STONEY-BOTHAR

 

NOT MAKING THE FILM

We started by telling each other all about the films we were not going to make. Definitely not. It was very reassuring. The more definite we got about what was wrong with other films, the more definite we felt about what we were going to do – for a while.

It was a bit hermetic and a bit juvenile, but it was easy. We’d look at the way poets or musicians were filmed usually; and we’d laugh. Men in pullovers and women in distress were all over cultural television, even classical musicians looked at ease compared to the way our possible subjects were being put through the visual mincer. We would not do that, never. There was a long and growing list of things we would never do.

We did one sensible thing: we kept quiet with other people, made no promises and found we didn’t have to. The GB developed a social life of its own, we often went to the parties and hardly anybody asked us to explain ourselves. There was a film being made and that was that. Our non-existent film had status and so had we.

It was almost embarassing. Almost-embarassment may sound like a condition that cannot exist; but it does. Statues must feel it. You stand there in a crowd and you have a place, even a slightly special place, but you are not involved and nobody thinks you should be. People walk around you, seagulls take an interest. It’s amusing but a little bit solitary.

People looked at us as if we were filming them already or giving them a sneaky screen test. They had expressions of wary eagerness with added defensive hostility. We were the vampires, they were the living; they had heard about bloodsucking; they would like us to know that they knew; they were keeping their collars turned up but were open to offers.

This importance the film was awarded was tangible but mistaken. There was a time when art films made a difference to careers but not any more. Now and again, I - a non film person - tried to remind myself that arts films are seen by very few and can never have the effect they used to have when the whole world had only three or four channels to watch and when ‘Aquarius’ or ‘Arena’ could make you famous enough for even your mother to notice.

Things changed when we entered the Scottish Gaeltacht. People treated us normally. The idea of a film was treated with interested courtesy but they were not fussed. We could suit ourselves. ‘Suit yourself’ is not a reproach in Ireland. But in Scotland, you sense hands being washed, sighs being sighed. You feel like going off and arranging your own crucifiction.

They didn’t care in the Gaeltacht because Gaelic and its territory are very intensively filmed in proportion to their population. Ever since Robert O’Flaherty and his Man of Aran, for example, the Aran Islands have a sense of being at the centre of the world’s attention – not economically or politically, but culturally. The islands live with film crews, academics, linguists. The population is not large enough to fill the film hours; everybody is a possible source for something.

We reckoned that if you come from Wolverhampton you’ll probably never be on television. But if you come from Stornoway, chances are you’ll always be on television, which will be interested in your memories, your traditions, your wages, your prospects. Gaelic people even get asked what they did in the war and if you watch them responding, you’ll very likely be somewhat charmed by their way of answering but eventually you will feel some awe at the way they respond in a sort of diagonal way without either answering or not answering the question, a way that used to be ascribed to a tribal and permanent vagueness but is really the result of casting a cold eye on cameras and film people and of realising that what they usually do to you after they’ve filmed is to chew you up, spit you out and ignore you.

There is the difficulty, in the Gaeltachts, of knowing exactly who you’re talking to. You often think you know what’s what before there is any real chance of knowing. You enter a Gaeltacht and, in the back of your mind, assume that the population has more or less been awaiting your arrival for generations. A stability is assumed that you would never assume in a city. You meet a city person and you investigate; you meet a Gaeltach citizen and you think you know them and what they represent, having assumed that they must represent something.

 

Murray was filming in the Hebrides. It was a while ago and Murray, who may well have been the latest thing himself in those days, had the very latest thing in film stock – Eastmancolour. The crew were wending their way back across the Lewis moor; the day was over and, as usual when days are over, the picturesqueness the crew had chased all day started blossoming all around. The sun was setting, a mackerel sky was showing-off shamelessly and, backlit against the setting sun, a silhouetted crofter was bending his back and wheeling a barrowful of peats along the line of the horizon while his dog did some of its best moves around about him. Now Murray does not film clichés, but when the scenery insists on being as scenic as possible and the natives seem to have gone native, what’s a film man to do?

So out comes the gear and the crew and in no time the whole thing is being filmed on the Eastmancolour. Fine. Then Murray who has, as you will see, a very strong talking-to-strangers habit, goes up to the man and asks permission to film his next few moves.

- - I’d be surprised if you got a meter reading in this light

Says the man

- - especially if you’re using Eastmancolour.

Says Murray:

- You’re a photographer yourself then.

- Well I did use to run a photographic store in Chicago

The Gaeltachts are, of necessity, full of travelled people and many of them have seen it all, or much more of it all than the rest of us. They have not returned home just to be discovered by vagrants with cameras like us. They were neither impressed or unimpressed by our arrival and saw no need to be either. They behaved normally, which – as Shaw used to enjoy insisting on – is very very unusual.

It was interesting. I was getting used, despite myself, to seem to offer a kind of stardom; and here were people who did not need to be in a film unless there was a good reason to be in it. Mind you, there was a good way to go before there was anything, any film, that anybody could be in or out of.

First there were some launches and many meetings that Murray and I took some kind of part in, and several kinds of bewilderment from. We went, we did what we were told. Usually we felt like we were part of a sort of Roman triumph but never sure if we were the victors or the vanquished or only the poor what gets the blame.

 

 

LAUNCHES

The art launch is a strange animal. You can see the point of launching ships, opening roads, unveiling monuments. There’s something at least theoretically useful about them; they link an object with its use and with its users.

