Revolutions that fail: Michael Collins.

NEIL JORDAN'S CONTROVERSIAL FILM of the Irish revolution and its central leader was a Gala at last year's Festival. It is a good example of the Festival's balancing act between promotional glitz and programming innovative and political films and films from national cinemas marginalized by the globalizing media conglomerates. Michael Collins is a rarity, a political subject about one of those marginalized nations, but produced by one of the globalizing Hollywood majors. It is a film that illustrates the tensions and dilemmas posed by increasing cultural globalization and the fragile state of national cinemas around the world. As well, while critics have highlighted the film's relatively explicit politics--its celebration of a revolution and its heroes, when political discourse rules out revolutions from the realm of the possible--it also shows us some of the political and historical limitations of big-budget cinema. The film's historical narrative begins with the Easter Rising of 1916 and follows the guerrilla war against the British through to the truce and the establishment of the Irish Free State. Its tragic culmination is the civil war which ensued and Collins' death at the hands of his former comrades. Generically, the film uneasily combines conventions and narrative features of both the bio-pic and the national epic. Collins is portrayed with boisterous energy by Liam Neeson as an everyman saint, humanising a Great Man of History. `The Big Fella' is, of course, bigger and louder than everyone around him, but his greatness is that of an ordinary man called on for extraordinary action. We see him on the stages of theatrical politics but also follow his touching sensitivity in the famous romantic triangle with fellow leader Harry Boland and Kitty Kiernan. He chuckles over his talent for `mayhem'--a comic evocation of Collins' legendary military brilliance and ruthlessness--but voices requisite moral anxiety over the necessity of violence. That anxiety is belied by the film's exhilarating depiction of the guerrilla terror against the British. Partly, this is celebration of the revolution, but it also reflects the film's narrowing of the political discourse to the morality and utility of violence for political aims. The moralistic focus on the violence of revolutionaries tends to underplay the centuries of systemic colonial violence and offers itself as a narrow intervention into the contemporary impasse of IRA terror and continuing British occupation. More broadly, it reflects the film's final focus, despite the romanticization of the revolution's heroes, on the revolution's tortuous detour. While the film's trajectory, as in many bio-pics, is to a hagiographic martyrdom, Collins' sacrifice consecrates the failure of the revolution. Thom Anderson's superb discussion, "Red Hollywood," recounts the studio blacklist in the 40s and 50s and examines the limits and strategies of leftist filmmaking within corporate culture.¹ He quotes Robin Blackburn's comment that "bourgeois sociology only begins to understand modern revolutions in so far as they fail" to argue that bourgeois cinema similarly prefers to sentimentalise and romanticize revolutionary defeat. This holds true for countless swashbucklers--for example, The Scarlet Pimpernel--played out against counterrevolutionary restoration in England or France, and for more progressive films, like Viva Zapata! or Burn! Michael Collins is in this lineage. Collins becomes a hero as much for being "devoured" by the revolution as for his achievements. The film's explanation for failure, and all its emotional energy, are entirely within nationalism. Jordan obviously feels he is making a nationalist epic, despite his contradictory views of the revolution, a tale of national hopes and tragedy that can speak to contemporary conflicts. Cinematically, this is signalled by the attention to historical veracity, the spectacular recreation of famous battles, the loving detail in period costume, language and performance. Jordan, in promotional interviews, emphasised the historic importance he placed on his film. The hysterical attacks on the film's supposed "incitement" to terrorism by the right-wing British press respond with fear to its supposed utility as nationalist epic, to the use of the historic in the present. The aspiration is perhaps to what Fredric Jameson calls national allegories in discussing the anti-imperialist literature of the "third world". However, if we think momentarily of Eisenstein's or Pudovkin's recreations of revolution as spectacle, in realisation, Michael Collins corresponds more exactly to the films Jameson elsewhere calls nostalgia films, recreation of the past for passive remembrance, for the "evacuation of history." This is most evident in the film's treatment of the nature of the revolution's defeat or partial compromised victory. There is no doubt that the Irish revolution has stalled for most of the century--it failed to secure independence and the national boundaries of genuine national liberation; it produced the authoritarian and backward theocratic Free State; it has foundered in communal and sectarian terrorism for decades. But Jordan's film presents its historic impasse entirely as a conundrum of violence within a circumscribed nationalist frame. We can feel the emotional pull of nationalism but have little or no sense of the demands for social transformation that fuelled the revolution, or how their thwarting led to demoralisation and factional destruction. Perhaps spectators might know something of the Marxist James Connolly, who we see executed by the British, propped in a chair, or they might know of de Valera's reactionary Catholic nationalism. But the film is silent on any political complexity; it simply dramatises a binary factionalism between fanaticism and moderation, intransigence and compromise. Collins plays Danton to de Valera's ascetic and manipulative Robespierre in a counter-revolutionary morality tale we have seen many times. Analytically, and tragically, the many stalled nationalist revolutions of the third world have suffered from moderation, compromise and co-optation; they have failed to socially challenge imperialism and reproduced in neo-colonialist parody the social order apparently overthrown. Ireland is virtually a prototype of this process but the films' fable fossilises the revolution around its moral defaults, eliding this social and economic dilemma--surely one of the most obvious and important of the 20th century--by what Jordan calls "an examination of conscience". But this finally explains little and hence the vacuity of the film's hagiographic conclusion; the reverent resuscitation of Collins' memory will finally move history. The historical functions as a lament, rather than the explosive in the present that the successful political film makes it. Interestingly, Jordan also understood his nationalist purposes as part of commercial strategies. In an interview with Rolling Stone (November 14, 1996), he commented that his film's national importance allowed a cheaper way to make large-scale action cinema with government willingness to provide downtown Dublin as a set--a grander scale than $30 million usually buys. If anything, this speaks to the mobility of current Hollywood production, able to move rapidly anywhere financial advantages apply. Similarly, the simplistic reduction of complex political struggles speaks to the commodification of nations themselves, each able to tell one or two simple national tales in the global cultural marketplace; last year's epics of Scottish nationalism, Rob Roy and Braveheart preparing the ground for this year's stage-Irish revolutionaries. Doubtless, these films rely on popular anti-imperialist nationalism but that functions within a globalized exchange of nations as commodities, much the way destinations are advertised for tourism with the most palatable stereotypes; we cinematically tour the Irish revolution or Scottish rebellion and the beautifully exotic landscapes converge with the historical distanciation of a safely past struggle. Jordan extended his living museum-like view of the past to the conventions of performance and commented that the film's demure and courtly portrayal of its menage a trois was inspired by his sense of different physicality and sexuality in the early century. On one hand, this freezes the past unusably as a nostalgic artefact and even avoids Collins' well known sexual exploits. On the other it allows the stilted and under-written performance of Julia Roberts as Kitty Kiernan to make minimal sense, even while her mere presence is a marker of the imperatives of globalized financing and consumption. A number of critics unfavourably compared this conservative use of conventions to The Crying Game's scandalous surprises, but that infamous daring was entwined with a strikingly reactionary deployment of the femme fatale in a simplistic anti-IRA diatribe. Historical contradiction and blockage are the stuff of revolutions, but complex social explosions may not cohere with the narrative forms of corporate demands. Jordan's film may consign the unfinished revolution to the past, despite its ongoing relevance to contemporary imperialism--but it still progressively evokes the courage and creativity of those who fought the mighty empire to a standstill. This may be a limited lineage in progressive commercial cinema, but it is doubtless still important. 1. In Susan Ferguson and Brenda Groseclose, eds., Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society. Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1985.