A recent scholarly debate on an internet listserve focused on whether Hollywood producers who exported movies in the 1930s were motivated purely by the potential profit of their enterprise or whether they self-consciously saw themselves as "missionaries" of American culture and values. Endnote1 No one in the long running discussion has questioned the appropriateness of the missionary metaphor, but the conflation of international capitalism with missionary work reflects the modern assumption that religious missionaries sent into Third World locations were really instruments of Western imperialism. Thus mutatis mutandis, Hollywood movies open up markets for American commercialism and economic interest in every corner of the globe.

The metaphor is appropriate enough, except that it reduces the complexity of intercultural exchange to a model of one-way domination and submission. Certainly balance of trade statements provide good evidence for such a metaphor. Yet it is not surprising that an Irish playwright, Brian Friel, would more complexly seek to subvert the notion of one-way intercultural influence in his popular play Dancing at Lughnasa. He features prominently an Irish missionary who returns to Donegal from Africa having quite hilariously "gone native," that is rather than converting the Africans to Catholicism, he has himself been converted to African dancing and folk customs, which he now practices at every opportunity much to the chagrin of his perplexed family. The missionary's "failure" is also doubled in the play's larger concern, which is how Gaelic, pagan Ireland refuses to be suppressed and continually erupts into the Anglicized, Catholic, postcolonial present. The dancing of the title is done to the pagan holiday "Lughnasa," although it is the modern technological invention of the radio which unleashes the primitivism.

Friel's sense of the dynamics of cultural exchange should give us pause in considering relationships between the American Hollywood film industry and the Irish nation state. From an empirical perspective, there is an easily illustrated trade imbalance, something along the lines of 70% of films shown in Ireland are American, whereas Irish produced films are only recently being exhibited in American multiplexes. Such an empirical perspective, however, does not take into account how thoroughly infused Hollywood is with Irishness, from subject matter to creative personnel. One only has to look at Still Irish, Endnote2 Kevin Rockett and Eugene Finn's mammoth compendium of Irish elements in world cinema largely achieved through the Irish diaspora and descendants, to wonder when it comes to cultural imperialism, who is the colonizer and who is the colonized?

The notion that Hollywood does not constitute a national cinema, that it in fact is made up of many international influences both in its creative personnel and its target audience has been well argued by Phillip French Endnote3 and others. We should be careful that in making such a point we do not minimize or ignore the predatory marketing and distribution tactics of American film corporations operating outside the bounds of their own nation's anti-trust restrictions. Popular culture may becoming globalized at the expense of the national, but American trade surpluses in the entertainment field were still a sticking point with governmental representatives at the GATT negotiations. Whether it was the idealistic fear of loss of national identity or the pragmatic desire to make the home country's national cinema more competitive, the French objection to Hollywood presence in Europe returns us to the question of whether movies perform an unwelcome "missionary" function.

Ireland presents an unusual case in the study of how small nations and their film industries can interact with the Hollywood juggernaut and the larger nation from which it originates. Although occasionally American films such as Natural Born Killers are banned through the Catholic-influenced censor board, for the most part American films are quite welcome; in fact, Irish cinema attendance is the highest per capita in Europe. However, the Republic of Ireland is not a one-way recipient of American popular culture. Irish rock groups led by U2 and Sinead O'Connor have substantially cracked the American market and the more folkloric "River Dance" recently drew raves on its theatrical tour as well as its American public television premiere. Of late, a film industry cobbled together by tax incentive plans and foreign investment has begun regularly featuring Irish talent at the American academy awards. Films such as The Commitments, My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, and Michael Collins have made it into the American suburban malls despite Irish content and accents.

Certainly, the large Irish-American audience and the shared language have made cultural exchange between Ireland and the U.S. easier than, for instance, Algeria and the U.S. But there are subtleties in the relationship that suggest much about the possibility, and indeed the desirability of national cinema in a postmodern world of disintegrating national identities. These subtleties lie outside the paradigms of domination/submission or media imperialism that permeate much of our discourse about cultural exchange in world cinema. There is a symbiotic quality about Irish/American relations that is surprising in light of the disparities in wealth and size between the two nations that will be the focus of the remainder of these remarks.