But users - audiences - don’t go to art launches; art people do. Exhibitions are launched by getting the invited to stand in front of the pictures and looking at the other inviteds. You can’t see the exhibition, so it must be all about the talking. You can’t talk, it’s too noisy. And you can’t find out who anybody is because you’re supposed to know who they are and if you try to explain who you are, you only show you aren’t worth knowing.

There were GB launches, and there were many. They mostly happened before the exhibition existed. There was a straightforwardness about this. The user question didn’t matter; the event was all about people who mattered to the GB in other ways.

There was one in the Dublin City Hall, a very grand space, designed to overawe, not to encourage. The central area of the large entrance chamber is enclosed by a circle of pillars - more pillars than any building could ever really need. The pillars divide the place acoustically into two separate worlds.

The Great Book Men gathered inside the pillars and intoned, I assume, the praises of The Great Book. A poet tried to do his usual intimate poetic things, but to an audience he couldn’t see and who couldn’t hear him.

The audience kept well clear of the only places where you stood any chance of hearing and kept to the outer ring, behind the pillars, and did the reception thing: they shouted at each other, grabbed at the bits of solid food that sped past them now and again, and drank as much fair-to-middling wine as you need to keep your shouting levels up.

I scuttled off. Leaving art launches early is even better than not going at all. You feel life is refunding you a bit of your time on earth. I stopped on steps of the City Hall steps - a place from which urban vistas should impress and reassure the visitor, a prospect which careful cities do not leave to the unassisted eye of the beholder. Not here. Dublin is a comeuppance place. Even the English couldn’t plan it, and they had it for long enough. It has never been sure where its main streets are; it has a castle you can’t see until you’re inside it; a parliament that is now a bank, a town house that is now a parliament. And these are no accidents, not really; they’re attitudes.

I stood and watched the city which was, as usual, ignoring everything but its own stream of consciousness and wished that writers and the rest of us were able to be a more honest part of it all. The pubs on Parliament Street were, of course, open and every one of them had already done their own launches of an evening in which the launchers and launchees expected to take a full and, as they say, active part. I went to say goodbye to Marisa and Mairi S, both propellors of the GB. They wanted to leave for Connemara at once. Or home to Lewis, or someplace where they don’t do launches. I went home to Stoneybatter. It’s on the wrong side of the river. The evening was up and going. You don’t have to launch evenings, not in Stoneybatter you don’t.

 

MEETINGS

We attended, often without knowing why. Sometimes we turned up just as Malcolm’s Mounted Foot – mere meeting fodder. Malcolm is a radical with more patience than we have and he was going through pathclearing processes with native informants, snow ploughs and St Bernards. Often there was no word, but no body either, the relatives were hopeful and Malcolm always showed up in the end, wiser and not visibly older - bald men often look as if they got themselves born at the age of forty like that man in Flann O’Brien.

Meetings aren’t always bad. Sometimes you start saying something -because you have to say something – and find yourself working your way towards a real thought. The GB meetings were voluminous. Round the table you’d have people who didn’t usually talk to each other – visuals, verbals, curatorial, educational, publicity and cybernetic persons. Even watching them working out ways to talk to each other was interesting, especially since – at this stage – we had nothing to say. More unusually, we said nothing.

The project was enormous. The book would consist of 100 poems, chosen by 15 Irish Gaelic and 15 Scots Gaelic poets, each chosing a piece of their own and two others (making 90) and ten more would be nominated. Each opening of the book would consist of an artist’s reaction to a text, in collaboration with a calligrapher and typographer, sometimes in collaboration with the writer. Apart from the size, the complexity and the number of possible breakdowns was worrying.

We had conversations, and listened to many, about the relationship of artist to text to writer to calligrapher to typographer to book. We made fair sense of the ‘I’m an artist, bugger off!’ conversation - we’ve all been teenagers after all, though some people seem to leave it very late in life. We knew the ‘I’m an arts professional: the rest is silence’ one. The Great Book Committees were large, very very representative and met infrequently, so most people wanted to have the conversation they always wanted to have and say some of the things they had always wanted to say. There was a lot of explaining things from the very beginning.

Some of it surprised us. Murray and I spent hours in a Dublin pub - the young arts consultant woman took us there because ‘old men go there’ - asking about the artists’ commissions, about interventions, about how the conversations with artists would go once the artists got going. We learned nothing. She read us highlights from the CV’s of many artists – a shopping list of facts about preferred media, background and the shorthand of identity – gender, nationality, sexuality. She had nothing to say about how the GB would influence, facilitate or even understand an artist’s work

Commissioning is either a simple payment or a subtle intervention, maybe sometimes a worthwhile conversation. Not now. Now, you commission an autonymous artist. They do what they do. As a dialogue or a process it lacks something - a something that you could call everything. But that’s how it is now. We disapproved of it but we didn’t mind. It was more interesting that Gaelic literature - ‘The Gaelic World’ as gentlemen in meetings allowed themselves to say - should encounter contemporary arts practice at its most impervious and typical.

We couldn’t see it, but the committees and the consultants and the meeting business did mean that the circle of arts professionals dealing with Gaelic was being widened. There’s a lot to be said against arts professionals but we seem to need them, we certainly have them and presumably, as with politicians, we get the arts pros we deserve.

Of course, we too – Murray and I – were arts professionals of a sort and we should have being pacing ourselves, thinking strategically, contributing patiently. But we didn’t look at it like that. We were going to make something, wanted to get on with it and felt a bit outside the meetings business. We should have known better. Despite Murray’s annointing, we still had no money for the film and we were going to need a fair amount of it. It was time to make applications.