I was interested in the improvisation process. If it was a dance piece where you’re following a narrative, it would force the documentary to have that kind of narrative. I would gravitate to that kind of theatre more so than the written or spoken kind of Theatre. I’m not interested in fulfilling people’s narrative expectations . . . It’s fine for documentaries and I like it in other people’s work. But I like to make things more challenging for myself. My work is more to do with feeling than three-act structure.” Ireland's rural elegist". TheGuardian.com. 5 January 2002. Archived from the original on 13 November 2016 . Retrieved 13 November 2016.

From the start, there is a sense of calm and serenity brought on by the wonderful visuals. This is a perfect advert for a different side to Ireland and one not often glimpsed in contemporary cinema. Each shot is a work of art with many extended shots of the breath-taking landscape, almost feeling like a segment from a nature documentary. The visuals invite us in, making us feel like part of the community and giving us a sense of perspective on the importance of the area to the locals but also how isolating it might be. I think that if there’s a hell and a heaven that one or other or both of the places are going to be vastly overcrowded,” he said with surprising heaviness. Even his walk and tone had changed. That They May Face the Rising Sun is another triumphant film for Irish Cinema, offering a fine showcase for Pat Collins, and doing justice to its much-loved source material. It feels like a true reflection of the community being documented in the 1980s with a restrained and subdued feel to it that lends it more power. The performances are superb and the visuals bring the Irish countryside to life in a way few films previously have.I loved the relaxed pace of this novel and the wonderful characters which include James and Mary Murphy who rarely travel from their local area; John Quinn, a notorious womaniser; Kate's uncle The Shah; Bill Evans, a farmer and James Murphy's brother who works at a Ford plant in England. The characters are so realistic that I was able to identify with characters I had encountered throughout the 80s in rural Ireland. He was also a farmer, although he liked to joke that it was the writing that kept the farm rather than the farming revenue allowing him to write.

That They May Face the Rising Sun is a down-to-earth, self-conscious novel that makes for a reflective movie. The characters—Joe and his wife Kate (played by Barry Ward and Anna Berderke)—mirror McGahern’s own past in that they have moved from London to their countrified hometown, and Joe spends his days writing his next novel. When his neighbors ask, “Does anything happen?” in his novel, Joe replies it’s nothing dramatic—“just day-to-day stuff.” Just like the movie we’re watching. Eder, Richard. 2002. “The Birds of Ireland Don’t Sing; They Cry ‘This is Mine”. Review of That They May Face the Rising Sun. The New York Times. March 22.I REALLY enjoyed this book and found it a nostalgic read. A word of warning! this as I have stated earlier is not a plot driven novel and its slow pace will not suit every reader. Production activity in Ireland has steadily grown in recent years, with Screen Ireland recording a spend of over €361m across film, TV and animation in 2022. Screen Ireland also announced several initiatives to continue allowing Irish talent to flourish. They include a Regional Support Fund of €3.5m, targeted at film crews and new entrants to the film industry. Foyle holds a special place in my heart;” BAFTA nominee Kris Kelly discusses Wind and the Shadow ahead of its premiere at Foyle Film Festival The cinema of Pat Collins is defined by thoughtfulness and calm. Whether making a documentary or a narrative feature, consideration goes into every frame’s meaning, and each scene unfolds at its own unhurried pace. Collins’ oeuvre could be categorised as ‘slow’ cinema, but that tag has the potential to undermine what the films try to say. In Collins’ latest, That They May Face The Rising Sun, the slow pace doesn’t change the fact that people are busy, lives are being led, and emotions are being deeply felt.

However, the failure of established ceremonies to survive - even as other age-old customs persist in diluted form - has already been broadly hinted at shortly before. This is most evident when Kate offers a scathing indictment upon learning of a former pupil’s engagement: Killeen, Terence. 1991. “Versions of Exile: A Reading of The Leavetaking”. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 17.1. 69-78. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to talk about except for my appreciation for his work,” says the film-maker. “I thought he was getting at something that I think that a lot of other people aren’t getting even close to. I wanted t see if there was something we could collaborate on. And then he met him in England in 2018. He was talking about this new show that he was doing. It was non-narrative theatre work. Through talking with Michael we came up with the idea of making a film of the process of him staging the show. Michael has a kind of a unique approach and very strong philosophical outlook about how theatre and dance should be done. The surface of the water out from the reeds was alive with shoals of small fish. There were many swans on the lake. A grey rowboat was fishing along the far shore. A pair of herons moved sluggishly through the air between the trees of the island and Gloria Bog. A light breeze was passing over the sea of pale sedge like a hand. The blue of the mountain was deeper and darker than the blue of the lake or the sky.' Thus, a poem ostensibly celebrating the birth of his daughter and the qualities he hopes she will possess also becomes a meditation on the importance of custom within the value system of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. His plea to his daughter to develop qualities which will ensure she is happy in her life to come, becomes a form of epitaph for those values he holds most dear. At the conclusion of the poem base values (“arrogance and hatred”) are contrasted with the two qualities he most values (“innocence and beauty”), which are shown to be rooted in the world of custom and ceremony. The subtle nature of their influence accentuated by images relating to Plenty’s horn and a “laurel tree”:

