A wise Agent
de Cinema once said: ‘There are maybe three or four great
documentaries and The Rocky Road to Dublin is one of them.’
In 1968 Dublin-born Peter Lennon returned to his homeland from
ten years as a journalist in Paris to make a documentary. He’d
been told that things were on the move in the old country, that
Dublin was ready and willing to take its place along side the
other ‘hep, swinging’ capitals of Europe.
Armed with a couple of ‘Go Dublin!’ articles, the
freedoms allowed by French ’New Wave’ cinema and
a life time supply of Gitanes, Lennon decided to see for himself
if the winds of change really were blowing up the Liffey.
Of course they were not.
Instead, with the help of the Enfant Terrible of French photography,
Raoul Coutard, Lennon turned the state of stagnation, stultifying
moral repression and short sighted cultural obsession that he
found into an unsentimental and often scathing film about the
sorry state of his tiny island nation.
The film itself documents the hopeless meandering of a medieval
society determined to focus on the past for answers to the future.
It interposes the wry disdainful jubilance of elderly poet,
Sean O'Faolain, with scenes of huge coated old battlers trudging
off to the shops with determination and bitterness. It plops
images of snot nosed brats with severe, pre 1930’s hair
cuts and scabby knees, next to gorgeously intimate scenes from
the local pub. It shows craggy streeted urban vistas and true
wasteland’s in The Wasteland, next to an oblique and condescending
interview with Hollywood legend, John Huston. The film’s
numerous priests, constant crow like presences flitting about
the peripheries, can only have been the inspiration behind Father
Ted. Of particular note is the gloriously flawed Farther Cleary,
‘The Singing Priest’, who is so plainly hiding ‘something’.
(Perhaps it’s the fact that fact that he sired two children
on one of his devoted flock? Who can say?)
Yes, The Rocky Road to Dublin is often brutally sarcastic, not
to mention bitter and tender by turns.
But time, you know, is a funny old thing. Our perceptions of
events and issues can change so radically that, with hindsight,
our own actions may become utterly incomprehensible down the
track. The Rocky Road to Dublin, relegated to obscurity for
the past forty years, is an exercise in exploring that incomprehensibility.
Lennon originally conceived it as ‘Camera Stilo’,
a visual essay, on the precarious and stagnant state of his
beloved country. But now it seems a pointless dig at the past,
at a country maybe only a decade behind the rest of the world.
Today Lennon’s
film, and the accompanying ‘Making of’ documentary,
are probably more entertaining as a foot note in the encyclopaedia
of Radical Cinema than as a functioning documentary. In France
the film was lauded as a film and played by devoted albeit Riot-Happy
students at the Sorbonne. It was the last film shown at the
ill fated 1968 Cannes Film Festival Critics' Week and there’s
even footage in the ‘Making of’ of Lennon arguing
with Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut to keep the
festival open. He was right there in the thick of it, and so
was his film.
Back in
balmy Eire, meanwhile, the film lasted seven weeks at one cinema
before being hounded out of town never to be seen again. It
was considered, like all fringe cinema, to be an insult to the
society it tried to represent.
The Rocky
Road to Dublin is also the natural heir of the Free Cinema.
Like Lindsay Andersons’ Everyday Except Christmas (1959)
and Karel Reisz’s We are the Lambeth Boys (1959), The
Rocky Road to Dublin explores the realities of life for a neglected
and in come cases ‘hidden’ section of society. And
like those films the style of the film is as important as the
content. All that hand held camework draws you in to participate
in the lives of a social ‘other’ we can barely imagine.
As Lennon himself says in the ‘Making of’, the grainy
black and grey stock accentuates the grimness the people and
places you are watching.
So much
for Film 101
But in the
end it’s important to remember that, for Lennon, The Rocky
Road to Dublin wasn’t just an exercise in the cinema of
the Zeitgeist. It was meant as one small battle in the great
cultural and social war of the late 60’s - a patriot’s
war for the dignity and potential of his country. And more than
that, he wanted to ask the Irish what they intended to do next.
He wanted to know how far they were willing to go, or in his
own words, “What would they do with their revolution now
that they had it?”
