"THEY'RE very personal, subjective essays. They're not holiday programmes," says Irish director Alan Gilsenan of the second series of God Bless America, his "filmic portrait" of US cities through the eyes of American writers, which starts tomorrow on TV. While the first series of one hour documentaries portrayed Gore Vidal's Washington, Neil Simon's New York and Scott Turow's Chicago, the new series kicks off with Richmond, Virginia, the home town of crime writer Patricia Cornwell. Continuing over the next two weeks, it features actor and writer Marsha Hunt's description of growing up as a black woman in Philadelphia and concludes with Garrison Keillor's dryly observed tour of the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
For Gilsenan, who has made several award winning documentaries on Irish subjects (and whose Home Movie nights archive series was one of RTE's more successful programmes last year), the Granada produced series offered an opportunity to explore new territory.
"It was really interesting to explore a different terrain. When you get to the States, you realise you're actually as ignorant about Americans as they're said to be about Europeans. I was never one of those Irish people who grew up dreaming of America."
The documentaries offer a fascinating portrait of the history, present, and potential future of the great US cities which have captured the imagination of most of the Western world in the 20th century, as refracted through the prism of the particular political, cultural or personal agenda of each writer.
"It's a strange fusion of the writers' view of America with my own," says Gilsenan. "That can often lead to an interesting tension. In the film about Chicago in the last series, for example, Scott Turow felt that it was really important to show how a new generation of middle class blacks was coming through, but I just couldn't see it. As far as I could see, black people in Chicago were still in the ghettos."
In its elegiac tone, and with magnificent photography of urban landscapes, God Bless America can be seen as another example of European film makers' love affair with the States. Combined with the varying perspectives of the writers, the series functions both as a love poem to the US city (the classic landscape of the 20th century imagination, after all) and as a warning about the collapse of these urban areas into bloody anarchy and despair.
In tomorrow night's programme, Patricia Cornwell expresses her fears about impending social collapse and urban warfare in the US. Cornwell is probably the most conservative of all the writers featured on the programme so far, but her bleak vision of the future of the cities is quite common, says Gilsenan.
"The one thing that really shocked me was how important the race issue is. It's right at the heart of American society. Patricia's view is probably the polar opposite of say, Gore Vidal's or Marsha Hunt's, but what they do all share is a quite apocalyptic vision of the way things are going.
"It reminded me of Northern Ireland, in that everyone's got a brother or son who's been shot. Richmond is quite a small American city, with a sort of genteel, Southern image, but it's got one of the highest per capita murder rates in the US. There's a huge amount of white paranoia about the danger they're in from black people, but in the main, it's young black men killing young black men. The casualty wards we visited in Richmond were full of 15 and 16 year old black kids."
ONE unexpected consequence for Gilsenan of filming God Bless America was the relationship that developed between himself and Marsha Hunt. The two now live together in Co Wicklow, a development the director is reluctant to talk too much about, beyond wryly observing that it fulfils "every directorial cliche in the book".
With six documentaries now produced, Gilsenan would quite like to complete the series by looking at cities in the West. While the new documentaries redress some of the racial and gender balance of the series, he rejects any notion of trying too hard for representativeness. "I think aiming for any kind of social cross section would defeat the purpose of the idea of writers' essays. I don't think any writer would want to be boxed in like that - certainly, I know that Marsha wouldn't.
"If you sat these six writers around the table, they probably wouldn't get on very well together. That's one of the fascinating things about American culture - how the country's always searching for its soul in a variety of different ways."
God Bless America starts tomorrow on UTV, 11 pm.
