The Field Day Podcast

The Field Day Podcast

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The Field Day Podcast episodes

  • Episode #22: Mark Dearey on Nuclear Power in Ireland and Britain
    How has the Irish Sea become the most polluted sea in the world?

    Sellafield is on the English coast, to the east of the Isle of Man.

    The answer lies in the north west of England, where the Sellafield site has poured millions of tonnes of nuclear waste into the sea since the 1950s. Like the history of nuclear power plants around the world, its history is one of spills, accidents, poor regulation and cover-ups.
    In this interview, we talk to one of Sellafield’s long-time critics, Mark Dearey.
    If we view Britain’s nuclear power programme as part of its military complex, it becomes easier to understand how the activities in Sellafield and elsewhere have run unchecked for so long. Even today, as Mark points out, the British nuclear industry enjoys the most advantageous institutional context in the world when it comes to planning, fast-tracking and government support.
    As for Ireland, where energy policy is short-sighted, disorganised and expensive, is there a prospect of going for nuclear as a way of meeting carbon emissions targets? 
    Mark also addresses the problems of bringing green policies into effect in democratic systems.
    There’s a massive risk that authoritarianism could creep into green politics globally.

    Mark Dearey

    As an environmental activist, and until recently a local politician, Mark has been a leading voice of protest about pollution from the Sellafield site. He was one of a group of four plaintiffs from the Dundalk region who brought landmark court cases against the British nuclear industry in the 1990s. Since then, he has been an authoritative voice on energy issues on the Irish scene. He knows the nuclear arguments well, from both sides of the debate, and argues that nuclear energy’s true cost is never calculated by its supporters.

    The post Episode #22: Mark Dearey on Nuclear Power in Ireland and Britain appeared first on Field Day.

    52 min
  • Episode #21: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey – “A Terrible State o’ Chassis”
    We are seeing Ireland north and south being sold to corporate powers
    Bernadette Devlin McAliskey is Ireland’s finest political orator, and a key figure in recent political history.
    In this lecture she takes as her theme a line from playwright Sean O’Casey, ‘A Terrible State o’ Chassis’, where chassis means ‘crisis’.

    Bernadette Devlin (later Devlin McAliskey) as a 22-year old psychology student and People’s Democracy candidate, in Belfast.

    While still a student at Queen’s University, she and her colleagues in the newly-formed People’s Democracy transformed political resistance in the Northern Irish statelet by spearheading a socialist, anti-sectarian, mass movement for change.
    In 1969 she became the youngest woman ever to enter the Westminster parliament, having become a leading organizer on the barricades in Derry during the Battle of the Bogside.
    The following year, when Mayor John Lindsay awarded her with a golden key to the city of New York, she passed it on to the Black Panther party, saying ‘I return what is rightfully theirs, this symbol of the freedom of New York.’
    ‘Bernadette’ as she is still known, currently works supporting migrants’ rights in South Tyrone and remains an iconoclast, a speaker of truth to power, and the unforgettable voice of the Troubles.
    ‘A Terrible State o’ Chassis’ was the 2nd Annual Seamus Deane Lecture, hosted by Field Day, at the Playhouse, Derry, on 30 September 2016. A video of the lecture has attracted an enormous number of views, so we are making it available to our podcast listeners here.
    The Seamus Deane Lecture Series brings to Derry and other Irish cities some of the world’s leading artists and thinkers who have the potential to make the city an international centre of intellectual discovery every year. Listen back to all the lectures here.

     

    The post Episode #21: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey – “A Terrible State o’ Chassis” appeared first on Field Day.

    53 min
  • Episode #20: Seamus Deane on Georg Lukács
    One of many prophets who forecast the disasters of modernism, but one of the few who did it from the left.
    Georg Lukács was one of the leading European literary critics of the 20th century. His life story was entangled with the political storms that swept across his native Hungary – communist revolution, reaction, fascism, global war and Stalinism.