To tease out this symbiosis, I hope the reader will permit me the latitude of explaining the seemingly whimsical title of this essay. The Irish Prime Minister, John Bruton, did in fact go to Washington in September of 1996 to address the United States congress, only the 30th foreign head of state since 1945 to do so. Endnote4 However, it is not my intention to suggest Bruton is a naive but good-hearted hero in a sentimental "Capra-corn" production. Far from it. Instead, I follow Richard Maltby's "Washington Goes to Hollywood" chapter title in his Hollywood Cinema. Endnote5 Maltby's analysis positions Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as a kind of salvo fired across the bow in an on-going struggle for power and influence over the American public between the Hollywood industry and the American congress in the 1930s. Offended Washington politicians threatened to enact legislation to stop studio block-booking practices in response to Capra's film. The tension between Hollywood and Washington had much to do with the Paramount Decree of 1949, which set back Hollywood profits and influence for a few decades until another actor went to Washington, Ronald Reagan.

Capra's film thus fits into two symbolic dimensions. In the fictional diegesis, Jefferson Smith going to Washington comes to articulate core American nationalist values for a country getting ready for a World War. In the extra-filmic dimension identified by Maltby, the film is a pawn in a contest between two geographical spheres of power and their corollaries: entertainment and politics. In the case of John Bruton going to Washington, another outsider goes to the seat of American power and again it is with a mission of building consensus in the implementation of public policy. The methods of Bruton are no less symbolic in delivery.

A successful rhetorician persuades an audience by extolling those aspects of the listener that the rhetorician will use to build his or her case. Mr. Bruton in this case opened his remarks by praising the American model of "constitutional democracy" built upon "checks and balances" and a "separation of powers." Other platitudes followed, but Mr. Bruton's real agenda quickly became apparent, which was defining those aspects of American history that pertain to the formation of a successful European union. Early in the speech he compared the union of the thirteen American colonies to the 15 member-states of the European Union and noted that provisions in the American constitution led to Westward expansion, just as Europe now looks to its east for new member-states in its own version of manifest destiny. Slyly he observed that the American union came out of economic necessities and desire to protect the frontier rather than the ideals of Montesquieu or Locke. He tactfully did not state the worry that in the case of Europe, preoccupation with economic union has pushed cultural union to a nagging afterthought.

Mr. Bruton's initial remarks fulfilled his function as Host President of the European Union. He then came around to his longer-running identity as Irish Prime Minister and began citing examples from American history which illustrated the question of divided national identities and ultimately bear on the difficult peace negotiations underway about which American legislators are probably largely uninformed. He cited the dual identity status of an 18th century American who could balance the identity of being both a Virginian and a citizen of the United States of America. There seemed to be an implicit invitation for Protestants in the North to have two identities in relation to the South--Ulster Protestant and member of a united Ireland, or maybe an Irish identity within a European identity. Mr. Bruton also cited American hot-point issues of multi-culturalism and political correctness as being salient to the North.

It must have been flattering to U.S. politicians to find such deference to American traditions as offering guidance to both Ireland and Europe. But it is very much a guided tour: Mr. Bruton is careful to not mention other historical lessons from the American past such as the fact that George Washington and the revolutionaries were considered terrorists by King George, that as many colonists supported union as separation from Great Britain until one group violently prevailed over the other, or that another key plank in the formation of the U.S. was the separation of church and state so as to not foster competition between religious groups. Mr. Bruton's emphasis was on a usable past, and it is a carefully tailored, shrewd emphasis.

Further, it is revealing of cultural difference that Mr.Bruton sought to establish his points about the American past by citing quotations from the American founding fathers, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, with even a touch of Andrew Jackson thrown in for good measure. This might seem a miscalculation to anyone familiar with the paucity of historical acumen of the average congressman. In the recent American presidential campaign, dialogue about the American past never got beyond Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Henry Ford's "History is bunk," describes a myopia in the American character when it comes to anything preceding recent memory, Ken Burns' PBS documentaries notwithstanding.

