Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- Part 1a Mapping Cinematic Journeys: Chronotopes of Journeys
- 1 Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity
- 2 Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film
- 3 Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth
- 4 Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
- 5 Memories, Notebooks, Roads: The Essayistic Journey in Time and Space
- Part 1b Expanding Europe: Interstitial Production and Border-crossing in Eastern European Cinema
- 6 Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors: Representations of Estonian Mass Deportations of the 1940s in In the Crosswind and Body Memory
- 7 The Holocaust and the Cinematic Landscapes of Postmemory in Lithuania, Hungary and Ukraine
- 8 Hesitant Journeys: Fugitive and Migrant Narratives in the New Romanian Cinema
- 9 Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions
- Part 2a Form and Narrative in Journey Genres
- 10 The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise
- 11 Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films
- 12 Gothic Journeys: Travel and Transportation in the Films of Terence Fisher
- 13 Transnational Productions and Regional Funding: Bordercrossing, European Locations and the Case of Contemporary Horror
- Part 2b The Politics of the Road Movie
- 14 Colonialism in Latin American Road Movies
- 15 Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie
- 16 Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie
- Index
4 - Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction
- Part 1a Mapping Cinematic Journeys: Chronotopes of Journeys
- 1 Global Visions: Around-the-World Travel and Visual Culture in Early Modernity
- 2 Brief Encounters: The Railway Station on Film
- 3 Diasporic Dreams and Shattered Desires: Displacement, Identity and Tradition in Heaven on Earth
- 4 Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín’s Innisfree
- 5 Memories, Notebooks, Roads: The Essayistic Journey in Time and Space
- Part 1b Expanding Europe: Interstitial Production and Border-crossing in Eastern European Cinema
- 6 Shadows of Unforgotten Ancestors: Representations of Estonian Mass Deportations of the 1940s in In the Crosswind and Body Memory
- 7 The Holocaust and the Cinematic Landscapes of Postmemory in Lithuania, Hungary and Ukraine
- 8 Hesitant Journeys: Fugitive and Migrant Narratives in the New Romanian Cinema
- 9 Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions
- Part 2a Form and Narrative in Journey Genres
- 10 The Sense of an Ending: Music, Time and Romance in Before Sunrise
- 11 Moving in Circles: Kinetic Elite and Kinetic Proletariat in ‘End of the World’ Films
- 12 Gothic Journeys: Travel and Transportation in the Films of Terence Fisher
- 13 Transnational Productions and Regional Funding: Bordercrossing, European Locations and the Case of Contemporary Horror
- Part 2b The Politics of the Road Movie
- 14 Colonialism in Latin American Road Movies
- 15 Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie
- 16 Sic transit: The Serial Killer Road Movie
- Index
Summary
In 1988 José Luis Guerín took a film crew from Spain to the western coast of Ireland, in search of the filming locations of John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952). The resultant film, Innisfree (1990), blends documentary with fiction, and the present with the past, to seemingly uncover the physical, cultural and spectral remnants of the Hollywood production in this small rural locality. Innisfree is both the product of a journey (the Spanish filmmaker's fannish field trip) and the representation of several journeys and returns. This essay will examine Guerín's depiction of the ghostly persistence of The Quiet Man in the landscape, by using Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope to identify the lasting significance of real and imagined time-spaces in the cinematic landscape. Just as immigrant Irishman Sean Thornton (John Wayne) returns to his spiritual homeland from Pittsburgh, USA to reclaim his family land, Ford himself returns to the land of his parents’ birth. In Innisfree Thornton’s, Ford's and Guerín's imagined Irelands all mingle and intertwine in a confusing crossroads of time, fiction, memory and landscape.
Fragments
The narrative and temporal structure of Innisfree is complex. Its form defeats conventional, linear, coherent approaches to critical analysis. Therefore, this essay will adopt something of the lane-hopping, timetravelling, fragmentary structure of the film. It calls for a mixture of rudimentary, pragmatic analysis and impressionistic theory. Perhaps we should begin with the former. We might identify the main timelines and storylines as follows:
a. 1988, the present day of the production, when the Spanish film crew document the people, places and customs of Cong, Co. Galway, Ireland.
b. 1951, the shooting of The Quiet Man in Cong and other locations around the west of Ireland, encountered through behind-the-scenes and personal photographs, and the recounted tales and memories of the Cong residents.
c. 1927, the Inisfree of The Quiet Man, a forged geography constructed of a variety of locations around Cong. Sean Thornton (John Wayne), an Irish immigrant, returns from Pittsburgh after killing a man in the boxing ring. He seeks a peaceful life in the family home his mother spoke of. He falls in love with local woman Mary-Kate Danaher (Maureen O’Hara) but her brother ‘Red’ Will proves to be an obstacle to their happiness.
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- Journeys on ScreenTheory, Ethics, Aesthetics, pp. 70 - 85Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018