Our closing event is a very special screening of Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s remarkable impressionistic survey of the Irish emigrant experience On a Paving Stone Mounted (1978), featuring contributions from Stephen Rea, Miriam Margolyes, Gabriel Byrne, Mannix Flynn, and Christy Moore.
We are honoured to welcome Thaddeus O’Sullivan for a Q&A after the screening led by film critic and programmer Ruairí McCann
“Funded by the BFI’s film production fund, On A Paving Stone Mounted is O’Sullivan’s feature-length, mixed-mode experimental film. It tries to express the emigrant condition through the central dilemma of the function of memory. Its action moves back and forth between location sequences shot in London, Croagh Patrick and Dublin. The editing resists continuity; much use is made of subjective camera work; and there is no controlling narrator device to provide the viewer with a linear structure. The structure expresses the processes of perception and memory-work. As O’Sullivan himself has noted: “[Memories are]… not simply the ‘past’ but a production of remembrance by the emigrant”. The film is formally framed by two scenes of presentation and story-telling, featuring an author-raconteur at the beginning and the professional seanchaí at the end. In contrast the film offers up non-professional voices that self-consciously address the discursive terrain of Anglo-Irish stereotypes, highly charged in the late 1970s. But paradoxically, for all its use of different story-telling modes, the film itself is recalcitrantly non-narrative.”
(Notes by Lance Pettitt sourced from the Irish Film Institute)
FILM INFO:
Thaddeus O’Sullivan, On a Paving Stone Mounted, U.K., Ireland, 1978, Black and White, 16mm, 96 minutes
THADDEUS O’SULLIVAN
Thaddeus O’Sullivan was born in Dublin in 1947 and emigrated to London in 1966 where he remained to make his life and career. After working in various jobs, he studied at Ealing College of Art and then took an MA in Film at the Royal College of Art. His early films were experimental, “structuralist”, mixed mode films that often explored how the memory works, particularly amongst the emigrant Irish in Britain. He has worked in the British and Irish film and TV industries since the late-1970s as an accomplished cinematographer, with many periods in the USA. His early films, from 1975 – 1985 include Flanagan, A Pint Of Plain, The Woman Who Married Clark Gable, On a Paving Stone Mounted and Assembled Memories: Jack B Yeats. Many notable feature films followed, including December Bride (1989), Nothing Personal (1995), Witness to the Mob (1999), Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000), The Heart of Me (2003), Into the Storm (2008) and Stella Days (2011). He has also worked extensively in Television, as a director on dramas including Call The Midwife, Silent Witness, Vera, The Crimson Field and Shetland. O’Sullivan has enjoyed success in America, making Witness to the Mob (1998) with Robert De Niro’s production company and the TV movie Into the Storm (2009), which starred Brendan Gleeson as Winston Churchill. Into The Storm was nominated for 14 Emmys. Thaddeus has been an award winner at the European Film Awards, the IFTAs and numerous film festivals and his works have also been nominated for a BAFTA and an Emmy.
RUAIRÍ MCCANN
Ruairí McCann is a film critic, programmer, illustrator and musician from County Sligo and Belfast. He’s the co-editor of the film journal and virtual cinematheque Ultra Dogme and his writing can be found on aemi online, BOMB, Defector, Documentary Magazine, photogénie, Screen Slate, Senses of Cinema and Sight & Sound, among other publications. His current projects include a longform oral history on the ‘First Wave’ of independent Irish Cinema of the 60s, 70s and 80s.