Still there is something refreshing and inspirational in Mr. Bruton's persuasive use of positive elements of the American past to reinvigorate concerns of the present. Irish diplomats are becoming renowned for their ability to keep the European Union running through large and small crises due to skill in negotiating differences between rival superpowers. The harmony achieved usually benefits Ireland out of proportion to the other participants. Some of this must be attributed to an Irish facility about cultural history, both their own and their larger neighbors. If in a postmodern era history is losing its relevance with the collapse of master narratives, the Irish still know how to gain a positive result by retrieving usable history.

Because of several centuries of Irish emigration, United States and Irish history are inextricably entwined. This presents problems with histories of multi-culturalism in the U.S., in that there is always a danger that various ethnic groups will become involved in comparative victimage. Paul Wagner's well-received Out of Ireland on the American PBS would be a good example. The documentary traces 19th century Irish emigration to America in a Ken Burns-style pastiche of broad historical overview juxtaposed with individual stories told through letters, passed-down photographs, and diaries. Early on a voice-of-God narrator seeks to dramatize the plight of mid-18th century Irish immigrants by recalling how they competed with freed slaves for the lowest paying jobs on the docks of New Orleans. Later, the documentary uses statistics to chart the ascension of the Irish into the best-paying and most influential professions in early twentieth century America. At this point mention of the earlier compared ethnic group, Afro-Americans, is not followed up on, but it seems implicit that the Irish succeeded through some innate superiority to those that did not succeed. Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White Endnote6 without a trace of sentimentality tracks the Irish rise in 19th century America as coming at the expense of Afro-Americans.

In the American cinema, there is the curious phenomenon that film directors who make films that comment most directly on aspects of American history are usually described as hyphenate individuals: be it an Afro-American director such as Spike Lee with Malcom X, an Italian-American director such as Francis Coppola with The Godfather Saga or Apocalypse Now, or an Irish-American director such as John Ford with too many films to list. When the hyphenate director takes the camera back to the ancestral homeland, the dynamic of cross-cultural exchange is stilted, as the individual's memory of national traditions and sensibilities passed down through immigrant ancestors is often almost necessarily nostalgic and romantic. Perhaps it was Ford's nationalist sympathies that made British critic David Thomson complain that "The Quiet Man is an entertainment for an IRA club night." Endnote7 In a more measured response, Luke Gibbons has argued that Ford's nostalgia about his ancestral home has led to a romanticization of the landscape which is "achieved at the expense of character and action." Endnote8 More virulent critics have suggested Ford's return to the ancestral homeland fosters a modern version of 19th century stage-Irishness.

In the case of Ireland, an articulate critical establishment has formed to contest the efficacy of images of Ireland crafted by Robert Flaherty, John Ford, David Lean and others. Indeed, the last several years have seen phalanxes of Irish film scholars and filmmakers touring American and European academic and cultural centers and stating their case for an alternative image of Ireland than that concocted by Hollywood. Endnote9 Perhaps a more mundane strategy of resistance is to appropriate the images of Hollywood's gaze and turn them into a revenue generating source for citizens in the west of Ireland dependent on tourist dollars for a livelihood. Who could calculate the dollars and now francs brought into the Aran islands over the years attributable to Flaherty's 1934 Man of Aran. (The film is now on the French Leaving Certificate exam, which prompts eager teenagers to visit the island during summer vacation.) The lesson was not lost on citizens in Cong, who are now developing a Quiet Man theme park from the film's original locations.

Implicit and often explicit in the academic critique of Hollywood's nostalgic and romantic appropriation of images of Ireland is the view that a danger is involved in the creation of unwanted cultural stereotypes. Endnote10 This danger is most often expressed in terms of cultural sovereignty, the fear that Hollywood's imperial gaze will overrun non-American countries' ability to self-define themselves through the motion picture art form.

