Neil Jordan

The unprecedented economic growth and immigration that Ireland experienced between 1995 and 2007 did not only challenge national but also ethnic, social, and gender identities. The contributions to this volume explore how films tackle these challenges and help to make sense of Ireland’s altered position in a globalised world. Among the films discussed are some of the most critically acclaimed Irish films of recent years, including Once (2006), Adam & Paul (2004), Garage (2007), and The Secret of Kells (2009), as well as the work of Oscar-winning director and writer Neil Jordan. The volume is completed by an extensive interview with award-winning director Lenny Abrahamson, and his collaborator, screenwriter and actor Mark O’Halloran.

Angela Carter is best known for her novels, short fiction and journalism, but she also produced a substantial body of writing for media other than the printed page, including five radio plays, two film adaptations, an original television documentary and a number of unrealized scripts for stage and screen. Despite increasing academic interest in Carter's work, these dramatic writings have largely been ignored. In this book, Charlotte Crofts redresses this lack of critical attention by examining Carter's dramatic writings together for the first time (including two unpublished works), giving them a more central position in the Carter canon

You can read an excerpt of the book here:http://books.google.com/books?id=RsMnIC72qC0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=anagrams&ie=ISO-8859-1&cd=9&source=gbs_gdata#v=onepage&q&f=false

Cited in Jack Zipes (2010), The Enchanted Screen, The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films; Susanne Gruss (2009), The pleasure of the feminist text, reading Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter and Laura Di Michele (2005) Shakespeare, una "Tempesta" dopo l'altra

It seems rather difficult to imagine creatures of classic horror films, such as the monster of Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolfman or Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde as icons that an audience could admire and understand empathetically. Furthermore, the sins these monsters represent are recognised immediately as reprehensible, punishable and worst of all, unattractive. This is perhaps the reason as to why their appearance and themes in film have remained practically unchanged throughout their different iterations. Vampire films on the other hand are a different case altogether, as they are so varied in their themes that they have managed to become a film genre of their own.

Vampires have fascinated generations of cinemagoers; with depictions of hideous vampires such as the rat-like Count Orlock in Nosferatu (1922), to the silent and sensualised Christopher Lee's Horror of Dracula (1958). These creatures have taken a hold of audiences all over the world.

These vampire films would later go on to inspire a generation of filmmakers to pose the question of what it could mean for a human to become a vampire. As a result of this question the humanisation of the vampire was made possible. This change has altered entirely the vampire film genre and it provided the films -notably during the 1980s and 1990s- with a different narrative. In these films the vampire's role as the villain is not so clear anymore and the monster becomes the protagonist to the detriment of its victims. However, the vampire remains the representation of evil whilst allowing the audience to experience the power of the vampire.

The fantasies vampires represent are those of sex, control of others and of nature and ultimately of guilt-free power. Jeffrey Weinstock observes in his work The Vampire Film, Undead Cinema: "What cinematic vampires have arguably done for much of their existence is to provide representations of tabooed sexuality in order to establish and reinforce proper sexual roles." (Weinstock, 2012: 8). It is precisely this idea that filmmakers and writers alike, employed to convey the attraction of becoming one of the undead, the possibility of enjoying an eternal life free of moral and physical boundaries.

The film industry adapted Dracula for first time in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). This adaptation inherited Victorian models of horror literature, thus, it carried in its narrative the repression against the vampire's unnatural sexual behaviour. The Count's appearance did nothing but emphasise the horror of that which is both forbidden and unknown.

It is precisely the forbidden nature of the vampire, which helped filmmakers to make them so appealing in the films of the 1980s. The vampire then becomes the figure of the renegade, helping those members of the audience who consider themselves different, or 'not normal' to identify themselves with this new generation of bloodsuckers. Milly Williamson explains this idea in her book The Lure of the Vampire: "Thus the vampire is no longer an expression of terror, it is the expression of the outcast and this helps to explain its enormous popularity" (Williamson, 2005, 183).

There was yet another dramatic change to the vampire's narrative with the poorly critically received Twilight (2008). This iteration is perhaps one of its most puzzling transformations. This creature of unfathomable and uncontrollable power appears in these films to be submissive to the desires of what would have been its prey. 

It is the idea of the romanticised vampire that fuels this work. The primary aim of this project is to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the vampire with regards to human fantasies of power. This will allow me to understand the reason as to why this supernatural creature has changed so much throughout its different iterations in film.

In order to do this I will use a textual analysis on a series of films as well as academic texts to better analyse the libertine nature of the vampire and the repressive narrative in its different films.

