This comment is on a re-edit of this material titled "Mitchell and Kenyon in Ireland" narrated by Fiona Shaw.
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This is a truly amazing film experience, because it more than transport you a charmed fictional world. It transports you a strange container a strange use of the medium. It should be a small shift that makes sense, but its so jarring.
For those who don't know this, it is from the period when movies were new and thought to be much like photographs. Movies weren't there to tell stories, reflect dreams or explore worlds. They were there so you could see yourself, and document events.
The business of movie-making was to roll into town, take some movies of the town, and then show them later that day. People would come to see themselves, even if they hadn't been there because the notion of a captured place was as personal more than a captured face.
So this is a collection of these films from Irish cities.
Everyone you see is someone who just happened in front of a camera. All dead, all working as hard as they can to be characters in a film before film really was the model. You see hundreds of people coming from a church after services. Its a Catholic church of course and you can feel the oppression: from one of the worst religious establishments in the modern world on one side and the British occupation on the other. We see a parade of returning Irish soldiers, back from one of England's colonial wars. We see pompous nitwits in costumes and uniforms as if it were Gilbert and Sullivan.
But most dearly and deeply for me some of this shows Dublin as Joyce saw it. The whole thing is narrated by Fiona Shaw, and the historical detail is amazing and fascinating. On watching an exit from a Dublin church, she remarks that a poster barely visible next to the door references a certain reverend who appears in Joyce at least twice. You see, the inside out nature of this thing turned me around. My richest literary experience is Joycean. Its the flavor I often seek in constructed cinema. But here is largely accidental cinema, devoid of narrative, that incidentally brushes an unseen narrative.
Everyone you see either is yearning for escape from the place (a third of the entire nation came to the US in this epoch) or resisting it in some way. The faces. God, the faces.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