With Ireland that perspective should not be dismissed easily. However, through ingenuity, subversive wit, and creativity the Irish may be uniquely positioned in not only avoiding a victim status but in fact becoming a powerful contributor to the international media scene. It often seems that Irish skills honed through centuries of co-existence with predatory invaders are being played out once again in the culture of mass media in the late twentieth century. Irish success in getting their voice and perspective injected into the global media mix is probably a model for other small countries to study quite carefully.

We might start with the recent appearance of the historical epic, Michael Collins. Around the time of the Projecting the Nation conference, Dublin newspapers were full of spirited debate about whether Neil Jordan's interpretation of historical events was a credible account. Much of athe contention turned on whether Jordan had taken unwarranted liberties with history, whether De Valera been done a disservice, whether Collins' violent proclivities had been whitewashed. Prominent Irish and British journalists and historians worried that a scene with a joke about "Belfast efficiency" before a carbomb went off would give succor to paramilitaries or interfere with the peace negotiations.

In retrospect, such speculation seems inflated. From a wider international perspective, what should not be overlooked is the almost unprecedented subversive accomplishment of Irishman Neil Jordan in relation to the Hollywood apparatus. When in the last 100 years, has a non-American, non-English writer/director taken the Hollywood apparatus of distribution, exhibition, marketing, production values, star system and used it so audaciously to craft a historical epic about the director's own nation's history? To put this more bluntly, what differing interpretation would an Indian national have brought to Gandhi? an Arab to Lawrence of Arabia? a Chinese to The Last Emperor? a Vietnamese to Apocalypse Now? The same question might have been eventually asked about Eoghan Harris's earlier script about Michael Collins had Kevin Costner gone ahead with his plans to make it with Michael Cimino. Endnote11 With Jordan's Michael Collins, a threshold has been crossed in regard to international access to the Hollywood apparatus.

There was consternation and a bit of amusement in Dublin last summer when reports came back after a U.S. test screening that Jordan would have to shoot additional sex scenes with Julia Roberts to shore up the box office prospects of the film. This story was later discredited and the romantic scenes on final display are rather chaste, but the initial question really was whether commercial considerations attendant to the Hollywood epic form would overwhelm Jordan's artistic freedom to explore an interpretation of the Michael Collins' myth.

The critical consensus now seems to be that whether one agrees with Jordan's interpretation of Collins or not, Jordan's efforts were about soamething other than producing a box office megahit. In fact, the film did rather poorly at the American box office--only about $11 million before disappearing quickly. Irish Times critic Michael Dwyer hypothesized that the film failed to deliver "stereotypical images that Americans, Irish-Americans in particular, lap up--the folksy, quaint Ireland with people singing, dancing, and drinking a lot." Endnote12 That may be a condescending view, but it is true that the film does not present a simplistic historical lesson of evil British and virtuous Irish with which many Irish-Americans are familiar. Most of the violence in the film is Irish on Irish. American reviewers were divided about the artistic merits and often complained about Julia Roberts' incongruous appearance. Perhaps it was easier for them to assess this overly familiar aspect rather than how the film engaged with Irish historical concerns.

It is, of course, the general ignorance about Irish history outside Ireland that suggests something of what is at stake in Jordan using the Hollywood historical epic form as his medium. In one of the more sophisticated reviews in the U.S., Georgia Brown in the Village Voice observed: "Clearly Jordan is attempting an intervention. Here is a filmmaker writing history, or what some would call hagiography. He wishes to present Ireland with a new official hero--one who knew there is a time for war and a time for peace--and the world beyond Ireland with a picture of the conflict's noble beginning." Endnote13 The phrase "a new official hero" is telling. Many in Ireland will take umbrage at Brown's implication that Collins was a rather average historical figure who Jordan arbitrarily decided to elevate to "new official hero" status. Rather it was the Kennedyesque mythic status of Collins in Irish history that demanded filmic treatment which Jordan and the competing screenwriter, Eoghan Harris, understood early in the 1980s when the possibility of a new Irish cinema was gaining currency.

