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Film Description
A massively controversial film from Irish-born journalist Peter Lennon and legendary French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Rocky Road To Dublin is set against a backdrop of Dublin in the 1960s. The hypocrisy of church, politics and state is exposed through a series of seemingly innocent interviews, in which Ireland's patriotic sportsmen, priests, censors and children unwittingly reveal the true nature of a repressed and censored Republic. The film had one showing at a Dublin cinema in 1968 but was then suppressed for three decades, never released in Ireland and never shown on Irish television.
Peter Lennon talks of Rocky Road to Dublin as an ‘affectionate’ look at the Irish Republic in the 1960s. It’s certainly a significant, if not unique, record of how its... more >
Peter Lennon talks of Rocky Road to Dublin as an ‘affectionate’ look at the Irish Republic in the 1960s. It’s certainly a significant, if not unique, record of how its people lived and thought at the time, but as it by and large shows an inturned and repressed populace, his views were never likely to be shared by the country’s authorities. It received one screening at a Dublin cinema in 1968 and then it was suppressed for over three decades, neither receiving a release and never shown on Irish television.
After he had returned to the country to visit friends – who tried in vain to convince him that Ireland had changed beyond recognition - Paris-based jornalist Lennon decided to make a film about the situation there. He hadn’t made a film before but thought that unimportant, and he received a promise of funding after saying he could get the cinematographer Raoul Coutard to shoot the project. In the spirit of the time he went and asked him, Coutard said he had a couple of weeks free, and they began the film soon after.
Lennon introduces Rocky Road to Dublin as ‘a personal attempt to reconstruct the plight of a community’. He certainly feels none of the ‘well-behaved gratitude’ he felt was expected of his generation to his elders who had formed the Irish republic in which they now lived. ‘We lived in the shabby afterglow of heroic days’ he says in his eloquent commentary.
The main question he addresses in the film is ‘what do you do with your revolution when you’ve got it?’, his answer being, ‘give it back to the bourgeoisie and the clergy’. He interviews censors (one who tells the scarcely credible story of censoring early sound films by sight and guesswork because they didn’t have sound projecting equipment), priests and politicians (deriding the ‘bad habit’ of their close involvement) and the assistant secretary of the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association), who justifies their ban on playing and watching ‘foreign’ (read ‘English’) games such as soccer, rugby, cricket and hockey.
Sometimes the film comes close to parody – the tolling bell that accompanies the list of banned writers is a case in point – but mostly it comes across as a fresh and at times spontaneous pice of work that also shows young people in pubs and clubs, including memorably, footage of The Dubliners playing the film’s title track in a bar.
Coutard contributes exactly what you would expect with his camera, at times wheeling it around, at others almost furtive, spying a bare shoulder or hands around a waist, intruding on private moments. At other times emotional effect comes from keeping the camera running after you would expect a cut.
If Lennon’s film sank without trace in Ireland it had a renaissance in France where it was the last film screened at the 1968 Cannes Film festival before Godard took the stage and announced the end of the festival. Afterwards it was shown in the Sorbonne accompanied by ‘the perfume of CS gas’ as students demonstrated in the streets. As Lennon says, ‘the French saw it as a film, the Irish as an insult’.
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