BACK PAGES: Journalist Peter Lennon's documentary film,The Rocky Road to Dublin , (released on DVD in 2005) portrayed Ireland as a backward, priest-ridden country in 1967 and greatly upset the country's image of itself when it was first shown at the Cork Film Festival. Filmed by the French nouvelle vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard, largely with the use of a then-rare handheld camera, its commentary pulled few punches. Fergus Linehan reviewed it again when it was subsequently screened for seven weeks in the small International Film Theatre in Dublin.
The Rocky Road to Dublin, as it's being shown at the International, retains all its infuriating roughness of technique. The vicissitudes of shooting with handheld cameras in whatever conditions present themselves means inevitably that the lighting varies. Lennon's decision not to use the colour in which the piece was originally filmed (because, he tells me, he feels black and white is better suited to the subject matter) exacerbates the problem and presents us with whole sequences which take place in half darkness. The sound, too, is pretty dreadful, and a whole section, where a young woman talks about birth control, is virtually inaudible.
Turning to the content, there are undoubtedly several parts which will infuriate the orthodox-minded. Starting with a brief run-through of Irish history from 1916 on, it goes on to talk with such figures as Conor Cruise O’Brien, a GAA official, Sean O’Faolain and Prof Liam O’Briain. It visits a Dublin ballad-singing pub, a hurling match, a class full of small boys parroting their catechism, a tennis club hop, a beat club and a with-it Dublin priest on his rounds.
Much of it, to my mind, only half states the case or is even downright unfair. For example, if I may take the risk of being called prejudiced myself, this newspaper is condemned out of the mouths of university students who only too plainly haven’t the slightest idea what they’re talking about.
The final conclusion reached too (that life here is unutterably grey, philistine and church dominated) looks as if it has been compiled from a series of newspaper cuttings, rather than from observation of the ordinary day-to-day life of the country, while the technique of interviewing seems to belong to television rather than the cinema.
It is when it is letting the pictures make the comment, though, that the film is at its best, and it is its visual content which ultimately makes it worthwhile.
If it was no more than a technically bad knocking exercise, The Rocky Road to Dublinwould be of no more value than any thin end of a wedge, but when Mr Lennon points Raoul Coutard and his camera at something things begin to happen. In a sense there's a film within the film which, without a word being said, has all the qualities of humanity, humour and charity which aren't always apparent in the commentary.
We see it in the faces of the small boys trying to explain the meaning of offences against chastity, in the quiet desperation observed at the tennis club hop, the embarrassment of a priest at a wedding, the enjoyment of the drinkers in the singing pub and many other scenes. This, one feels, is how it is, illuminated by the artistry of the camera.
When you see it you feel that both the phoney messages of the tourist Ireland and the gloomy one of Mr Lennon are somehow superfluous.
Go and see The Rocky Road to Dublin. Its director's aim is to set people talking and arguing and in this he has undoubtedly been successful. Infuriating though it undoubtedly is, both in form and content, it's original, funny, often poetic and altogether the liveliest film yet made about this country.
http://url.ie/2h83