However, another implication can be taken out of Brown's phrase, "new official hero," and that is the assumption that history is not "official" until it enters the discourse of global popular culture. The Irish experience here has many resonances the American furor over Oliver Stone's JFK. A lively publishing industry thrived and continues to thrive in connection with conspiracy theories regarding Kennedy's assassination. There were probably 200 books, including a few bestsellers, which preceded that film and argued essentially the same view: that the Warren commission findings were a cover-up. The firestorm of rebuke that greeted Stone's JFK, however, was well out of proportion to the response generated by the conspiracy book industry in totality. Preeminent in the objection was the contention that masses of people, including many impressionable youth, would be exposed to a biased account of history without equally well-funded, artistically crafted, Hollywood-sponsored, alternative theories of the Kennedy assassination. This is ultimately the lament of a print culture overthrown by a visual culture. Writers at The New Republic knowthat their sway does not extend as far suburban movie theaters.

Some of the same tension is at play with Michael Collins. No country per capita produces or consumes more history books than the Irish. Yet suddenly Neil Jordan's interpretation of Michael Collins in attention and weight given vaults ahead of the learned tomes by historians such as Tim Pat Coogan. Two hours of movie viewing seems to replace the rigors of reading a history volume.

However, rather than seeing this as one more example of the postmodern collapse of the historical, it might be argued instead that the reception of Michael Collins exemplifies a reinvigoration of the historical, at least in Ireland, where thousands of Dubliners volunteered to be extras and the film went on to become the all-time box office champion, surpassing Jurassic Park. The debate and reconsiderations of the Collins historical legend occasioned by countless newspaper and magazine articles, tv and radio talk shows, and even discouse at the local pub in a way transcends the film itself. Even if historical debate had broken outside the confines of published historians, the leading historians were frequently given public forum to express their opinion of the film.

As to why this "reinvigoration" of the historical is necessary at this point in time, one needs to attend to the manner in which the reinvigoration is conducted. The nationalist sympathies of paramilitaries are only naggingly relevant to a modern Irish citizenry more concerned with integration into the European Union and the economic future than with rhetoric about the "ancient enemy." Luke Gibbons' "Ireland is a First World country, but with a Third World memory" Endnote14 is insightful here. Some sort of reconciliation is needed with the Irish past, and films such as Michael Collins, The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, and Some Mother's Son give an account of the Irish historical complaint against the British to a worldwide audience that has not been rebutted by anything comparable from English filmmakers. But that the venue is Hollywood/international film is crucial. When nationalistic concerns are played out in movie theaters, a cathartic rite of passage occurs. While these films are not inspiring anyone to pick up a gun, Irish historical concerns which form the cultural memory are achieving the legitimacy of First World media attention. The optimistic view is that surely bright lights in the Clinton or Major administrations will understand that when such legitamacy is achieved, there is political capital to be gained by achieving a positive resolution to the tensions in Northern Ireland.

Now in shifting the question to Ireland's filmic relation to England, we have moved off the concern with Irish/U.S. filmic relations. However, there is a certain symmetry involved in the destination. Neil Jordan used American studio Warner Brothers money to make a film about Ireland's War of Independence from England. The final filmmaker to be considered, Alan Gilsenan, used Granada Television money to make a series of television films, titled "God Bless America," which feature an original, but distinctly Irish view of the United States. It seems, once again, that the Irish are adept at playing one superpower off against theother. Obviously, Gilsenan working out of the documentary tradition rather than the Hollywood feature film tradition which Jordan thrives in, has not had the same impact and audience. Yet the "outsider" status should give Gilsenan a relative freedom from some of the constraints under which Jordan operates. Gilsenan's films deserve more attention than the ghetto of public broadcasting to which they have so far been confined.

In film theory, Sergei Eisenstein was one of the earliest proponents of montage editing as being fundamental to the synergistic meanings available to the film art form. As eloquent and beautiful as Eisenstein's films can be, however, there is something ham-handed in his montage of collision. The line of thinking that would edit a shot of a counter-revolutionary against a shot of a peacock, or workers being killed versus a shot of meat being cut in a slaughterhouse finds its apotheosis in 30-second, commercial advertising. A shot of a sexually provocative woman edited against a shot of a can of shaving cream is Eisensteinian in style, although not political view.

