Documentary realism and fundamentalist religion in Ireland: a case study of power in the blood together with The Rocky Road to Dublin and The Road to God Knows Where

Introduction: According to many critics documentary helps to interpret history and promote human understanding while dramatising and bending reality. In general it does not draw conclusions, but rather consists of statements and assertions so that conclusions can be drawn. All the ‘creative’ documentaries discussed in this paper attempt to address the power and influence of religion in Ireland and to encourage audiences to reflect on such issues using a range of conventional strategies from direct address to cinema verite techniques, drawing upon the powerful influence of Robert Flaherty's poetic exposé of Man of Aran from the 1930s, together with more recent documentary techniques using more dialogical and reflexive formats. Peter Lennon, John T. Davis and Alan Gilsenan's documentaries under discussion in this paper present a relatively raw yet somber aesthetic, combining many of these techniques in their varying attempts to understand and appreciate the historical power and legacy of religion for contemporary Ireland

Religion and Irish cinema in studies

In classics like The Quiet Man and Ryan’s Daughter representations of the clergy and religion in Irish cinema has to some extent reflected perceptions of the church in the wider Irish society. These representations were certainly favourable, validating the great reverence in which the people then held their church. An apparent anti-Catholic agenda was given voice more recently, which was precipitated by the numerous church scandals of the 1990s. However, it still took a long time for representations of institutional violence by the clergy to be documented as exemplified recently in The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Song for a Raggy Boy (2003). This paper will concentrate on close narrative readings of these films to illustrate how cinematic representations of Catholic authority figures involved in such abuse can be read as endorsing an anti-clerical and broadly secular humanist discourse. I suggest however, that these provocative texts nonetheless remain foregrounded within religious discourses and the traumatic evocation expressed in these narratives is necessary for the therapeutic process of healing within Irish society

Ireland's America: a case study of Sheridan's In America (2002) and Get Rich or Die Tryin (2005)

Jim Sheridan is one of the fathers of Irish national cinema with Oscar-winning films including My Left Foot (1990) and powerful nation building narratives like The Field (1990) and In the Name of the Father (1993). His recent work has tried to become more internationally appealing with an evocative study of Irish emigrants in America and most controversially his recent biopic of the internationally known black rapper, 50 cent. By examining In America and Get Rich or Die Tryin this article will assess how Sheridan adapts his Irish preoccupations while trying to take on Hollywood. More than any other Irish director, Sheridan uses family, race, otherness, and Americana, in general, to dramatise Ireland’s affinity with America

Developing, deploying and assessing usage of a movie archive system among students of film studies

This paper describes our work in developing a movie browser application for students of Film Studies at our University. The aim of our work is to address the issues that arise when applying conventional user-centered design techniques from the usability engineering field to build a usable application when the system incorporates novel multimedia tools that could be potentially useful to the end-users but have not yet been practiced or deployed. We developed a web-based system that incorporates features as identified from the students and those features from our novel video analysis tools, including scene detection and classification. We deployed the system, monitored usage and gathered quantitative and qualitative data. Our findings show those expected patterns and highlighted issues that need to be further investigated in a novel application development. A mismatch between the users’ wishes at the interviews and their actual usage was noted. In general, students found most of the provided features were beneficial for their studies

Developing a MovieBrowser for supporting analysis and browsing of movie content

There is a growing awareness of the importance of system evaluation directly with end-users in realistic environments, and as a result some novel applications have been deployed to the real world and evaluated in trial contexts. While this is certainly a desirable trend to relate a technical system to a real user-oriented perspective, most of these efforts do not involve end-user participation right from the start of the development, but only after deploying it. In this paper we describe our research in designing, deploying and assessing the impact of a web-based tool that incorporates multimedia techniques to support movie analysis and browsing for students of film studies. From the very start and throughout the development we utilize methodologies from usability engineering in order to feed in end-user needs and thus tailoring the underlying technical system to those needs. Starting by capturing real users’ current practices and matching them to the available technical elements of the system, we deployed an initial version of our system to University classes for a semester during which we obtained an extensive amount of rich usage data. We describe the process and some of the findings from this trial

Learning from COVID-19: Virtue Ethics, Pandemics and Environmental Degradation: A case study reading of The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Contagion (2011)

This paper uses virtue ethics to discuss the COVID-19 outbreak, Hollywood science-fiction/pandemic films, and the environmental crisis. We outline the ideas of hubris and nemesis and argue that responding to the COVID-19 pandemic requires that we develop virtues. We will explore these ethical issues through an eco-reading (Hiltner 2018) of two popular films cinematic representation of pandemics, The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Contagion (2011). Fictional narratives are particularly adept at celebrating the moral and intellectual virtues of individuals (as is standard in Hollywood cinema) and dramatizing the tensions inherent in human scientific and technological civilisation. Using examples from our texts and with reference to COVID-19, we begin with a discussion of virtues and vices, both individual and collective, we then explore the concept of flourishing and apply this framework to collective action problems such as climate change and COVID-19. Thus, science fiction can provoke new forms of environmental philosophising and ethical engagement, while addressing the most important challenges facing humanity at present