Sir, - Luke Gibbons was not the only academic attending the conference on Irish cinema at the University of Virginia last May, so I don't know why he believes (August 27th) that my statement that: "One wondered if some of the academics had even seen these films - low budget, in dependently made contemporary dramas made by first time Irish directors," was a reference to him. It wasn't. For the record, I wrote that "there was little or no reference to Paddy Breathnach's Ailsa or Gerard Stembridge's Guthrie in the papers read."
Luke Gibbons chooses not to quote the final of the original sentence, pointing out quite rightly that he chaired a panel on directing and Effect: The Aesthetics of Film making", which included Paddy Breathnach. I would hardly suggest that he chaired such a panel without having seen Ailsa, but I find it interesting that he seeks to blur the distinction between papers delivered to the conference and informal panel discussions/interviews with Irish film makers.
Of the broader selection of films I mentioned, only Into the West is cited by Luke Gibbons as being among the films he discussed, and it certainly was not discussed "in extensive detail". I agree with him that it would be absurd to expect a single lecture, with a single thematic focus, to address the entire range of films made in the last ten years. It seems to have escaped his attention that his address was not the only, or even the main subject of my article.
We can both accuse each other of selectivity in choosing titles. As it happens, his letter appears to be more of a response to my report in the current issue of Film Ireland, in which I described his paper as "meandering but highly selective", than to my article in these pages. The latter did not refer to him in any detail, except to note that "some of the newer breed of film makers, many of whom were attending their first event of this kind, were less than pleased by what they saw as their exclusion from the `canon' in the keynote addresses by Luke Gibbons and Kevin Rockett" - a point which he chooses not to challenge.
I still believe that the Virginia conference reflected a lack of engagement by the critical academic community with current Irish film making practice. The central point of the article was that there has been little or no considered academic analysis or published work on the subject in the 1990s, with the exception of some work from the University of Ulster. That point still stands. As to his remarks about my "writing as a professional journalist", the article was clearly a critical intervention, for which I make no apologies (as far as I'm concerned, I wrote the Film Ireland article as a professional journalist as well). - Yours etc
Donnybrook,
Dublin 4.