What is exceptional about Alan Gilsenan's work is that he brings a distinctively Irish sense of the ironic to the plastic elements of his film craft. It has been theorized that the wit and subversive play with the English language that characterizes this century's great Irish writers comes down from a culture forced to give up their native language and accept an imposed language. Gilsenan's sense of montage seems in this tradition and is subtly different from Soviet or American montage theory. The synergy he creates from the ironic juxtapositions constantly at work in his films demand an active, alert viewer.

His best known film would be The Road to God Knows Wherewhich was publicly castigated by former Prime Minister Charles Haughey for giving a bitter, negative view of Ireland on the eve of joining the European Union. That seems a bit harsh. The film violates the post card view of Ireland that the Tourist Board would like to promote by focusing on Tallaght slums, junkyards, traveller children, emigration, and its dominant visual metaphor, the winding, desolate road that seems to lead to nowhere. Yet there is incredible spirit, energy, and determination in the youth interviewed in the film that suggests a resilience beyond the brooding iconography. An example of the ironic style would be the juxtaposition of an IDA logo "We are the young Europeans" with a desolate building dwarfed by a Budweiser billboard. What is Gilsenan saying? That the boosterism of the IDA will lead to American style commercialism? That America itself stands in the way of the progress the IDA would like to effect? Or that American commercialism is as ridiculously out of place in the more tradition-bound rural Ireland as the IDA's rhetoric is?

My feeling is that there is no preferred reading or decoding, as there might be with an Eisensteinian juxtaposition, rather the juxtaposition forces us to make meaning on our own terms, dependent on what the viewer brings to the film. It links with a later shot in the film where smiling children, jump up and down in slow motion to a U2 song, while in the background we see a gigantic U.S. flag. One might read the overbearing flag like the earlier Budweiser mural as a sinister presence. Yet the children seem happy enough, enhanced by the slow-motion; although maybe there is a suggestion they are locked into a mindless worship of pop music? Gilsenan's images often have this ambiguous density. They are not exhausted easily.

With Gilsenan's ironically titled series "God Bless America," his exploration into the abstract meaning of "America" comes full circle. Ostensibly the series is about how famous American writers view their hometowns: Scott Turow and Chicago, Neil Simon and New York, and Gore Vidal and Washington D.C. However the weight of the dense imagery of the series reflects not the conventional views of the writers, but rather Gilsenan's outsider-looking-in sensibility, and often there is an unsettling dialectic between the voice-over soundtrack with the writer's views and the faintly mocking visuals coming from Gilsenan's whirlwind tours through the cities.

The results are quite exceptional which can be illustrated with examples from the series' center-piece, the Gore Vidal episode titled "Heart of Stone." Vidal has been the focus of several American made documentaries, which generally portray him as an intellectual gadfly, dwelling on his entertaining debates with William Buckley, his maverick political campaigns, and his gossipy reminisces about the Kennedies. Endnote15 Gilsenan cuts right through the gadfly persona by taking Vidal on a walk down memory lane, a return to his blueblood boarding school where he strolls hallways filled with the well-dressed sons of the American ruling class. Americans have a bit of a blindside in regards to their class system; they prefer the American dream of upward class mobility. Gilsenan will have none of this and shows Vidal to be a product of an English-style boarding school system that is a pipeline to positions of affluence and power. When Gilsenan later cuts to shots of Washington's homeless and poor, Vidal's pronouncementsabout race and class in America take on a suspicious ring with visual juxtaposition of boarding school versus D.C. slum.

The documentary constantly seems one step away from undermining the very authority it manifestly seems to be establishing. Vidal tells the over-familiar story of his relations to the Kennedy family. This sets Gilsenan on a montage of 1960's stock footage: political assassinations, Vietnam violence, Americans walking on the moon, atomic bomb testing, Lee Harvey Oswald. However, he overlays the dramatic, serious footage with a soulful, slow-paced medley of Elvis Presley singing American Civil War songs. The ambiguities of the mix are incredible; the sacred and the profane hopelessly reshuffled, our pieties are de-centered. Gilsenan follows this with a more politically correct Mahalia Jackson singing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" cut against Hell's Angels biking through Washington, followed by shots of the Vietnam memorial.