    Georg Lukács’s study in Budapest

    Lukács, who wrote in German and Hungarian (his name is also written as György Lukács), was in the German literary and philosophical tradition. He was a theorist of the aesthetic, and a Marxist who sought to define and defend the role of artistic practice in the social world.
    In this interview, Seamus Deane discusses Lukács’s landmark writings on European novelists such as Scott, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Mann. At the core of Lukács’s project was the problem of understanding how the great  tradition of German rationalism slid into the darkness of ‘irrational intuitionism’ that marked the fascist period in particular.
    For Lukács, the clearest indicator of the disintegration of all that was good about Europe, including communism as a utopian possibility, was the disintegration of the novel itself. The subjectivist, solipsistic styles of Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Beckett made it impossible to see the totality of relationships that make up society. The destruction of the novel form was directly connected, he believed, to the dissolution of all hope of the possibility of transformation and rebirth.
    Deane ends his discussion by commenting on the precarious state of the Lukács Archives in Budapest, which have been threatened with closure, in line with the anti-intellectualism and anti-semitism of the Orbán government (Lukács was from a Jewish family).

    Literary critic and novelist Seamus Deane.

    Seamus Deane is a founding member of Field Day. He is emeritus Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published many books in Irish literary criticism, and was the General Editor of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991, 2002). He is the author of the Booker-nominated novel Reading in the Dark (1996).

    The post Episode #20: Seamus Deane on Georg Lukács appeared first on Field Day.

    48 min
  • Episode #19: Ciara Chambers on Irish Newsreels
    From the 1910s to the 1950s, newsreels were the only source of non-fictional moving images available to the public.
    Many samples of this forgotten genre survive. Now researchers are uncovering a whole new set of archival sources that nuance and illustrate the history of Ireland in the first half of the 20th century.

    Dublin 1916. A screenshot from ‘Sinn Fein Rising: Liberty Hall Part 1’ by Pathé, available on the Irish Film Institute video player. Links below.

    Ciara Chambers is one of those researchers, and the leading authority on the newsreels screened to people throughout Ireland. These newsreels cover an extremely tumultuous era in Irish history: the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, partition, the Civil War, and the first decades of the two new political entities on the island. And, of course, the newsreels cover the period of the two World Wars.
    As Ciara Chambers explains, the dominant newsreel companies on the Irish circuit were British. This meant that nearly all material watched by Irish audiences was coloured by the British worldview. But the story is more fine-grained than that – it turns out that stories were sometimes altered, added or omitted to suit unionist viewers in the north, or independence-minded viewers in the south. And when stories clashed with the lived reality of viewers in the south, they weren’t shy about raising their objections.
    The conversation here will be of huge interest for those interested in Ireland’s current decade of centenaries.

    Feargus Denman and Ciara Chambers

    Ciara Chambers is the authority on the history of Irish newsreels. She has worked on a range of archival and digitization projects with the Irish Film Archive, Northern Ireland Screen, Belfast Exposed Photography, UTV, BBC, and the British Universities Film and Video Council. She was also the associate producer on ‘Éire na Nuachtscannán ‘ (‘Ireland in the Newsreels’), a 6-part television series broadcast on TG4. She is Lecturer in Contemporary Film and Screen Media in the Department of Film Studies in University College Cork.

    Resources Mentioned in the Episode:
    • ‘Éire na Nuachtscannán‘ (‘Ireland in the Newsreels’), 6-part TV series by TG4. In English and Irish.
    • The Irish Independence Film Collection, on the Irish Film Institute video player.
    • Ireland in the Newsreels, book by Ciara Chambers published by Irish Academic Press.
      Sources:
      All materials used here are for educational purposes only.
      The screenshot used above is from the Pathé newsreel Sinn Fein Rising Liberty Hall Part 1, which may be viewed here:

      https://ifiplayer.ie/sinn-fein-rising-liberty-hall-part-1/

      Extracts from the soundtracks of two newsreels by Pathé are used in this episode, for educational purposes only:
      Settling In – American Troops in Northern Ireland (Pathé, 1942)
      Spectacular Parade in Dublin (Pathé, 1941)
      These and many other archival items may be viewed on British Pathé’s online channel www.britishpathe.tv

      The post Episode #19: Ciara Chambers on Irish Newsreels appeared first on Field Day.

      52 min
    • Episode #18 Roddy Flynn and Tony Tracy on Irish Film
      In 2013, Roddy Flynn and Tony Tracy had a bright idea. Why not make a statistical analysis of Irish film?
      This conversation explores the surprising things they found out.

