The Searchers: Liberal Morality Play or Reactionary Epic?
The characters become forces of immense physical action which we cannot take our eyes off of. It is action motivated by honour codes and by rituals of kinship. It is a world of forms and the observing of forms. Closer to Achilles and Hector than to Freud. It is a Homeric western.
The Poetry of Dispossession: The Irish-American Cinema of John Martin Feeney - Part 3
The Irish nationalist John Mitchel advised the Irish in America to assimilate or face an unhappy fate. Feeney is characteristic perhaps of that unhappy fate.
The Poetry of Dispossession: The Irish-American Cinema of John Martin Feeney - Part 2
Feeney's films exalt in themes of tradition, family and community as no other American filmmaker ever has. His evocation of social cohesion in the transience of social ritual is often sublime. But is it a facade?
The Poetry of Dispossession: The Irish-American Cinema of John Martin Feeney - Part 1
Feeney established a tradition of cinematic poetry, steeped in Irish race-memory, which his ancestral homeland ought to have embraced.