"Drawing together a wide range of focused critical commentary and observation by internationally renowned scholars and writers, this collection of essays offers a major reassessment of Aidan Higgins’s body of work almost fifty years after the appearance of his first book, Felo De Se. Authors like Annie Proulx, John Banville, Derek Mahon, Dermot Healy, and Higgins himself, represented by a previously uncollected essay, offer a variety of critical and creative commentaries, while scholars such as Keith Hopper, Peter van de Kamp, George O’Brien, and Gerry Dukes contribute exciting new perspectives on all aspects of Higgins’s writing, including his radio plays, his critical work, and the Harold Pinter film adaptation of Langrishe, Go Down. Langrishe too is revisited, while convincing cases are made for the major significance of later novels such as Bornholm Night-Ferry and Lions of the Grunewald, as well as Higgins’s unorthodox trilogy of autobiographies. This collection confirms the enduring significance of Aidan Higgins as one of the major writers of our time, and also offers testament that Higgins’s work is being rediscovered by a new generation of critics and writers.


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VAMPIRE: MASKED IDENTITY, HIDDEN DEATH
The cinema has rapidly and in grand style absorbed the novel character of vampire Dracula, the dual creature combining the features of man and monster, a dead man and living person. The imagination of F. W. Murnau, W. Herzog, F. F. Coppola, T. Scott or N. Jordan has helped spectators get acquainted with a whole bunch of vampires. In the essay, Wałaszewski attempts to identify the source of fascination with vampires. He claims that the character expresses duality of the temptations of immortality and punishment, transgression of man's condition and an infringement of the laws of nature (lack of mirror reflection, sucking people's blood). According to Wałaszewski, this duality is a trap set for the first time by Bram Stoker's "Dracula"in 1897. In line with the folklore tradition, Stoker's vampires raising from tombs force us to symbolically face man's most primeval fear; an encounter with the death-heralding look-alikes. The cinema has turned the vampire into a character from pantheon of dreams about immortality.

At its most fundamental level, a nation is simply a substantial group of people who share and acknowledge some cultural trait that binds them together meaningfully. Claims of nationhood can result from shared history, shared language, shared beliefs, shared location, or some combination of these and other factors. The selection of contemporary novels and films we will read this selection will survey not only the positive value of such communal impulses but also the darker aspects of nationhood, in particular the difficulty of peacefully integrating competing nation-based identities into meaningfully pluralistic societies.

In his chapter “David Copperfield’s Home Movies,” published in the book collection Dickens on Screen, John Bowen illustrates “how David Copperfield narrates scenes of memory in quasi-filmic ways, and how these ways are implicated in questions of male sexual identity, which it explores through various kinds of fetishism, voyeurism, sadism, and sexual transgression” (29). This paper takes Bowen’s essay as an invitation to explore another, more playful side of filmic/novelistic gender-construction, in part by reading the novel David Copperfield retrospectively via a film on which it had, I believe, a special influence: Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto, based on the novel by Patrick McCabe. Jordan’s film, I will argue, both draws upon this already inherently filmic/novelistic play with gender in David Copperfield and also engages it in “queer interpretation and enquiry”  in such a way as potentially to revise the way we read gender constitution in the Victorian novel.

1916 marked an important moment in the development of modern Ireland. The continuing resonance of the Republican Rising that took place in that year was evident in the now much quoted editorial of The Irish Times (18 Nov 2010) the day after it was announced Ireland was to receive a financial bailout from the EU and IMF. "Was it for this?" the editorial asked, "the men of 1916 died." However, the Rising was but one of a range of significant events in 1916. Beyond the political sphere, 1916
marked the publication of James Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and also saw the foundation of Ireland's first indigenous film production company, The Film
Company of Ireland, whose co-founder James Mark Sullivan was arrested after the Rising and charged with complicity. 1916 was also the year in which Ireland was aligned to Greenwich
Mean Time for the first time, supplanting Dublin Mean Time, bringing the island temporally closer to the rest of the United Kingdom in the same year that would mark an important point in the changing political relationship between the UK and Ireland.
Towards 2016: 1916 and Irish Literature, Culture & Society is cognisant of the multiple perspectives
and events that are associated with 1916 in Ireland and their continuing relevance to Irish literature, culture and society. The collection considers a broad range of cultural forms and societal issues, including politics, theatre, traditional music, poetry, James Joyce, greyhound sports, graphic novels, contemporary fiction, documentary, language, political representation, and the Irish economy with contributions from both emerging academics and established scholars. Also featured is an interview with acclaimed film director and novelist Neil Jordan (conducted by novelist Patrick McCabe) on his life and work, including his biopic Michael Collins (1996), a work which includes one of the most memorable renderings of the Rising and its aftermath. Among the questions considered in the collection are: What were the formative influences on one of leaders of the Rising, James Connolly? What effect had the Rising on Ireland's fledgling labour movement? What impact did the Rising have on the Abbey and Irish theatre? What connects 1916, James Joyce, and the Cuban Revolution? What is the relevance of 1916 to Irish traditional music? What place has 1916 in contemporary Irish fiction and poetry? What are the relations between the Rising, sequential art, popular culture, and memory? A century after the 1916 Proclamation spoke of equality between women and men, could Ireland be finally about to realise equal gender distribution in politics? Does 'Irish sovereignty', a central concern of the Rising leaders, have any relevance for Ireland in the contemporary globalised and European Union context?

