FILM STUDIES The Cinema of Neil Jordan: Dark Carnival By Carole Zucker Wallflower Press, 203pp. £16.99 Neil Jordan By Maria Pramaggiore University of Illinois Press 200pp $19.95IT IS AN irony that, 15 years after the re-establishment of the Irish Film Board and the subsequent investment in Irish film production, Ireland's two best-known film-makers, both at home and abroad, remain the two directors whose careers were established in the 1980s - namely, Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan.
Of these, the former is considerably the more prolific and the less tied to Irish-themed films, and, after the lukewarm reception of Sheridan's Get Rich or Die Tryin', that situation may remain unchanged. Jordan's films in particular, with their often provocative explorations of gender, sexuality and performance, have been the subject of much critical attention from outside as well as inside Irish academia.
Earlier writers on Jordan's films have been dismissive of his position (if he had one) on nationalism, and many have had a thing or two to say on his depictions of gender and racial identities (usually found not to measure up to standards of political correctness). For more recent writers, particularly local critics, the challenge is to negotiate between essentialist notions of what it means to be Irish and the stereotyping of the nation that accompanied that process, while questioning whether there is something distinctive about being an Irish artist, or an artist working out of Ireland.
Neither of the two US-based writers reviewed here is particularly concerned about Jordan's representations of Irishness, his problematic relationship with Irish public politics or his Catholic cultural inheritance. Neither author distinguishes between Irish and non-Irish films, but finds expressions of Jordan's literary background running through all his works.
Of the two books, Pramaggiore's is by far the most rigorous. Her critical position hinges on a reading of the director's oeuvre as being defined by his exploration of the postmodern gothic. The gothic, she explains, has always been concerned with the notion that the past will come back to haunt us; both the gothic and the postmodern are deeply unimpressed by rationality and so Jordan's films abandon realism in favour of the unreal and the horrifying. If, however, postmodernism celebrates the breakdown of stable identities, Jordan's reluctance to ascribe to any one position prevents him from joining unreservedly in that celebration.
Jordan's Irishness lies in his recourse to the gothic tradition and, equally, to his repeated deployment of irony and scepticism, and by extension all his films are Irish, whether their narratives reflect this or not. This reading works particularly well for productions such as The Company of Wolves (1984) and Interview with the Vampire (1994); it also casts new light on Michael Collins (1996), whose shadowy depiction of Dublin's streets Pramaggiore interprets as the gothic haunting of Irish history. Both the gothic and the postmodern are fascinated by the process of doubling and the exchange of identities, which she also traces through the films, from the much-maligned High Spirits (1988) through to The End of the Affair (1999) and The Good Thief (2002).
On occasion, Pramaggiore's unfamiliarity with the nuances of Irish culture will cause the local reader to raise an eyebrow; for instance, in her analysis of The Butcher Boy (1997), she writes of the pig being a symbol of Ireland. Well yes, but one imposed from the outside as an insult, something that Jordan plays with as part of the film's exploration of postcoloniality.
IN THE SAME vein, Zucker displays a rather high-handed insouciance when it comes to the spelling of Irish proper names and will not have endeared herself to Emer and Kevin Rockett by referring to their earlier book on Jordan by the wrong title. The Cinema of Neil Jordan evidently has its origins in a series of essays that have now been collected together and updated.
As a result, some of the chapters are more developed than others, and the author's analysis of the films that have come out since the project commenced seems shoehorned into the overall whole.
Like Pramaggiore, Zucker writes convincingly of Jordan's gothic inheritance and she is stronger on performance, principally Stephen Rea's (the actor contributes the book's foreword). She is at her most interesting in tracing the director's lineage back to Yeats's borrowings from Irish folklore, seeing in their shared Sligo roots a fascination with fairy logic, Celtic demons and supernatural apparitions. The subtitle of her book, Dark Carnival, finds her taking a pathway through Bakhtin's theories of the carnivalesque and the liberating pleasures of chaos, which she also sees as informing Jordan's films.
Both books are fine contributions to the study of this key Irish film-maker; if Zucker's writing may be a little too Bakhtinian (or simply chaotic) for some, others will appreciate its intuitive moments. Pramaggiore's will be a set text.
• Ruth Barton is a lecturer in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Her last book, Acting Irish in Hollywood: from Fitzgerald to Farrell, was published by Irish Academic Press in 2006