Vidal interviewed about race relations tells Gilsenan "now it seems we are more integrated but more irritable and violent." The image track does not support this instead concentrating on polarization. Gilsenan goes immediately to a Black Muslim gathering and then juxtaposes that with Bill Clinton being serenaded by Scottish Highland bagpipers. The next sequence features Clinton speaking to a police officers' convention juxtaposed with Vidal's observations on America becoming a police state. At this point Gilsenan and Vidal seem in more in synch, as a flood of images portrays a bleak, Third World-like landscape teaming with law enforcement personnel. Gilsenan's view of class relations operating in the American capitol and in Vidal's career is unsettling and insightful.

However, while black people living in inner city poverty is a constant sight throughout the series, particularly the Scott Turow episode, one feels a bit of the touristic gaze about the shots that never open the subjects up to being anything other than signifiers of black Americans. Reducing humans to signifying types is always a danger in the documentary form, but the American film Hoop Dreams gives a far more complex view of how race operates in America by showing day-to-day interactions between whites and blacks. In Gilsenan's work, we have striking images, such as the black workmen doing the daily cleaning of monuments--in particular, one black workman throws a bucket of soap on the giant white face of Abraham Lincoln. But we are getting to know Gore Vidal, not the fellow who washes Lincoln's statue every day, and this seems a limit on Gilsenan's analysis.

While never explicit about Vidal's homosexuality, Gilsenan tactfully films Vidal talking about his boyhood friend Jimmy Trimble, who died in World War II. Vidal visiting Trimble's grave is one of the more moving moments in the documentary. At this point and elsewhere in the documentary, Vidal muses on whether America should have gotten involved in World War I or II--his father as a senator had argued against involvement. An American filmmaker would probably exclude such heretical talk. However, Gilsenan follows with Vidal taking a guided tour through the Pentagon given by an vacuous, young officer guide. Vidal seems an uncomfortable outsider to the thing about which he tries to be so authoritative--United States military power. Perhaps the gently mocking tone Gilsenan sets up toward Vidal is best exemplified by the scene where he talks about how Washington has changed, visits an old shoeshine stand, and the soundtrack features the big band classic "Don't Get Around Much Anymore."

Gilsenan fails to examine Vidal's position as a leftist in a time when liberal has become a dirty word in American politics. Nor do we get a sense of Vidal's incredibly prolific output of novels, such as the seven-part American history series. Yet that seems trifling in comparison to the larger project of the "God Bless America" series, which is to interrogate the tenuous American sense of place in a postmodern world. Sometimes such an interrogation needs to be done by someone with an outside perspective. One of the real dangers of American domination and ownership of the mass media is if it prevents more examination of both American identity as well as other culture's identity by artists of Gilsenan's caliber.

Gilsenan is not the only Irish film artist to turn the transnational camera gaze towards America. Further examination of this perspective should start with John T. Davis's striking work from Northern Ireland, particularly his Route 66. Roddy Doyle's The Commitments is interesting in the way it reworks American popular culture on the North side of Dublin. Cathal Black's Korea has that unsettling image of an American flag on a funeral barge in the Irish midlands. These films collectively work to define an Irish identity and sense of independence in a symbiotic fashion. A working class character in The Commitments asserts the much over-quoted sentiment that the Irish are the blacks of Europe, a moment of pride in Irish "soul," but also a moment dependent on cultural models imported from without.

