Refreshingly, Eoghan finds an Ireland disinterested in nationalism and, as an audience, we are invited to consider a landscape unabated by state-centric conceptions of Irishness. A voice emerges from the landscape resonating with those open to hearing it, and as a nomadic character or a contemporary seanchai, Eoghan moves through the landscape collecting the stories and soundbites of the thoughts and ideas of the people he meets.
Traditionally, Irish cinema has treated the landscape as a space for national regeneration, whereby identity in the present is directly linked to a nostalgic and idealised past. Central characters from films like The Quiet Man, The Field and Into the West romanticise the landscape as a restorative space, where the ills of present predicaments can be cured. Francie Brady from The Butcher Boy takes a more radical approach by nuking the landscape in the hope of a fresh start, or at least in an attempt to erase the past. While my sympathies lie with young Francie, Eoghan encounters a landscape filled with characters who have little need to marry the present with the past. They are neither establishment nor anti-establishment figures, but rather simply offer an alternative view or understanding of what it is to be Irish or, dare I say, Gaelic. The people Eoghan meets are real people, or versions of themselves with stories of interest. They are not homogenised representations of Irish nationhood, for or by the state. The archival footage interspersed in the film is not a nostalgic harkening back to the past but rather an acknowledgment of its existence; a snapshot in time, much like the film itself, acting as a document of the present.
“You have to have noise to have the silence”: “tost” is the Gaelic for silence and, as Eoghan explains, it literally means the space in between the noise. This in-between, as a theme, is evident throughout, and as the film is neither plot-based nor narrative driven, it becomes about what happens between the points on Eoghan’s journey. In his search for silence, he tells a barman in a local fishing village, desperate for conversation after a long lonely winter, that he is not interested in stories per se, it’s more quiet he’s after; but within this interaction alone Eoghan has begun the process of collecting. He wanders out into the landscape with a microphone acting as an open invitation to talk – the very device that separated him from people in Berlin has now been inverted. Eoghan gathers both the sounds that surround him and the stories of the people he meets, reiterating the point that the landscape goes beyond mere nationhood.
For director Pat Collins, Eoghan plays the seanchai, echoing the figures traversing the landscape in the thirties and forties as they moved from house to house collecting stories. Eoghan is a preserver and transmitter of folk wisdom, a nomadic character selecting stories that exist in between people and places. He moves beyond the homogenised representations of Irishness or nationhood, but also the mystical and nostalgic narratives associated with landscape. As a nomadic Seanchai Eoghan collects contemporary stories of Gaelicness, of who we are, who we were, but more importantly, who we can become borne out of our interactions with the landscape. Eoghan does not represent an Irishness rooted in the past as a nostalgic figure meandering the landscape in the hope of collecting sounds from the past. Eoghan punctures the grand narratives of nationhood by including the multiplicity of narratives he meets along the way. As a seanchai, he literally forces us to become aware of an alternative Ireland, one that moves at another pace, which is beyond the control of the state.
CinÉireann / December 2017 57