easy as possible to access the information. Cyril Cusack made films in four different countries, for example.
Rockett describes his approach as "thematic rather than biological". A literary and dramatic index lists adaptations of Irish themed material, "but you won't find adaptations of non Irish subject matter written by Irish writers, such as Pygmalion, or films like Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa". Productions using Ireland as another location, such as the first World War drama The Blue Max, also aren't included, but, surprisingly, you will find Howard Hawks's screwball classic Bringing Up Baby. "Barry Fitzgerald's role as the gardener, with his wife as the cook, in Bringing Up Baby forms part of an identifiable depiction of the Irish in American cinema from the early silent era onwards. Equally, in the Ron Howard film Backdraft, the McCaffrey brothers (Kurt Russell and William Baldwin) are clearly Irish American. Although their Irishness is never referred to, there's a ceili, and a typical cinema donnybrook."
Still Irish. Rockett's companion volume to the filmography, is based on the same research. "We were trying to draw out these key images across the decades, and then to relate or juxtapose them on facing pages. One exam plc is the facing images of the character played by Elizabeth Sellars in the 1952 film The Gentle Gunman and Miranda Richardson's character in The Crying Game that same image of the crazed, psychopathic IRA gunwoman.
Of 500 textual pages in The Irish Filmography, 85 are devoted to Irish productions. "One of the most striking things is that the period from the very beginning up to 1985 is 35 pages long, while the last 10 years occupy 50 pages. That includes well over 200 short dramas. Within those, you can see a considerable technical improvement on the films of the 1970s and early 1980s but there's also a move away from the political and social concerns of those earlier films, which I think is now beginning to be reflected in the feature films being released.