A Terrible Beauty
Directors: David and Keith Farrell
(Tile Films)
★★★ (out of five)
“THERE were no winners in 1916, the rebellion was a failure,” so reads the opinion of historian Michael O’Duibhlin in A Terrible Beauty, a new docu-drama that reconstructs events of the Easter Rising and offers fresh perspectives on the most significant single week in Ireland’s history.
Produced and directed by David and Keith Farrell of the Dublin-based Tile Films, A Terrible Beauty is a smart blend of expert commentary, imaginative re-enactment and archive footage.
Narrated by Love/Hate actor Peter Coonan (sounding like a ringer for Colm Meaney), the film is based on “first-hand accounts of those caught up in the Rising”. The filmmakers claim to go beyond previous movie versions of Easter 1916 (usually characterised myth-making) and retell the human stories on both sides.
A Terrible Beauty deliberately steers its focus away from the big-name actors in the events (Pearse, Connolly, etc.) and instead shines light on less-renowned figures like Ned Daly (one of the executed), Volunteer brothers Frank and Jack Shouldice and British Captain FC Dietrichsen, who had an Irish wife living in Dublin and two small children.
By chance Dietrichsen met his wife while marching through the streets. With sanguine confidence he assured her it would “all soon blow over” but was killed later that day during the skirmishes in Northumberland Road.
The filmmakers’ principle of allowing us to hear more unfamiliar voices also extends to the documentary’s contributing historical commentators. There’s no sign of prominent names like Roy Porter, Joe Lee, Ruth Dudley Edwards or Tim Pat Coogan.
Instead the film offers room to other interpreters of the Rising, including descendants of those who took part and the sober thoughts of archivist John McGuiggan of the Great War Forum.
McGuiggan observes that the soldiers sent to quell the rebellion were trained for the expansive theatre of Flanders and were ill-prepared for gun battles in the tight, urban arena of Dublin. As the rebels take up well-observed positions in key buildings, the film visually shows British soldiers walking into a turkey shoot.
The film’s dramatic reconstructions offer some eerie foreshadowing of what awaited British troops more than 50 years later in Belfast and Derry. Welcomed in 1916 with “tea and refreshments,” as one voice puts it, they soon found themselves cast into an early form of guerrilla warfare.
But the most shocking account of violence in the movie is the restaging of the North King Street Massacre, in which 15 unarmed Dublin men (all civilians) were tied up and murdered by soldiers. As a poignant re-enactment illustrates, members of the South Staffordshire regiment were given haven in a loyal household only to turn on its occupants in an act of bloodthirsty vengeance.
The military high command later denied all reports of the killings and, as McGuiggan points out, “no one was ever arrested”, adding: “When you try to cover things up it becomes a conspiracy.”
It doesn’t seem facile to see the North King Street Massacre as a precursor to the first Bloody Sunday slaughter at Croke Park in 1920, and the second in Derry in 1972. In each event the British military failed to discriminate between Irishmen with guns and those without them.
Historian Diarmaid Ferriter has rightly written that no one has yet composed a comprehensive account of the Rising and A Terrible Beauty doesn’t do so either. There’s little insight into the varied complexity of the rebel fighters, and no mention of the Irish Citizen Army and its potential antagonism with the Irish Volunteers.
Some of the content has also been covered before, notably in the excellent TV series Rebel Heart (2001), based on Ronan Bennett’s screenplay. Thankfully, though, the Farrells’ production is free of the mawkish sentiment of John Ford’s The Plough and the Stars (1936) and the romanticised view of George Morrison’s Mise Eire (1959).
Where it’s brilliant is in recreating the claustrophobic chaos of gun battle, almost as effectively as Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch (1969) or Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966).
A Terrible Beauty is part of an on-going Living History project.
It was screened to some acclaim at the 2013 Jameson Dublin Film Festival and on TG4 in April this year. Several screenings are planned in the lead up to the Rising’s centenary in 2016.
For information on A Terrible Beauty visit www.1916film.com
