“A Machine for empathy”: Articulating vulnerability in An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) (2022)

Description

“A Machine for empathy”: Articulating vulnerability in An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) (2022)

We are currently living through an extraordinary period of productivity and success for Irish-language cinema, evident in the critical and commercial success of An Cailín Ciúin (‘The Quiet Girl) .Winner of The Grand Prix of the International Jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2022, the film subsequently received a large number of further national and international awards including 8 awards at the IFTA Film & Drama Awards and culminating with its nomination on January 24 2023 for the Best International Feature Film Oscar, the first Irish-language production to receive such recognition. While Irish language films have previously been the recipient of significant national and international accolades (a prominent example being Tom Collins’ London-set drama Kings (2007)), An Cailín Ciúin uniquely also managed to connect with a wide audience in a manner never previously achieved by an Irish-language production – by October 2022 the film had taken over €1 million at the Irish and UK box office and broken box office records at several cinemas, including the Irish Film Institute.



Understanding the reasons for the success of An Cailín Ciúin is a complex undertaking that involves considerations at a number of levels which would include (to name but a few) the production context that made the film’s creation possible in the first instance; the marketing and distribution context that enabled it to reach a larger national and international audience than previous Irish language productions have achieved; and the particularities of its aesthetic realisation that contributed to its impact on audiences. This paper is particularly interested in this final aspect and how the film successfully realises film’s potential as a “machine for empathy” (as famously described by film critic Roger Ebert in a 2005 talk), through its persuasive and compelling articulation of vulnerability as a powerful affective means of evoking audience engagement. This vulnerability is most obviously apparent in the central character of Cáit, played in an incredibly affecting debut performance by Catherine Clinch. However, this paper contends that vulnerability is realised on a number of further levels: firstly, the nature and precarious historical context of Irish language film production; secondly, the language used in the film and the choice to translate the source text into Irish (and the implications of this); and thirdly and perhaps most importantly the sophisticated realisation of vulnerability (and its significance) within the film’s narrative and aesthetic approach, particularly through Kate McCullough’s superb cinematography. In this final consideration, we will be drawing on the work of Laura U. Marks and her concept of ‘haptic visuality’ to examine how vulnerability is realised and evoked within the film’s aesthetic. 

Period	24 Jul 2025
Event title	IASIL Galway 2025 : Technology and Ireland
Event type	Conference
Location	Galway, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International