The relationship between the U.S. and Ireland in regard to film industries is only symbiotic if the larger Hollywood "center" is affected in some way by the smaller Irish "periphery." Irish Cultural Studies have long turned on two center/periphery dialectics: that of the rural Ireland versus urban Dublin and that of postcolonial Ireland versus the British metropolitan center. In both cases much of the energy is directed at how the periphery seems to subvert and even control the more conventionally powerful center. In his contention that Heathclilff was really Irish, Terry Eagleton reviews the history of British/Irish cultural relations and writes: "Ireland, in this as in other ways, then comes to figure as the monstrous unconscious of the metropolitan society, the secret materialist history of endemically idealist England." Endnote16 Declan Kiberd notes how rural Ireland became a cornerstone of 19th century ideological reaction against British industrialization and writes: "This elevation of the peripheral over the central reflected the internalization of a model that had characterized the late-nineteenth-century politics of Britain and Ireland. When Parnell and his Parliamentary Party held the balance of power at Westminister, they had provided an object lesson in how the Celtic periphery could paralyze the London center." Endnote17

In what ways would a peripheral contingent of Irish filmmakers such as Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan, Alan Gilsenan, and Roddy Doyle rebound and transform the Hollywood center? The conceit is probably still premature and overly grandiose. Still, with maybe the exception of Sheridan's The Field, these filmmakers will have none of the historical representation of Ireland as a rural environment. Their cinema is a cosmopolitan, urban one, well aware of international politics, and well aware of the politics of cultural identity. Not a few American reviewers noted that there was a seriousness of purpose in Michael Collins that was in sharp contrast to much of the aimlessness of recent Hollywood cinema.

In conclusion, let us return to the loose metaphor of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In that film, Jimmy Stewart assaults the American government's establishment with a desperate filibuster and melodramatically pricks the conscience of Washington politicians, which in the fictional world leads to positive social change. When Mr. Bruton and Mr. Gilsenan go to Washington, or Mr. Jordan and Mr. Sheridan go to Hollywood, their plan of attack is not a clumsy filibuster but rather Irish eloquence and creativity. While we can not hope for a grandiose Frank Capra ending, perhaps their efforts can shake a moribund Hollywood/international cinema towards a more positive direction.

Endnotes:

Endnote1

H-Net List for Scholarly Studies and Uses of Media originates at Michigan State University and is moderated by Ken Nolley and Steve Mintz. The discussion of Hollywood film as missionary work was on-going in January and February of 1997.

Endnote2

Kevin Rockett and Eugene Finn, Still Irish: A Century of the Irish in Film, (Red Mountain Press: 1996).

Endnote3

Phillip French, "Is There A European Cinema," in John Hill, Martin McLoone, and Paul Hainsworth, eds., Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1994), pp. 34-52.

Endnote4

The text of Mr. Bruton's remarks can be found by searching the Irish Times internet data base for the HOME NEWS Thursday, September 12, 1996. itwired@irish-times.com.

Endnote5

Richard Maltby and Ian Craven, Hollywood Cinema, (Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 372-379.

Endnote6

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Endnote7

David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd Edition, (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 257.

Endnote8

Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons, and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland, (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 223.

Endnote9

For instance, the "Irish Film: A Mirror Up To Culture" conference sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, in Charlottesville, May, 1996, which featured about thirty Irish filmmakers, academics, and journalists.

Endnote10

A well-argued example of this would be: Trisha Ziff, "Restricted Visions: Images of Ireland," Afterimage (February 1992), pp. 4-7.

Endnote11

Harris's screenplay on Collins and Jordan's were effectively competing for being the first modern treatment of the Collins legend. A fascinating and acerbic exchange between the two writers occurred in the Irish Times. On October 23, 1996, Jordan published "Tally Ho! Mr. Harris," which ridiculed Harris's script as well as deconstructed a 1930s Samuel Goldwyn film about Collins, Beloved Enemy. Harris's rebuttal on October 26th, "Tally Ho: Not So Funny, Mr. Jordan," attacked Jordan for laminating homoerotic themes to the Collins myth, among other things.

Endnote12

Dwyer is quoted in: Judith Miller, "Making Money Abroad, and Also a Few Enemies," The New York Times (Arts and Leisure: January 26, 1997).

Endnote13

Georgia Brown, "Out of Obscurity," The Village Voice (October 22, 1996), p. 78.

Endnote14

Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 3.

Endnote15

E.g. Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No (1982, Gary Conklin).

Endnote16

Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, (London: Verson, 1995), p. 8-9.

Endnote17

Declan Kiberd, "The Periphery and the Center," The South Atlantic Quarterly, (95:1, Winter 1996), p. 15.