A prescient vision of Ireland, through a 1960s lens

CULTURE SHOCK:IN RECENT YEARS, we've had lots of zombie and horror movies in which familiar landscapes have been emptied of ordinary life and are inhabited by none but the undead. If, however, you wanted to make a particularly haunting Irish version of this post-apocalyptic dystopian future, you would have to compete with a real Irish past.

Emptiness has been a relatively recent reality in what was the most dramatically depopulated country in western Europe. A satirically exaggerated vision of a post-Nama Ireland in which most of us have given up and left would look rather like the short 1961 film, written by the Nobel Prizewinning German novelist Heinrich Böll, Irland und seine Kinder(Ireland and Her Children).

Böll’s film (directed by Klaus Simon and beautifully shot in black and white by Olrik Breckoff) will be shown at the Irish Film Institute at noon today as part of the Stranger Than Fiction documentary festival. It is a remarkable vision of an Ireland before the Lemass boom kicked in, before television and Vatican 2, before our unfinished attempts at modernity.

If it had been shown two years ago, that is all it would have been. Now, it has an added edge of surreal admonition. Two years ago, we might have viewed the film through a haze of nostalgia, seeing the slowness of life it depicts as serenity, the emptiness as peace, the desperate piety as lost certitude.

Now, the haze through which we view it is not nostalgia but nightmare. The potent images of a place gone to seed have just a little too much contemporary resonance for comfort.

The Ireland that Böll depicts has, of course, vanished for good and we are not about to return to it. But neither is it one we can be smug about. Böll’s film begins with images of young kids sauntering to primary school, presumably on Achill, where he spent so much of his time. He remarks that children in Germany would already be on their third lesson by this time of the morning. The image seems falsely idyllic, and the casual mention in the commentary of Ireland as a “child-friendly country” now seems bitterly ironic. But Böll has his own knife to twist: “Maybe they are given so much freedom because their future is uncertain . . . Ireland gives its children all this, then doesn’t know what to do with them.”

The line has a chilling edge in a week when the ESRI is including a return to large-scale emigration of the young in its calculations for unemployment next year. When Böll says, with laconic elegance, that “there is parting in the air” of Ireland, the words contain daggers.

Entropy is the keynote. The imagery of the film comes straight from Samuel Beckett. There is indeed, no more potent reminder that Beckett was, in many ways, an Irish realist. Böll evokes a nation of Godots: “Waiting for a miracle to emerge out of calmly passing time. Waiting for lesser things – money from America, a letter from England. Waiting for the pub to open. Waiting for something indefinable. A mysticism of waiting is practised which strikes a busy central European as almost Oriental.”

This Ireland is a place of children and old people. A brilliant sequence towards the end of the film shows an elderly couple by their fireside. The camera picks up on an old doll and a photograph on the wall of a young man in uniform. Böll’s script wrings a quiet, understated tragedy from the images: “Old houses and old people remain with the props from their children’s childhood. Some return in old age to see their grandchildren leave the country . . . [The exile’s] pictures adorn the walls. The sons are policemen in London like the ones in true-life crime stories, flight lieutenants in Korea or in Limburg an der Lahn. They will never forget their parents and only their good qualities stay at home in the memories of their parents.” Above all, Böll’s film haunts us now with its images of empty, half-derelict houses. These buildings used to be the visible scars left by the wounds of famine, poverty and emigration. The most grotesque irony of the boom years is that we ended up manufacturing them. “Not only in the countryside,” says Böll’s script, “ but in the cities too, abandoned houses are a common sight.”

Coming from a Europe that was still recovering from the mass dereliction of a catastrophic war, the Germans must have found something bittersweet in the almost tranquil nature of an Irish dereliction created, not by bombs, but by mere abandonment. The images in the films of dilapidated trains on rusty, disused railways, of harbours with no boats, of rows of bricked-up Georgian houses that look like stage sets, have the ghostly feel of a land put to sleep by some wicked enchantress in a fairytale.

It is not surprising that when the film was eventually broadcast in Ireland by RTÉ in 1965 (under the title Children of Éire), the reaction was hostile.

Letter-writers to The Irish Timesaccused Böll of "pseudo-romantic melancholy" and "insidious propaganda". One letter (signed, rather unnecessarily, "Indignant") accused Böll of hinting to his compatriots that "our 'majestic, empty, desolate land' is only waiting to provide the lebensraum they desire". Another demanded that the Minister for External Affairs inform his counterpart that the film was "an unfriendly act". (The paper's eminently level-headed TV critic Ken Gray pointed out that Children of Éirewas merely "a very fine, imaginative portrait of one aspect of the Irish character".)

This hostility made some sense in an Ireland that was, by 1965, embarked on a process of radical change. By then, Böll’s film could be dismissed as belonging to a past that had been left behind for good. It says something that, 45 years later, viewers in Ireland are unlikely to feel quite so sure about that. Physically and literally, Böll’s vision may be very distant.

Psychologically and imaginatively, it feels all too close.

Stranger than Fiction runs at the IFI until tomorrow. See irishfilm.ie.