This article demonstrates that two films of the 1990s portraying historical figures central to the mythologies of their respective nations - Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996) and Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) - present their contentious versions of history analogically, via the conventional modes of encoding and representing gender identified by Laura Mulvey and others. Michael Collins can make an argument about the fate of twentieth-century Ireland in terms enabled by contemporary discussions about gender and desire in homosocial configurations. The character Michael Collins is understood as the bearer of spectatorial gaze and will; murdered, he represents the extinguishing of the spectatorial identity and of a potential future for the new-born Irish state. The character of Elizabeth I likewise embodies the fate of England. Woman’s ‘natural’ filmic place is the frozen, two-dimensional realm of the fetish, and so the final image of Elizabeth represents a relief that is both narrative and symbolic: woman rightly placed - the Queen be-fetished - implies the success of the nation beyond the film. The historical argument made in Elizabeth is therefore made in quintessentially cinematic terms: the story of the young female ruler becomes an illustration of the fate of woman herself in narrative cinema.

A imagem do vampiro na cultura popular costuma abarcar diferentes ideias e descrições, desde uma concepção de origem mitológica/folclórica, remetendo a lendas russas, gregas, indianas e outras, até a mídia audiovisual contemporânea, que cria e recria mitos e nos oferece vampiros de diversos feitios. O trabalho proposto aborda o filme Entrevista com o Vampiro, dirigido por Neil Jordan e lançado em 1994, inspirado no livro de mesmo nome, publicado por Anne Rice em 1976, em língua inglesa. Diante de postulados de Vernet (2012), consideramos essa obra um filme de cinema narrativo, com uma forte representação social, veiculando representações da contemporaneidade. Como objetivo de compreendermos a representação da figura do vampiro, observamos na obra cinematográfica de Neil Jordan a transformação do humano para o vampiro do personagem Louis Pointe du Lac, personagem principal e narrador da história, para identificarmos como Jordan cria sua visão de vampiro: diferente do tradicional; que procura conhecimento de si e do mundo; que busca entender sua função no mundo, um sentido para a vida; apresenta problemáticas típicas do homem, com questões de cunho filosófico e moral, atormentado por sua consciência, tendo como pano de fundo as mudanças dos séculos. Para fornecer o devido embasamento teórico-crítico, o trabalho se ampara em proposições de Aumont (2012), Vernet (2012), Melton (2011) e Garcia (2015).

In the 1990s, Irish society was changing and becoming increasingly international due to the rise of the 'Celtic Tiger'. At the same time, the ongoing peace process in Northern Ireland also fuelled debates on the definition of Irishness, which in turn seemed to call for a critical examination of the birth of the Irish State, as well as a rethinking and re-assessment of the nationalist past. Neil Jordan's 'Michael Collins' (1996), the most commercially successful and talked-about Irish film of the 1990s, was a timely contributor to this process. In providing a large-scale representation of the 1916-1922 period, 'Michael Collins' became the subject of critical and popular controversy, demonstrating that cinema could play a part in this cultural reimagining of Ireland.
Locating the film in both its historical and its cinematic context, this book explores the depiction of events in 'Michael Collins' and the film's participation in the process of reimagining Irishness through its public reception. The portrayal of the key figures of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera comes under special scrutiny as the author assesses this pivotal piece of Irish history on screen.

This article explores the presentation of the body of the terrorist in a range of British and American films with a particular emphasis on how these films combine political and romantic plotlines. As part of a broad consideration of how the terrorist is presented, this essay will concentrate in particular on Cal (1984), The Crying Game (1992), The Dancer Upstairs (2002) and The Quiet American (2002). Rather than fully engage with the more complex discourse of politics, often these films ask audiences to conceptualize the transgressive figure of the terrorist through the very familiar vocabulary of love and sexual desire. Some accounts of this process have tended to underestimate the significance of the body in relation to political contexts and this essay will seek to redress this imbalance. While appropriating the versions of the traditional romantic plot as a means of humanizing the terrorist, these films create a vision in which normative heterosexuality is a sphere of confusion, failure and destruction. We conclude with a discussion of how The Siege (1998) and Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) follow different but related trajectories to the dominant model explored in this essay.

A feminist re-reading of Neil Jordan's film adaptation of Angela Carter's The Company of Wolve, cited by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes in The Enchanted Screen, The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films, Taylor and Francis, 2010:
http://www.isbnlib.com/preview/0415990629/The-Enchanted-Screen-The-Unknown-History-of-Fairy-Tale-Films
"As Charlotte Crofts points out in her astute essay, the film's foregrounding of storytelling serves a double function, first by contextualizing the violent ..."