Last night in Dublin, the arts and heritage minister, Sile de Valera, launched two significant new initiatives from the Film Institute of Ireland (FII). Both are funded by the US production company, Spyglass International, which is donating $250,000 towards the development of a new Irish Film Archive and who are also the official sponsors of the new Tiernan MacBride International Screenwriting Award, which carries an annual prize of 10,000.
The Spyglass donation to the archive was welcomed as "a major boost" by Mark Mulqueen, who was appointed director of the FII in March. "It is relatively unique for an Irish cultural development to receive private support of this scale for a project at the conception stage," he said. "The aim now is to secure similar support from the relevant national bodies for this unique national collection".
The archive houses work dating from the pioneering films made by the Lumiere brothers in 1897 right up to such recent releases as When Brendan met Trudy. The new financial investment will fund an extended purpose-built preservation facility that will allow the archive to undertake a more proactive policy of acquisition, as there will be ample space to house newly acquired material, Mulqueen says.
"What we want to do is make the present space more accessible and re-locate the preservation vaults to a more appropriate space, probably outside the city because there's no need for them to be in Dublin," Mulqueen says. "That's a big project. We also want to explore preservation for future television. So much valuable material has already been lost. There's a lot of expertise and experience in our archive staff. We also plan to put screens into the archive for public use, along with access to the paper archive."
The new screenwriting award is named in memory of Tiernan MacBride, one of the staunchest activists in building an Irish film industry, who died in 1995. "It's absolutely guaranteed sponsorship for five years," says Mulqueen. We want to give it a particular international dimension. It could go to somebody Irish who is based abroad and may not have thought of re-entering the Irish sector, or people in Ireland who want to be platformed internationally." The winner will be announced at "the all-new Irish Film Ball in December", he says.
These two major developments come within four months of Mulqueen taking over as FII director from Sheila Pratschke, who has become director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakkerig. "She handed over the reins with a good body of work completed and the ship put back on course," he says.
In further recent developments, Grainne Humphreys, the FII head of education, has been appointed assistant director of the institute, and the Irish Film Centre has installed its 70mm projector, the only functioning one in the State, and launches its 70mm screenings next week with Hitchcock's Vertigo, followed by a two-week run of 2001: A Space Odyssey, also on 70mm."
Clearly, it's an exciting time for the new FII director, Mark Mulqueen, who is 30, is from Limerick and is a fine arts graduate from that city's School of Art and Design. Prior to joining the FFI he worked with the theatre company Macnas and Bui Bolg, and spent the past four years as city arts officer with Cork Corporation.
" I could have gone in the job for another year or two but I was getting itchy feet" Mulqueen says, sitting in his ground-floor office in the Irish Film Centre (IFC). For all the valuable work carried out by the FII in its archive and film education programme, the public perception of its base, the IFC, remains one of a building with two cinemas and a bar and bookshop. "To some degree, that will always be there," Mulqueen says. "The education and archive are both relatively low-key activities in that sense, although both are major work and major costs. The identity is not exactly coherent.
"I think the IFC is a particularly strong branding in Irish society - compared to most cultural centres, it's middlebrow rather than highbrow, thankfully. There are no invisible barriers. It's a very accessible environment here. So that's very good, but so strong that the rest of the institute's activities don't have the same profile. We're not going to waste money on it, but it's up to ourselves to clarify how we're seeing ourselves and presenting ourselves externally. It's important because there are quite a few bodies dealing with film in this country, and maybe more than what's actually necessary.
"There's a film audience and a film experience, and there's a general public which is having no film experience. In or around there is our brief. None of that refers to the film industry, which is a different activity. Our brief is the film legacy and history, and the cultural aspect of film, which is changing rapidly because it's a technologically based art form. It's a very large body of work and, I think it's fair to say, a body of work that the Arts Council for quite along time misunderstood and failed to grapple with. They have been unnecessarily confused to some degree, I think, as to where their role is alongside the Irish Film Board. They are two very different occupations."
