Luck of the Irish: Take Five: Gabriel Byrne
Time Out New York Project: Issue #813, May 19-25, 2011
He’s played gangsters, a psychiatrist, even Satan himself. Now actor Gabriel Byrne, 61, can claim a new honorific: film programmer. Beginning this Friday, the Museum of Modern Art will present the Byrne-curated “Revisiting The Quiet Man: Ireland on Film.” As the title suggests, John Ford’s classic, John Wayne-starring romance is front and center among the offerings, all of which — from the colorful Disney fantasy Darby O’Gill and the Little People to Steve McQueen’s harrowing, politically volatile Hunger — address the Irish experience in distinct and fascinating ways. We caught up with Byrne via phone to talk about his work on the series.
Was this a program that you conceived or were you approached by others?
I conceived it. Something I’d been thinking about for quite a while was the notion of identity in film — how different groups, different societies, different countries are portrayed onscreen and how our knowledge of each other is, to a great extent, based on the knowledge we’ve gleaned from films. Being an immigrant to the United States also made me think about the question of immigrant identity in mainstream American film, with especial regard to how the Irish story has been told.
What experiences did you draw on while doing research?
I’ve been going to films since I was five years old. The first film I saw was Darby O’Gill and the Little People, and it had a very profound effect. My interest in cinema has always been broad. For a time, I was a film critic for a magazine in Dublin. Basically what it meant was two free tickets to every film that was out. I don’t really know whether I was any good or not. But I was always interested in what films had to say. And after I was appointed Ireland’s Cultural Ambassador to the US, I thought about how, in the case of cinema, we could look at the questions that I think every society has to ask: Who are we? Who are we as a group? How are we perceived? How have we been perceived? And how have we allowed ourselves to be perceived through film?
Why did you choose The Quiet Man as the central text?
Because it’s a very controversial film among Irish audiences. Many Irish people have a problem with it because they think it perpetuates certain stereotypes. John Ford, who was himself Irish, had a very profound love of both America and Ireland. But he was also an exile, exiled from a culture that he felt was in his DNA. So when he made a story about returning to his homeland, it was deceptively simple, full of stereotypical characters and situations. But he was making more than just a film about a man, John Wayne, who returns to Ireland. He was actually making a mythical film about the notion of returning and what that means to an exile. And the conflict of exile is that you don’t really belong anywhere. You don’t really belong in the place that you’ve left, and you don’t really belong in the place that you go to.
Judged by the films in the program, it seems that Irish culture is equally attuned to fantasy and reality, and that a number of the more recent movies are trying to reconcile the two.
That’s a very good point, and it raises a larger question of the nature of film itself, which presents what we imagine to be reality, but is actually a fantasy. The Irish story — and that includes its politics, its history, its characters — has usually been told by outsiders. It wasn’t really until Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan began to make films in the mid-’80s, early-’90s that we began to see films that were specifically about the modern reality of Ireland. Jim’s picture, Into the West, is a film about fable and fantasy, but rooted in the reality of the gypsy community in Ireland. But then you have a film like Hunger, which has absolutely nothing of fantasy in it. It’s rooted in a political reality that for many people is still very much a part of their lives.
What do you hope people will take away from the series?
To look at film, and not just Irish film, in a different way. To be motivated to look at history and how it’s told in different ways. And to understand that, throughout all those years when the Irish have been depicted on film, we like many, many other groups have had to fight to have our voice heard. This series is an attempt to say, “This is the story that we have to tell. And we want you to hear it.”
Revisiting The Quiet Man: Ireland on Film runs from Fri 20–June 3 at MoMA.