“THADDEUS O’Sullivan is rare among Irish filmmakers,” so says film historian Lance Pettit about one of Irish culture’s most impressive but undemonstrative characters.
In a career that stretches over four decades, encompassing movies about everyday folk and iconic figures like Winston Churchill and Jack Yeats, O’Sullivan has created an intriguing body of work as a director, scriptwriter and cinematographer.
Now 67, O’Sullivan has had a busy five years since he made Into the Storm (2009), his accomplished and somewhat iconoclastic portrait of Churchill during WWII.
He’s directed the TV series The Crimson Field and Vera and, most recently, the unusual and unsettling missing persons narrative Amber. To all these O’Sullivan brings an unflashy yet distinctive style.
But it’s for the big screen that O’Sullivan is most renowned. While his celebrated works like December Bride (1991) and Nothing Personal (1986) are readily available, his early movies are now released on DVD.
The Irish Film Institute, in cooperation with the Irish Studies department at St. Mary’s University in Twickenham, has gathered O’Sullivan’s first five films on a twin-disc set. Lance Pettit of St. Mary’s says the DVDs allow viewers a chance to see O’Sullivan’s film-making in “stylistic development”.
While the IFI’s Kasandra O’Connell says the films reach beyond the (sometimes) narrow interests of “academic audiences”.
Among the collected movies is the short documentary Assembled Memories (1981), O’Sullivan’s remembrance of painter Jack Yeats and the various currents he swam in during the first half of 20th-century Ireland.
Also included are the short dramas Flanagan (1974) and A Pint of Plain (1975), both tasters that foreshadow O’Sullivan’s later evolution into a storyteller concerned with how common people cope with both everyday matters and deeper emotional demands.
There’s also the full-length On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978) and the short classic The Woman Who Married Clark Gable (1984). These both inventively tell of the difficult psychological states of Irish people struggling with common experiences.
The first is about the vast emigrant population in London; the second deals in the emotional instability of a woman trapped in a stale marriage who finds colour in cinematic fantasy — she starts imagining she’s wed to Hollywood legend Clark Gable.
On a Paving Stone Mounted is a “holy grail” for committed Irish film viewers, described by film scholar Luke Gibbons as an “experimental meditation on landscape, exile and memory.”
It features early performances by Gabriel Byrne and Stephen Rea, with cameo appearances by Miriam Margolyes and Christy Moore. O’Sullivan drew upon his personal reflections of emigrating to London and his curiously mixed feelings of banishment and freedom.
Set in the 1940s and based on a Sean O’Faolain story, the Clark Gable film stars Brenda Fricker and Bob Hoskins. Fricker plays Mary, a middle-aged woman who relieves her life of drudgery through escapism at the movies.
There are echoes of Mia Farrow in Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and the picture reflects how cinema challenged the Church for the Irish popular imagination. O’Sullivan reprised the theme in Stella Days (2011), with Martin Sheen as Fr. Daniel Barry trying to found a movie-house in a rural village, causing great turmoil and meeting teeth-gritting resistance in the Church hierarchy.
This fascinating DVD collection reveals the seeds of O’Sullivan’s later growth as a filmmaker and certainly holds interest for both film scholars and movie buffs alike.
If Fr. Daniel in Stella Days is a turbulent priest, Fr. James (Brendan Gleeson) in John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary is a priest surrounded by turbulence. One of the strongest pictures ever to appear in Irish cinema, Calvary is now available on DVD.
Gleeson is so prevalent at present it seems impossible to avoid mentioning him, but his performance as the embattled island priest swallowed up in the depths of modern depravity is perhaps his finest yet. An Oscar nomination is mooted.
Most movies lose something on shrinking from the projected theatre version down to DVD and Calvary is a particular example of this phenomenon. McDonagh’s visual imagery is breathtaking when seen at full-scale, with Larry Smith’s cinematography capturing the angry Atlantic Ocean ready to explode.
The mixing of ice-blue waves spitting foam across pitch-black rock, and a raging inferno razing the local church to the ground, makes the viewer almost feel as though they’re witnessing the biblical trials of fire and flood.
Nevertheless, although the visual effect cannot be fully appreciated, this DVD is an essential addition to any Irish movie collection. Gleeson leads a stellar cast of Irish talent (including Aidan Gillen, Kelly Reilly, Chris O’Dowd, Dylan Moran) through a parable that raises numerous questions about Ireland’s current value systems, now that Catholicism’s old certainties seem to have been washed away on the tide.
A murder threat against Fr. James does make the plot somewhat contrived, but it also serves to show how many in the locality might hold the priest, and therefore the Church, in complete contempt.
It’s to McDonagh’s credit that he doesn’t offer any easy answers to these modern dilemmas, just compelling drama.
Thaddeus O’Sullivan: The Early Films, 1974-1985 is available to order from the IFI Film Shop on 0035316795727 or online at www.ifi.ie/shop priced €21.99 including delivery.
Calvary is out now on DVD
