Film the secret of roan inish

Feature Filmint. Issue 24 Fantasizing the real: The Secret of Roan Inish By Mark Bould Keywords John Sayles, The Secret of Roan Inish, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, realism, naturalism, the fantastic, social totality, Utopia Left Grandfather Hugh (Mick Lally) 28 | film international issue 24 Below Saved from the sea The Secret of Roan Inish Where the prospective horizon is omitted, reality only appears as become, as dead, and it is the dead, namely the naturalists and the empiricists, who are burying their dead here. (Ernst Bloch 1986: 223) AMO N G J O H N S AY L E S ’ S films, The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) is something of an anomaly. Coming between the two films in which Sayles refined his technique for telling complexly interwoven realist melodramas containing dozens of important characters – City of Hope (1991), a detailed portrait of a fictional New Jersey city being assetstripped by a declining power bloc, and Lone Star (1996), a border-town murder-mystery whose solution reaches back decades – it is even more surprising. Based on Rosalie K. Fry’s 1957 children’s fantasy novel Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry (aka Child of the Western Isles), it is set on the west coast of Ireland shortly after World War II. It tells of the return of Fiona Coneelly (Jeni Courtney) from the city to live with her grandparents, Hugh (Mick Lally) and Tess (Eileen Colgan), and their subsequent return to Roan Inish, an island they had earlier evacuated when the younger families relocated to the mainland. When they left Roan Inish, Fiona’s infant brother Jamie (Cillian Byrne) was swept out to sea in his boat-like cradle and lost. Taken and raised by the selkies, he is being held hostage against the family’s return. Such fantastic material seems a very long way from Say- Feature Roan Inish les’s typical concerns with the realist depiction (and critique) of contemporary American life and the complexities of material social being under capitalism.1 This essay will offer an overview of Sayles’s work, and then argue for the centrality of Roan Inish, despite its seeming incongruity. Mapping totalities In Sayles’s films, even the most minor of characters is usually connected to the multiply-stranded narrative at several points, giving the sense that he or she is central to a story whose edges we merely glimpse at those moments when it intersects with the film’s narrative. This refusal to reduce minor characters to mere plot-functions is essential to Sayles’s ability to create a sense of a world much vaster and more complex than the narrative can contain, and to his consistent attempts – rare in contemporary cinema, let alone Hollywood – to depict a social totality. Derived from Hegel via Marx, the idea of totality is most evocatively captured by Lenin: ‘[The] refusal to reduce minor characters to mere plot-functions is essential to Sayles’s ability to create a sense of a world much vaster and more complex than the narrative can contain’ A river and the drops in this river. The position of every drop, its relation to the others; its connections with the others; the direction of its movement; its speed; the line of the movement – straight, curved, circular, etc. – upwards, downwards. The sum of the movement. (Lenin 1961: 146 [original emphasis]) Limbo And some sense of the totality underlies Brecht’s argument that: it is not worth the writer’s while, to simplify his problems so much that the immense, complicated, actual life-process of human beings in the age of the final struggle between the bourgeois and the proletarian class, is reduced to a ‘plot’, setting, or background for the creation of great individuals. Individuals should not occupy much more space in books and above all not a different kind of space, than in reality … for us, individuals emerge from a depiction of the processes of human co-existence.