founder of the Irish Republican Army and the soldier who won an independent Irish ... the Irish war of independence and the Irish civil war until his death at the hands of .... the real dialogue or dialogic tcxt of War Stories in- volves the speaking ...
Film Reviews
MICHAEL COLLINS. Produced by Stephen Woolley, Redmond Morris (co-producer); written and directed by Neil Jordan. 1996; color; 138 minutes. Distributor: Warner Brothers/Geffen Pictures. In the various controversies that swirl around Irish history, a few historical figures serve as ideological touchstones. One's opinions about them reveal much about how one views the nature of Irish politics and questions about Irish identity. Along with Patrick Pearse and Eamonn De Valera, perhaps no person serves this role so well as Michael Coli ins, arguably the founder of the Irish Republican Army and the soldier who won an independent Irish state at the cost of partition, civil war, and his own life. Michael Co/tins is Neil Jordan's attempt to tell the tale of Collins from his participation as a minor player in the Easter Rising of 1916 through his major role in the Irish war of independence and the Irish civil war until his death at the hands of former comrades. The film is, however, less a historical biography than a cinemagraphic portrait of the myth of Michael Collins as well as a statement about the nature of things in Ireland since 1922. Film is a wholly different thing from history. It must compress events, can make interpretive assumptions, and is not constrained by rules of evidence. Nonetheless, in many ways, Michael Collins is faithful to the past. The film's portrayal of period Dublin is masterful and has perhaps no rival in film history. While there are occasional errors in detail, the verisimilitude here is admirable despite the film's penchant for the now de rigueur use of gray and blue in period films. Crowd scenes in particular have been shot with an eye to the original photographs and films of many of these events and are done well. Of course, there are the usual sins of commission and omission. The film dwells too much on Kitty Kiernan, who, in her role as the female personification of Ireland, is won over by Call ins's willingness to endorse violence, but who also serves as the focal point of homoerotic tension between Coli ins and his friend Harry Boland. Some choices, such as Collins's seeming chastity, are of little consequence, while others, such as the execution of Ned Broy or the manner of Boland's death, are significant. Broy, only one of the intelli-
gence contacts supplying information to Collins, accompanied him on his fateful trip to London, rejected the treaty that ended the war of independence at the cost of partition, eventually served as head of the Irish police, and died an old man. Boland, by contrast, was killed rather ignominiously when Free State soldiers found him half-dressed in a hotel room in Skerries. In both cases, the truth and its implications are far more interesting than what is presented in the film. The film also presents its hero rather simplistically. Despite brilliant acting from Liam Neeson, Collins was a far more complex and interesting character than one finds here. He came by his patriotism as an teenage expatriate living and working in London, where he was swayed by the idea of an "Irish Ireland," and he came to the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) through Gaelic games. He then learned the Irish language, and when Collins returned to Ireland in early 1916, he had come to believe, as many exiles do, with absolute certainty in the purity of a cause. While imprisoned in Wales in 1916, Collins moved to establish his authority among his fellow prisoners. He then cultivated it through careful manipulation of his public image as a nattily dressed gunman with the mind of a banker and the tenderness of a serious Catholic. From 1917 onward, he worked tirelessly not only to gain Irish independence hut to win leadership of the movement, holding key positions in both the IRB and the Irish Volunteers and alienating more than a few people in the process. His careful selection of IRB men to run in the 1918 general election was as much a tactic to secure control of the revolutionaries as it was an attempt to win a democratic mandate. If in democratic politics he could be manipulative, in matters military he was ruthless. The film actually goes easy on the British, where the Black and Tans deserved much of what they got. But Collins's "squad," which dispatched the Cairo Gang, a British counterintelligence unit, also dispatched many an Irish civilian who had different notions of what it meant to be Irish, setting the stage for the ongoing conflict we have today. The most glaring omission in this film, from both a historical and a dramatic perspective, is that of the peace negotiations in London. De Valera, as the film implies, sent Collins on the mission doomed to failure.
