Space and Place in Irish Cinema

This essay tracks the changing ways in which space and place have been visualized within Irish film and conceptualized in Irish film writing. In so doing, it maps the shifting social relations and cultural concerns that are constitutive of an Irish cinematic space, tracing the shift from an overriding concern with Irelands colonial legacy to an increasing desire to locate Ireland within the coordinates of contemporary global capitalism. It argues that, despite the over-identification of Irish cinema with particular locations and landscapes, Irish films have often been deficient in their expression of the lived experience of place. Finally, it offers a few tentative examples of films that meaningfully engage with the local whilst reaching beyond the parochial in their aesthetization of landscape and their mode of cinematic address.