Having worked in the arts outside Dublin for seven years, Mulqueen is acutely aware of the need for the FII, a national institute, to expand its regional activities, to be relevant and active in a meaningful way throughout the country, and not in a patronising or tokenistic way.
'When you're working in the other cities and in the rural areas, you get quite a regular contact with centralised national institutes that can have a heavy tokenistic element to them," he says. "Steady, low-level, locally empowered relationships are what we want to go after and we want to forge them over a period of time. The end result should be that at a local level there's access to a good film experience, and that happens through our cinemas department, archive and education - and hopefully new outlets such as our publishing plans."
The two IFC cinemas are expected to be self-supporting and receive no direct subsidy, something Mulqueen regards as a flaw: "There was a great big debt which all sorts of circumstances contributed to, along with unrealistic costings which was common at a time in a different economy. A number of bodies such as the IFC were initiated in the early 1990s when real costs weren't being embraced. If they had been, some of those initiatives might have never happened because the money wasn't around. So many things around the country were supported by blood and guts, really, and the likes of F┴S schemes. We're in a different era now." While the quality of programming at the IFC cinemas is admirable and has improved and broadened significantly in recent years, the most common complaints from its patrons are that films play for such limited runs, dictated by the policy of publishing a bi-monthly programme, which prevents extending the runs of movies which are playing to packed houses.
"On the night Amores Perros finished this month, there just weren't enough seats," he says. "People were quite happy to sit on the floor and watch it, but that's not allowed. It was the same the week before when Code Unknown was finishing its run. It's heartbreaking when so many people want to see something and we can't show it to all of them.
"We've carved a reputation for showing top-quality film at a rate nobody else is doing. There is a tendency in the arts not to be bold and ambitious, but that's what we're doing. It's driven by a passion. The staff are absolutely passionate about what they do, and when you have that kind of a team, it's easier to achieve what they do. It's a fantastic team." To deal with the evident public demand, the FII has commissioned an architectural feasibility study regarding a third screen. Mulqueen is also aware that the smaller IFC2 ought to be upgraded and made more comfortable. "The quality of the experience of cultural cinema should match what's experienced by the multiplex audience," he believes, "and we're striving to do that. We need to re-invest seriously in our two cinemas and we have to be brave enough, and we hope that the Arts Council and our other partners will be brave enough, to look at the prospect of a third screen.
"We are going to discuss with the Arts Council our own proposals on how realistically a cultural cinemas network along the lines of the British Film Institute cinemas could work. There should be different tiers of different types of partners, such as the film societies around the country. I see it as a three- or four-year project which is phased in and is financially realistic and can show around the country the kind of the programme the IFC is giving to people in Dublin. It will require local input, and local input tends to follow good ideas."
The FII is also venturing into publishing with Cork University Press, initially with six critical studies, the first three of which will be launched at Cork Film Festival in October - Lance Petitt on December Bride, Kevin Barry on The Dead and Fidelma Farrelly on This Other Eden.
Mulqueen pinpoints the perception of film as populist and thriving as a major obstacle to acquiring funding: "We want to establish full State recognition for film as an art form. There is a little bit of confusion the Arts Council have had and continue to have: that if it's a buoyant industry, like film is, how is it an art form as well? But there's a bouyant publishing industry and a buoyant music industry, and there's no struggle when it comes to funding literature and music. It's very strange. And it happens in theatre, too.
"There should be no difficulty or struggle with the commercial success of art in this country. I do feel that the Arts Council struggle to grapple with that. The other side of it is the absolutely outdated idea of high and low art.
"The Arts Council is now preparing its next five-year arts plan for the country and I think they need to put film at the top of their agenda and work it out for themselves. They are investing in film bodies around the country and they should invest a lot more in them and be very happy that it's such a popular art form. By investing in the film institute and the IFC and regional cinemas and places like the Kino in Cork, which they should fund, they are creating a cultural cinema audience - and that's the same audience which will go to Irish cinema, and that's how it works its way right back to what the film board are doing. It's actually absolutely complementary."