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Film Reviews But it was while he was in London that Collins, courted by English society, made his, and ultimately Ireland's, fateful compromise; without this, the story of his seizure of the middle ground is inexplicable. In the cnd, the film casts Collins as a martyr for that middle ground. De Valera and his followers made the mistake of taking seriously the vision of I reland for which Collins had so successfully fought, and it is not really clear in this film how they ended up on opposite sides. Nevertheless, Michael Collins is a superior film that presents a legitimate interpretation of Collins's life and times. Many critics in England and Ireland have been discomforted by the heroic portrayal presented here, and perhaps they should be. But almost any portrayal of Coli ins would bring to life that unresolved thing that is Ireland. The film suggests that the middle way, then and now, might not be what it seems to be. SEAN FARRELL MORAN Oukland University WAR STORIES OUR MOTHERS NEVER TOLD US. Produced by Gaylene Preston and Robin Laing; directed by Gaylene Preston; interviews conducted by ludith Fyfe. 1995; color; 95 minutes. Distributor: First Run/ Icarus Films. Gaylene Preston's film is a feature-length, oral history documentary about the experiences of New Zealand women during World War 11. Rendered in an unpretentious but highly polished style that fore grounds the cultural and social specificity of these women's lives, War Stories was named best film at the 1995 New Zealand Film Awards, and-unlike Preston's previous work-it has even found a committed American distributor. This greater international visibility is well deserved and somewhat long in coming for Preston, who has built a solid career in New Zealand with a series of entertaining, well-crafted, left-leaning films. Coming from a small-town, working-class background, Preston entered the developing New Zealand film industry in the late 1970s, when it was, in her words, a "male culture that was bouncy and funny, quite abrasive, and blokey and matey and sexist." Since 1985, she has provided an alternative to this male culture in fictional feature films (Mr. Wrong (1985] and Ruby and Rata [1990]) and television projects, including Bread and Roses (1993), a mini-series biography of political activist Sonia Davies that offers a detailed view of the transformations in New Zealand during and after World War 11. War Stories thus caps a decade of socially conscious filmmaking, all of it informed by Preston's belief that there are progressive positions worth championing, female voices worth attending to, and a large general audience worth addressing and inspiring. Seven interviews-seven mothers, Maori and Pakeha (New Zealanders of European descent), working and middle-class-form the heart of Preston's revi-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
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sionist take on the social history of World War 11 New Zealand. In structure and rhetorical orientation, War Stories follows the tradition of earnest American documentaries like Union Maids (1976) and The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980), which rely on (without rcally problcmatizing) what Bill Nichols calls a "witness-centered voice of testimony" (Representing Reality [Bloomington, Ind., 1991], 48). Unlike the activists in Union Maids, however, the witnesses in War Stories speak less of proletarian politics than of social mores and daily prejudices. But what these ordinary, articulate, lively women most completely testify to is the power of memory and of personal resilience, humor, and love in the face of wartime's ration of separation, grief, and sudden loss. From their testimony, we know these women lived in a class society, isolated and provincial yet linked irrevocably to England, the United States, and the North African and European theaters of war. This is no major revisionist thesis, but then War Stories does not claim to be an investigative expose. Grand, startling revelations would in fact run counter to Preston's overall sense of precisely where social history is to be rediscovered: in the everyday and the anecdotal, if not solely the domestic, then surely the intimate. What "our mothers never told us" are their stories of attempted rape and painfully tense homecomings and, more generally, their deeply felt realization that romance, sexual activity, and marriage did not necessarily go hand in hand in wartime New Zealand. War Stories exists only because of these particular women, although it is Preston who provides the forum and the occasion for their storytelling and who situates the women cinematically and discursively. Until a snapshot of the women appears on screen after the final credits, the mothers are presented individually: each separate story is introduced by a title card that identifies the speaker by first name, and each mother is seated by herself against a pitch-black backdrop, carefully illuminated by three-point lighting. The camera is stationary, varying somewhat in distance from shot to shot but never drawing nearer than a medium close-up. There is no question, in other words, that these are staged interviews, recollections/performances of the past that somehow necessitate the effacing of all visible traces of present-day New Zealand, except for the presence of the women themselves, who seem rcmarkably forthright and comfortable telling their stories. Absent also from the interviews is any sense of personalized domestic space; yet, significantly, thc women on Preston's stage arc fully individualized through dress, posture, dialect, and physical features. In contrast to the seven witncsses, ludith Fyfc, thc interviewer, always remains offscrccn, positioned as a listener rather than a supplicant or interrogator. Thus the real dialogue or dialogic tcxt of War Stories involves the speaking women and what might be called thc "archival" material that Prcston incorporatcs. Certain visual evidence comes from the women themselves: letters, documents, photographs. Preston knows
FEBRUARY 1997
