Donal Foreman talks The Image You Missed
When Irish filmmaker Donal Foreman's estranged father Arthur MacCaig died 10 years ago the American documentarian left behind three decades of archivial footage cataloguing the conflict in Northern Ireland. Foreman used that never-seen-before imagery, and some of his own, to explore his father's work and in turn learn more about him. The film creates a candid encounter between two filmmakers born into different political moments, revealing their contrasting experiences of Irish nationalism, the role of images in social struggle, and the competing claims of personal and political responsibility.
We caught up with the director before the film had its Irish premiere at the Audi Dublin International Film Festival earlier this month.
Cin E: You've said that you didn't really know your father growing up. Do you think that making the film helped you to know your father more?
Donal Foreman: It did. The inspiration for the whole project really came from sorting through my father’s apartment after he died, and learning about him through the images I found there. The strangeness of that experience was something I wanted to try to channel through the film. But in Art’s entire archive there was very little directly personal or autobiographical material – no diaries, no home movies… Even among thousands of photos, he tended to photograph strangers and places he visited more than his own everyday world. So any kind of knowledge I gained was inevitably indirect, gleaned through exploring his gaze and his ideas. It’s one of the reasons I talk in the film about putting together a “fiction of him” through his archive – it’s a projection that is invariably going to diverge from those who really knew him and were a part of his life.
I found it interesting to see a mix of your own work and his in there. How did you decide what footage to use in the film?
I always knew that I was going to draw on my own personal archive of images in the film as well. Part of the motivation for the project was to tease out the differences between his films and my own, and create a dialogue between them. In the process, I was hoping to transform my own style and working process as a filmmaker—not to become more like him, but to use the dialogue to push myself in a new direction.
Your way of filmmaking is very different than your father's. How did you reconcile that?
I don’t think you can, ultimately! But the idea of reconciliation is an important question in the film for me – the possibility of reconciliation between father and son, colonizer and colonized, present and past… For me it bleeds into the form of the film itself. How do you bring two images together? That by itself is enough to worry about..
44 CinÉireann / March 2018