120037 AR Advanced Cultural Studies Course (426) = Cultural/Media Studies 1/2 (Cultural/Media Studies) (2009W)

The 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland that erupted in the late 1960s and ran for about thirty years was Europe's longest postwar civil conflict, and gave rise to various military, paramilitary and policing styles and a range of political experiments, until the 'Good Friday' Agreement of 1998 won sufficient popular acceptance to enable a protracted period of 'peace,' or more accurately a period of largely nonviolent civil tension that still continues. Television news and entertainment programmes on the one hand, and documentary, independent and major-studio film-making, on the other, struggled with the challenge of presenting the causes and the nature of the 'Troubles,' often settling for an essentialist view of the conflict that might sell tickets or raise television ratings, but didn't advance peace, or even a cessation of violence.
We will be discussing a number of these films, made for cinemas or television, made in Ireland, Britain or the USA, to discern a rhetoric, or range of rhetorics, and the contribution the films made to the conflict or its resolution. Noteworthy in particular is the contrast between the largely irenic language of politicians deeply committed to the cessation of violence, and the rhetoric of grievance that film-making both examined and sustained.