The latest documentary from Pat Collins â one of our nationâs greatest filmmakers â which was well received at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019, arrives just a week after Jessica Sarah Rinlandâs frighteningly austere Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another. Both feature much footage of hands working away at emerging artefacts, but, though unlikely to be confused with Godzilla vs Kong, Henry Glassie: Field Work is much easier on the digestion.
The picture is a study of the great American folklorist of the title. The dauntingly intelligent, impressively lucid academic â a son of the south, raised on civil war battlefields â began by recording the music of the Appalachians and surrounding areas (fans of the legendary ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax will sense some similarities).
âMost people are discouraged from being creativeâ: Pat Collins on Henry Glassie: Field Work
The globe-trotting work of American folklorist and ethnologist Henry Glassie is the focus of the new film from Irish documentary-maker Pat Collins. As Collins tells us, the results get at a larger truth about the human need for creativity.
16 April 2021
Henry Glassie: Field Work (2019)
Since John Bergerâs award-winning BBC series Ways of Seeing (1972), weâve not often seen perceptive visual arts criticism on our screens. Now from Pat Collins, the Irish director of Silence (2012) and Song of Granite (2017), comes a mesmerising documentary inspired by the writings of celebrated American folklorist and ethnologist Henry Glassie.
April 16, 1871
On April 16, 1871, celebrated Irish playwright John Millington Synge was born in Rathfarnam, Co. Dublin. Born into an upper class Protestant family, Synge would take his own path, nurturing his fascination with the Catholic peasant class of rural Ireland with frequent trips to Wicklow, theWest of Ireland and the Aran Islands. Recording everything he noticed, Synge became one of the first and most thorough chroniclers of country life and language in Ireland, most notably in his still-famous plays, which include The Playboy of the Western World, Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows. With W.B Yeats and Lady Gregory he founded the Abbey, Ireland’s first national theater. Troubled by health problems for much of his life, Synge died young, in 1909 at age 37, from Hodgkins disease.
It was Yeats who had encouraged him to go west in search of writing material among the Irish-speaking areas that were even then dwindling. As well as the Aran Islands, Synge spent valuable time in West Kerry â where the fictional Christy Mahon begins his odyssey â and in Mayo, where most of the Playboyâs action occurs.
But by his own account, a crucial part of Syngeâs education also happened in the east, among the Wicklow Mountains, where he set his early one-act play, In the Shadow of the Glen (1903).
That too was based on a story heard from Dirane and yet when writing it, Synge recalled years later: âI got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchenâ.
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By Mark Williams
In the midst of the Celtic Revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, W.B. Yeats implored his Irish literary compatriots to “go where Homer went.” It was an audacious urging, to formalize a relationship between Ireland’s mythological pantheon and the classical gods of ancient continental Europe, to write into existence as rich a cultural and literary heritage as the Greco-Roman deities held in the popular canonic imagination. The task, taken on by Yeats, as well as writers like George Russell, Austin Clarke, and Lady Gregory, was somewhat complicated by the fact that until the century prior, the mere intellectual concept of a native pantheon of Irish gods was unavailable to Irish writers, having largely been abandoned by the late middle ages. Moreover, writes Mark Williams in his excellent new book on the subject of Irish gods, they are notorious shape shifters.