In Dante’s Divine Comedy in the cantos devoted to hell, Francesca da Rimini appears in the second circle, which is reserved for the lustful. She was a member of the Polenta family who was killed by her husband upon being discovered with his brother, before she had time to repent her sin of adultery. The very arguments Eamonn Hughes makes regarding language, character, perspective, and structure for Rising Sun being a break from the earlier fiction rather than a trajectory, thus emerge as confirmation of the trajectorial relationship in terms of the Prodigal Son reading. The lake environs is the home, the same home Mahony in The Dark leaves, the reminder of which is articulated by Joe Ruttledge’s memory of his own youth. This home is transformed because of Joe’s journey, Joe being the culmination of all McGahern’s travelers. His experiences, his independence, and his secure identity allow him to see his home differently. The lyrical prose and the lush natural descriptions that Hughes sees as a break from the terse Joycian “meanness” of McGahern’s earlier prose (2005: 147) (particularly that before Amongst Women) reflects the changed sensibility in the Prodigal traveler lately home. And perhaps we can also recognize the urge to forgive and reconcile of the author himself as he not only sees his own spare Leitrim home with the softened perspective of age, but with the knowledge that he has not much longer to savor its beauty, having already been diagnosed with cancer. McGahern's work has been very influential in Ireland and elsewhere. [15] A younger generation of Irish writers, such as Colm Tóibín, as well as contemporaries such as Eamonn McGrath, have been influenced by his writing. [16] At the very beginning of That They May Face The Rising Sun, the audience is introduced to the setting with a long two-minute establishing shot accompanied by classical music. And if the film could be summed up in one frame, I am sure it would be this one: a peaceful landscape with the sun rising amongst the clouds on a scenic lake surrounded by nature, seemingly untouched by human presence. It almost feels like a moment frozen in time, inviting us to reflect on the uncorrupted beauty of nature, like a cinematic rendition of an English romantic painting by J. M. W. Turner.

Eamonn Hughes has stressed how “the social sphere is brought to life through the text’s insistent references to play and performance, in content, in metaphor and in the characters’ speech”. The novel’s continual stress on the performance aspect of life is designed not only to underline the consciously theatrical dimension which is surely at the heart of preserving social customs, but also to underline these social customs ultimate connection with that most established of Irish institutions – the church. Although conventional Christian belief had long since gone for McGahern, just like his spokesperson Ruttledge in the novel – in The Church and Its Spire (1993) he fulsomely expressed his indebtedness to his Catholic upbringing in Ireland, especially in light of a complete paucity of other cultural experiences: It was such a monster of a process,” says Collins. “We were shooting a huge amount of hours, something like 150 hours, and trying to get that down to one hour. The average TV or long documentary would be a seven-weeks edit. We were nearly six months editing. For Keith Walsh, the editor, it was just a huge job.” The novel received critical acclaim, by its recognition at the Irish Book Awards and its nomination for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2003. [7] [8] Alison Light of The Independent stated of the work: Little happens, but everything that happens is 'news'. 'Have you any news?' 'No news. Came looking for news.' That's a running joke between the two couples living on the lake, Joe and Kate Ruttledge, who have lived and worked in England but returned to the place he knows from childhood, and Jamesie and Mary Murphy, natives of this country. 'I've never, never moved from here and I know the whole world,' Jamesie boasts. There is a strong, humorous affection and dependency between the four, but also reserve and distance.I think I’ve learned from every film that I’ve made,” he says. “I’m learning as I go along. I feel I have to be challenging myself every time I start a new film. For most of my work, I want an Irish audience to watch it. I’m only interested in talking to Irish people; in a sense that you can go deeper if you’re just setting your sights on an Irish audience, because you can presume that they know more about certain subjects. You don’t have to explain it to the Americans or anybody else. I’m not too worried about a big progression. That it frees me up in all sorts of ways. Breslin, John B. 2002. “Pastoral”. Review of That They May Face the Rising Sun. Commonweal. May 17. McGahern is also considered a master of the Irish tradition of the short story. Several collections were published as well as Love of the World, a collection of non-fiction essays. His autobiography, Memoir ( All Will be Well: a Memoir in the US), was published in 2005 a year before his death outlining numerous influential moments in his life which critics often speculated were present within his earlier work. Andrew Motion wrote "In a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye". [14] Influence [ edit ]