that's what the aesthetic within Pat's films is all about.
With the film being shot in black and white you're automatically seeing Connemara in a way that you are not used to seeing it.
We are surrounded by realism in an awful lot of ways. There is this obsession within documentaries that is been challenging all sides now This kind of valorisation of the realistic. And that is kind of boring to me. I have to say there is plenty of realism in our lives already. I think part of the job of art is to make you see things in a way that you haven't seen them before. Just by using the tools like monochromatic photography or just non-sync sound. They're interesting tools to make it feel hyper-real, not necessarily unreal, but hyper-real. To bring you out of the sense that you are simply in that world. That you are looking at a world in a different way with these tools. And it's not like we're inventing this stuff, this is the history of cinema that were working with, and it was important to do that justice.
It's fair to say that it's a welcome change from the $300m dollar blockbuster CGI-fest.
Modern blockbuster realism just doesn't serve the imagination in any way. It gives the imagination nothing to do. The phrase "leaves nothing to the imagination" is a hackneyed one. It is usually a kind of bawdy thing to say, but I think that we need to resurrect it. Because so many films these days leave me with nothing for my imagination to do. Which I think is kind of tragic. It is a tragic end that all these great, great minds, these great, great artists are spending their time creating these massive boring worlds, when you can do so much more with so much less. That's what makes something smaller and closer and totally beautiful like Song of Granite much more important
CinÉireann / December 2017 41