Hubert Butler
Witness To The Future
A Film By Johnny Gogan With Post Show Talk
Crescent Arts Centre
Sunday 12 June – 2.30pm
Tickets: Free
Born and raised in Kilkenny, Hubert Butler
(1900-91) – once described as “Ireland’s
Orwell” – is now widely considered one
of the great essayists in English of the
twentieth century. Proud of his Protestant
heritage while still deeply committed to the
Irish nation, he sought in his life and writing
to ensure that Ireland would grow into an
open and pluralistic society. His five volumes
of essays (The Lilliput Press) are masterful
literature in the tradition of Swift, Yeats
and Shaw, elegant and humane readings of
Irish and European history, and ultimately
hopeful testimony to human progress.
In this unique and remarkable film by one
of Ireland’s most innovative film-makers,
Butler’s life and work are brought to the big
screen for the first time. The film follows
his writer’s journey from his Anglo-Irish
childhood and study at Oxford; through his
time in Stalinist Russia (where he worked as
a teacher), Nazi Germany (where he helped
expedite the escape of Jews), and interwar
Yugoslavia; to his later life as a marketgardener, writer and public intellectual at
Maidenhall, Co Kilkenny, where his family
had lived for a century and a half.
Butler wrote on a wealth of Irish topics as
diverse as the Irish Saints, archaeology,
local history, the Anglo-Irish Big House,
the Irish Literary Revival, the Churches,
nationalism, republicanism, and Partition.
A writer for whom “the ethical imagination”
was paramount, he also wrote many essays
addressing twentieth-century cultural
nationalism, the dangers of globalization
and mass communication, the search for
humane community, racialism, Mitteleuropa,
Stalinism, and the Holocaust.
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Widely travelled in the Balkans, Butler wrote
on a wide variety of subjects concerning his
experience of the region, much of which
remains deeply relevant to the recent
history of Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia. He
lived in Yugoslavia between 1934 and
1937, and spoke Croatian fluently. Many of
his Balkan essays deal with the genocidal
Croatian quisling regime (1941-45) and the
collaborationist role played by the Catholic
Church and, particularly, by Archbishop
Stepinac – a topic which embroiled him
in a major controversy in 1950s Ireland,
and continues to polarize the political and
cultural life of independent Croatia, where
Stepinac’s proposed canonization has yet to
be progressed.
Historian Roy Foster, poet Chris Agee and
biographer Robert Tobin lead the film’s
impressive line-up of literary contributors.
Steve Wickham (of The Waterboys) provides
an original score with a suitably Balkan
flavour, whilst the film’s historical sweep
is assisted by rich archive footage. The
publication in August 2016 of Butler’s
sixth volume, Poteen in a Brandy-cask:
Yugolsav Essays, by The Irish Pages Press (in
association with The Lilliput Press), has been
timed to coincide with Witness to the Future
and its autumn tour of Croatia.
Following the screening there will be a
discussion featuring Chris Agee, BBC
journalist Darragh Maclntyre & Director
Johnny Gogan.