Music, words, the movement of people and the topography of the earth all seem to preoccupy Collins. What do we know about our land, our history if we are not forced to leave it? What can a stranger tell us about our geography that we cannot or will not see? Collins constantly asks us to look both inward and outward at where and who we are.
In Tim Robinson: Connemara the feet, constantly walking over every tiny part of the Connemara landscape seems to suggest that you can only document such immense beauty a step at a time lest you become overwhelmed. In Silence, Eoghan gets even more tactile with the land, finding himself and his story in it. In Living in a Coded Land there seems to be less hope with the historical and physical shackling of ourselves to the land contrasting with ever greater numbers leaving it.
Ireland is a complex country and indeed a sense of what is Irishness a difficult question. But what it means to be Irish is not what is being specifically attempted with these three films. Rather, Collins is measuring our relationship to the physical island and our ability to try and separate that from the political, religious or psychological. There is real trauma in our collective souls that may yet be healed by a reconnection to what it means to be on terra firma. But what about the people who have left and the immigrants that have arrived? Both emigration and immigration feature in all three films (indeed, in Song of Granite Joe Heaney also goes to work abroad).
Living in a Coded Land
Silence