      Tony Tracy (left) and Roddy Flynn

      Flynn and Tracy’s data-driven approach focuses particularly on the Irish Film Board and the projects it has supported. In this insightful and entertaining commentary, they explore the connections between Irish and global screen culture and  put their research into the context of the ever more frequent waves of change that wash over screen production in Ireland.
      Why is it, they ask, that very few directors ever manage to go on to make a second film? Why did the chronic underrepresentation of women in the industry suddenly rise to the top of the agenda in the mid 2010s? How many films and TV shows that have been made in Ireland actually Irish? Who gets to decide? Has the Irish Film Board been a success or a failure?
      The most difficult but crucial task of all is working out what an indigenous film industry is for. Perhaps the old bugbear of Irish identity has finally been set aside as the big issue for Irish filmmaking, as director Lenny Abrahamson once suggested:
      Irish cinema got a lot better when it stopped thinking about what it means to be Irish
      This recording was made in June 2018, one week after the referendum on abortion in Ireland, which is referred to on a couple of occasions. It is also worth noting that the Irish Film Board was re-named Screen Ireland two weeks after this recording.

      Tony Tracy lectures in the Huston School of Film and Digital Media at NUI Galway. Roddy Flynn lectures in the School of Communications in Dublin City University. Among many other activities, they are regular contributors to Estudios Irlandeses – Journal of Irish Studies, where much of their research on this topic has been first published. Together, they have written the Historical Dictionary of Irish Cinema, which Rowman and Littlefield will publish later in 2019.

      The post Episode #18 Roddy Flynn and Tony Tracy on Irish Film appeared first on Field Day.

      1 hr
    • Episode #17 Jonathan Rayner on the Mad Max Films
      This is a threshold moment, Johnny.

      Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth instalment in the Mad Max franchise

      The Mad Max world teeters on the edge of reason and on the edge of existence. It is difficult to think of a more highly-charged and high-octane film franchise that has reached a mass global audience. The four iconic films are among the most recognisable and influential movies of the past few decades. Writer on Australian cinema, Jonathan Rayner, explains what is special about these films, how they came to be, and what they have come to mean both at home and across the world.
      He describes the endless desert roads of Mad Max, a place where violence awaits and where, perhaps, the sublime is to be glimpsed. The first Mad Max film came out 40 years ago, born of an Australian film policy that was looking for indigenous and authentically Australian stories and content.
      Did they get what they were looking for? Did they even know what they were looking for?

      French poster for the first Mad Max film (1979)

      The weird mashup of science fiction and Hollywood westerns, TV cop shows and punk aesthetics established a look and feel for dystopian futures that are still to be found in film today. The 40-year progress of the franchise also provide a revealing lens through which to observe important trends in the recent history of cinema.
       This is the first of several film-themed podcast episodes from us at Field Day. In the next couple of months, you can look forward to a critique of Irish state policy in relation to film, a history of Irish newsreels, and a preview of a documentary on the Satanic Panic that visited the streets of Belfast in the early 1970s.
      Jonathan Rayner is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of an authoritative history of Australian cinema, Contemporary Australian Cinema (2000), and of books on the directors Michael Mann and of Peter Weir. He is also an authority on naval war film, while his recent focus has been on landscape in film.
      This interview was recorded during the International Conference on Landscape and Cinema, held in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon. The conference was hosted by the Centre for Comparative Studies.

      The post Episode #17 Jonathan Rayner on the Mad Max Films appeared first on Field Day.

      46 min
    • Episode #16 Mark O’Connell on Posthumanists and Preppers
      What is society going to look like if you have a certain number of people living forever? Mark O’Connell is best known for his bestselling, prizewinnng To Be A Machine. In that book, he describes various fringe projects around the world dedicated to extending human life as much as possible. In this interview, he connects […]
      52 min
    • Episode #15 Barry McCrea on Modernism and Minor Languages
      “The language we speak is always borrowed. We don’t invent it ourselves.  It comes from somebody else.” Some modernist writers in search of a way out of their alienation found that leaving their own native languages offered a new freedom. Professor of Comparative Literature Barry McCrea explores the unexpected choices that helped some find a […]
      58 min
    • Episode #13: Michael Mary Murphy on the Irish Music Industry
      The first million-seller in the global music industry was the sheet music of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies. Using this as his starting point, music historian and industry insider Michael Mary Murphy shows that there are long chains of cause and effect that run through the history of Irish popular music from 19th-century ballads to 21st-century […]
      51 min

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