Man about Dog

Man About Dog (2004) is an Irish comedy-caper-road-movie about three Northern wide-boys who mange to get their hands on a prizewinning greyhound. They travel from North to South in pursuit of their fortune chased by a big-shot greyhound breeder and a group of Irish travelers, who are intent on claiming their winnings. In the film many aspects of narrative structure, theme and visual style that have come to be identified with New Irish (1) intersect, tracing key developments in Irish cinema at large and in particular, the ongoing relationship between southern and Northern Ireland since the re-activation of Bord Scannan na hEireann/Irish Film Board in 1993. This film reveals how identity politics and film narratives have shifted significantly during this period, with the emphasis on the 'national' being, in more recent times, eschewed. While the discourse of national identity has served Irish film well over a long period, providing a cogent methodology for examining Irish cinema's First Wave (1975-1989), off-shore (2) and foreign productions over the past 30 years, its value to the analysis of contemporary indigenous film-making is less pronounced. Film-makers in Ireland today appear less concerned with the exploration of national identity; contemporary Irish cinema reveals an identity formation that is more aligned to mainstream popular culture relying on cultural universals rather than specificities. Where identity is specific, it is at the level of consumer products that cross easily between national borders, mainstream cinema being one of the dominant cultural underpinnings. Many of the transformations in style and content within Irish film over the last decade or so can be surveyed microscopically in the film Man About Dog--illustrating developments in the macroscopic practices of New Irish Cinema at large. Man About Dog can be categorised as a post cease-fire film, whereby the North of Ireland is used as a location backdrop with little exploration of politics in the story line and almost no reference to the Troubles. In a similar way to Accelerator (2000), Sunset Heights (1998) and Most Fertile Man in Ireland (2001) the backdrop of Northern Ireland is used to launch the narrative and locate the story. While the premise of the plot may be linked to the Troubles or remnants of the conflict since the cease-fire, the central dramatic theme is usually more universal and often humanistic, less locally specific and rarely political, a characteristic of contemporary Irish writing that, on a surface level, could take place 'anywhere'. (3) As Martin McLoone (2001) has argued, although many films set in Ireland since 1993 are not necessarily political films, one can engage with them in a political way, suggesting that far from being ideologically neutral, these films reveal a political nuance in its broadest sense. Whether as a reaction to the perceived notion of what an Irish film is or to thirty years of political violence in Northern Ireland, recent Irish writers and directors are increasingly appropriating the political situation in the North for comic purposes. collective response among film-makers in Ireland, possibly reflecting a wider reaction to the cessation of political violence, is not to analyse and reflect through the medium of film, but to laugh, creating a catharsis of relief having finally discarded the fighting Irish stigma and stereotype that has sustained many Irish film narratives. Comedy is the chosen method by southern film-makers to explore the Northern situation which often eclipses an overtly political resonance. record-setting box office receipts for Man About Dog, (2.5 million [euro] in Ireland, making it the highest grossing Irish Film Board film since its reactivation in 1993) suggests that the domestic audience is responding favourably to this type of exploration. Despite challenging the notion that a national cinema exists, in an article entitled The Myth of an Irish Cinema, Michael Gillespie (forthcoming 2006) states that 'a film industry [in Ireland] does exist, but, from the beginning of the last century to the present, the efforts of foreign and national filmmakers have been indistinguishable from one another at every level of the production process'. …